[Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?

[Brian]

Following this line of reasoning in both directions, many users who
contribute to an encyclopedia that "anyone can edit" may not want their name
reprinted on every conceivable medium that their contributions could be
replicated on. In other words, many users probably don't care even a little
bit about the attribution requirements of the CC-BY-SA. They contribute
under the implicit assumption that their work is in the public domain. An
argument can be made that printing their username all over the place is an
invasion of their privacy, since with a bit of Googling its often possible
to relate that to their real identity. I've got a collection of references
to algorithms that show its possible to link users across social networking
sites. Some of these methods would apply to a user's edits as well.

My honest intrepretation of the 5 authors or less rule else a hyperlink is
that it's silly.

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> So, whatever way we decide to go with licenses or attribution
> requirements when this debate has settled, at some point our
> prospective reader will find themselves confronted with a long list of
> names, whether printed on the page or at the end of a URL or
> steganographically encoded into the site logo. :-)
>
> On this list, a minority will be real names ("John Smith"); the rest,
> if we discount the thousand variants on "anonymous" via our IP
> editors, are pseudonyms ("WikiUser") or modified names
> ("JohnSmith78").
>
> In some cases, users adopt pseudonyms out of a desire for privacy, but
> in many cases, it doesn't signify much more than a simple decision
> that a username is a lot easier to work with internally, or a general
> habit of using some kind of nickname online... or the fact that "John
> Smith" was taken. And many of *those* people would, no doubt, prefer
> to be credited by a real name (or at least a real-sounding nom de
> plume...). Similarly, some of those using pseudonyms who don't want to
> use real names, may prefer a different pseudonym... etc, etc, etc.
>
> It would be helpful to figure out some way of (automatically) being
> able to have a given username "translate" into a different name when a
> list of credits is generated - we would have a list which better
> reflects the attribution wishes of our users, and one which looks a
> little "neater" for the reuser to put in their Respectable Scholarly
> Publication. Win-win situation.
>
> So how could we do it? At a rough sketch, I'm envisaging:
>
> * each user has a "credit" field which they can (optionally!) set
> through preferences
>
> * when we generate the list of contributors to an article, in whatever
> way we end up deciding to do that, the system can be set to read off
> this "credit name" rather than simply using the normal internal
> username, if one is available.
>
> I note that MediaWiki already has a user_real_name field - could we
> use it for this sort of purpose? Would this be technically practical?
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
>
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