[Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?

Brian Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu
Mon Feb 2 22:45:29 UTC 2009


On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:29 PM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu> wrote:

> On Monday 02 February 2009 22:41:37 Brian 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
>
> Do you have anything to back your claims with?


The operating assumption is that the average pseudo-anonymous user to a
wikimedia project understands and/or cares about the licensing issues and
realizes their name will be printed everywhere that the text they contribute
is printed. Do you have any evidence that this is true? That the average
pseudo-anonymous contributor has a fairly sophisticated understanding of
copyright? Otherwise its quite similar to the ToS at the bottom of every web
page you visit, which you supposedly implicitly agree to, but which you
rarely to never read and is actually a legal grey area.


> > 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
>
> Are you arguing that we should not have page histories?
>

Just that I am skeptical that people realize their pseudonyms will be
printed on potentially any medium and that they are further aware that this
pseudonym can be linked to their real identity.

The point is that listing the authors is a silly clause.


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