[Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?

[Samuel Klein]

I usually agree with the Mingus, but:

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 5:45 PM, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
> 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.

True.
One option should be "Include attribution for non-minor edits to all
articles?  Y/N".
Another should be "Name for attribution" -- this is not necessarily a
Real Name, it can be a writing alias, which is again different from a
username.


>> < 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]

Some don't.  Some do.
Another option should be  "Default license for your edits, in addition
to CC-BY-SA : Public domain" (and perhaps others) for people who want
their work to continue to be available to projects/efforts using other
licenses.   A good database would track licensing by revision, in
addition to a shared default license.

> 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.

I wouldn't recommend changing from the current mechanism to one that
blatantly shows all editor's names on every page whever displayed.
But I would aboslutely lay the groudnwork for prpoer attribution by
aggregating and caching the complete author list, without duplicates,
in some reasonable order; tracking and displaying a non-nick name for
attribution, and having the full author list with some basic metadata
about the contributions of each author at most one click away from the
article itself.

Calling the current history interface "attribution by hyperlink" is misleading.

>> 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.

Then make that clear in user preferences and when people sign up for
an account.  It's an important part of joining the community.  We
could start by turning off the "include me in attribution" by default
in userperfs and seeing what happens -- people who literally want
'full' attribution could still dredge through page histories.

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

I couldn't disagree more.

SJ