[Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal

[David Goodman]

But here's the virtue of contributing to Wikipedia in the first place:
anyone anywhere who wants to see who did what, will go to the actual
Wikipedia and will find your credited contributions, regardless of the
details in subsequent reproductions--as long as they know it's from
Wikipedia.

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 5:06 AM, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> One thing that has not been brought forward yet in this discussion,
> and which I think is important, is that 'author' does not equate
> 'editor'. It seems many here do go from that assumption in trying to
> get the authors of an article. Suppose, an article has the following
> edit history:
>
> A starts the page with some text
> B adds some text to it
> C notes that A's text was a copyright violation, and adds a template
> to that effect
> D removes all the text of the page (because A's text is a copyright
> violations, and B's edits make no sense without it), and replaces it
> by a translation from another Wikipedia
> Some vandal vandalizes the page
> E reverses the vandalism
> F adds some interwikis
> G corrects 2 spelling mistakes
> H adds a paragraph
> I adds a picture from Commons.
>
> The _editors_ of the page are A to I and the vandal. But are they also
> the authors? I think not. In my opinion the _authors_ are D, H, the
> authors of the translated article and the author of the picture.
>
> Having said that, my opinion on this is that I do want to be credited,
> but only where my contributions are really major. Not where I made a
> 'non-authorship' edit, and also not where I made a substantial but
> still relatively small edit, for example adding one line to an already
> extensive article. The first I don't consider authorship, and the
> second I'd be more than happy to be credited as part of "wikipedia
> editors". But where a page is essentially written by me with only
> insubstantial (though useful) edits by others before and after, I do
> want to see my name as the maker or one of the makers. Thus, I'd like
> to see some credits similar to the "main credits place" in GFDL, where
> a few of the major authors are mentioned, plus "other Wikipedia
> editors" or something similar.
>
> --
> André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
>
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG