[Foundation-l] Licensing interim update

[Sam Johnston]

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 9:54 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
> If one wants to go down the suggested attribution route, one approach might be:
>
> Create an "authors page" associated with each page that contains:
<snip>

There may be a far simpler (and fairer) way that could satisfy a large
segment of the pro-attribution party:

"Where the majority of an article is contributed by one user they must
also be attributed by real name."

Comments made by Mike Peel in another thread got me thinking again
about the 'problem' of photographs, which has not sat well with me
until now. This gives those lone contributors credit for their work
even when transformed (e.g. touched up) by others. It avoids most
conflicts as by definition there can only be one 'majority
contributor' and this will be trivial to identify compared to, say,
the 'top 5'. It's also easy for re-users to understand and could be
made easier still by embedding RDF so creativecommons.org can give
specific attribution instructions. It resolves my concerns about
'unprofessional' usernames (attribution is a meatspace construct and
requiring real names shouldn't pose a problem for most authors).
Finally, it would be trivial to implement (at least compared to some
of the other proposals) - just link a user id to the articles or even
use an 'author' template (or exclude collaboratively developed content
from the scheme altogether).

This (or something like it) could well be the happy medium we've been
searching for. Even if still not palatable for the legal bigots, it
should satisfy lone authors (who have the strongest claim for
attribution) as well as those who fret about onerous attribution
requirements in terms of lists, urls, etc. Many (most?) articles would
end up being attributed as (something like) 'from Wikipedia', while
others would be 'from Wikipedia by Sam Johnston'.

Sam