[Foundation-l] Licensing interim update

[Sam Johnston]

On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 12:05 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:

>> "Where the majority of an article is contributed by one user they must
>> also be attributed by real name."
>
> How does that work? Most Wikipedians work pseudonymously...

Au contraire - the commons pictures of the day for the last month for
example are almost all first names, last names, initials, or in most
cases, full names.

As I said, attribution is a meatspace thing that relates to entities
being credited for their work and preventing others from passing it
off as their own. Attribution by real name encourages certain people
(e.g. photographers) to justify contributions when they otherwise
might not, but with the benefit of attribution comes responsibility
and accountability. While it may be possible to a pseudonym to build a
reputation, the justification for it is less tangible (e.g. more
narcissistic) and perhaps more importantly, less professional (an
article on 'Cloud Computing' by 'JoeRandomHacker' is not going to be
so reusable, yet there are far fewer unpalatable real names than what
there are pseudonyms).

Sam