[Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?

[Brian]

Also, has it been discussed that the minimum number of authors rule
effectually only applies to stubs and some starts? Even these have often
been edited by many more than a handful of bots.

It would be useful to have an SQL query that output the number of articles
on en.wp with more than a handful of articles. It's probably fairly small.

So the effectual rule is that attribution is done by a hyperlink.

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 2:41 PM, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:

> 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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