[Foundation-l] Wikipedia Attribution and Relicensing

[Erik Moeller]

2009/1/16 Sam Johnston <samj at samj.net>:
> That is, you must at least reference Wikipedia and the article, but it may
> be appropriate to additionally *or* alternatively refer to individual
> contributor(s).

Yes - I agree with this. The only question would be whether referring
to the history or to the article are substantially different in terms
of attribution. In community-developed guidelines regarding GFDL
re-use, both standards have existed; re-use recommendations in en.wp's
Wikipedia:Copyrights refer to the article URL, for example. The
current recommendations are intended to be based on a lowest common
denominator among WMF- and community-developed interpretations of
reasonable GFDL attribution obligations for re-users, to ensure that
the licensing regime we may implement in the future is consistent with
the expectations of volunteers who have made contributions in the
past.

Let's broaden the question a bit:

Provided that,
- the site footer for articles is modified to name contributors if
there are fewer than six;
- the site footer also refers to the page history for credit -

Are there participants in this discussion who would consider
attribution-by-history-URL for pages with > 5 authors acceptable, but
who would consider attribution-by-article-URL unacceptable? I think if
we lower the requirements in this regard, it needs to be based on more
than a discussion here, but it would be good to get some informal
feedback on the question first.

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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