[Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?

[Brian]

* more than a handful of authors

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 2:45 PM, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:

> 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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>>
>>
>