[Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?

[Sam Johnston]

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 12:13 AM, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
> I advocate a much more flexible attribution scheme than listing the authors
> or printing a url to the history page. I think a simple (Wikipedia) is a
> sufficient attribution for text. If you have the text it is trivial to find
> the original author of that text. It's not so trivial with images, but a
> link to the history page of an image can be embedded in its metadata.

Precisely, and once you have this as a minimum standard you can still
do whatever you like on top of it. As significant bonuses we're not
diluting/drowning out the promotion of Wikipedia and we're avoiding
situations where authors can go after [re]users for infringement;
effectively the power of enforcement would be vested in Wikipedia (but
not the copyright itself so we don't have to worry about WMF turning
evil, only new license releases which must be 'similar in spirit'
anyway).

The attribution instructions could go something like:

"You must attribute Wikipedia, should reference the name of the
article (with hyperlinks where appropriate) and may also credit the
authors which can be found on the history tab."

I've also been thinking more about the possibility of identifying key
contributors for attribution and I've come to my own conclusion that
it's a non-starter. If you start attributing some people but not
others then those who are not attributed (who would otherwise not care
had the attribution have been for Wikipedia) will get justifiably
upset and may well seek to enforce their 'right' to attribution.

The only way "to shake out some authors" reliably (as Andrew just
said) is to do it manually, which is another avenue for conflict and
resource wastage. Summary: author attribution is an all or nothing
thing; either you attribute a boundless list of 'names' in 2pt font or
you attribute nobody.

Anyway I have to get back to writing 'AttriBot' so I can stamp my name
on any article with <5 authors ;)

Sam