[Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?

[Nikola Smolenski]

On Monday 02 February 2009 23:45:29 Brian 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. 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

Yes:

* Contributors who do not have any understanding of copyright will usually 
attempt to copy copyrighted material to the project, that will then be 
deleted and they will be warned. This will lead them to at least 
understanding that they can't just copy any material anywhere without the 
author's permission, and logically this leads to the conclusion that other 
people can't do the same with their work. Similar thing will happen whenever 
someone tries to upload an image for the first time.

* When someone is presenting Wikimedia projects, they usually mention free 
licences and what do they mean.

* Practically all printed material today is printed with its author(s)' names; 
therefore it is obvious to assume that this material will be too, if printed.

* In past, several books and DVDs were made from material from several 
Wikimedia projects, containing all the names of the contributors. They were 
marketed in and out of the projects, and I expect that a fair number of at 
least contributors of these projects know about them, yet I haven't heard of 
anyone expressing surprise about it.

> average pseudo-anonymous contributor has a fairly sophisticated
> understanding of copyright? Otherwise its quite similar to the ToS at the

Understanding that your work should be attributed to you requires only the 
most rudimentary understanding of copyright, or none at all.

> 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.

I'd say it is quite dissimilar, but anyway - a large amount of Wikipedia 
marketing specifies that Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia the content of 
which can be freely reused under certain conditions and so on. This is much 
more than your average website does.

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

You have not proven your point.