[Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal

[Nikola Smolenski]

On Thursday 22 January 2009 16:56:57 Sam Johnston wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 8:46 AM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu> wrote:
> > We can develop tools that would identify principal authors with
> > sufficient accuracy; and this list of authors is likely to be short
> > enough to be practically included in full.
>
> I disagree with this assertion regarding automation and can think of many
> situations both in which this does not hold true, giving false negatives
> (e.g. single/initial uploads of large contributions, uploads using multiple
> aliases, imports, IP numbers and not-logged-in contributions, etc.) and
> false positives (e.g. minor edits not marked as such, spam/vandalism,
> comprehensive rewrites, deletions, abuse/'attribution whoring', etc.).

I find your disagreement wrong, your lists of examples mostly meaningless, and 
even a large percentage of false positives and false negatives preferrable to 
no attribution at all.

> masse. Oh, and I would place anyone who considers their own interests
> taking precedence over those of the community (both within Wikipedia and
> the greater public) into the category of 'tool' too :)

If people feel they are not adequately credited for their contributions, they 
are less likely to contribute. Proper attribution is a need of the community.

> Wikipedia is a community and those who contribute to it for egotistic
> rather than altruistic reasons (even if the two are often closely related)
> are deluding themselves given they were never promised anything, least of
> all grandeur. What value do they really think they will get from a 2pt
> credit with 5,000 other authors? If it is relevant to their field(s) of
> endeavour then they can draw attention to their contribution themselves (as
> I do) and if they don't like it then they ought to be off writing books or
> knols or contributing to something other than a community wiki.

Great way to care about community interests, there. Sure to draw a lot of new 
contributors.

> "Requiring even 2 pages of attributions be included after every article
> inclusion is a non-free tax on content reuse, and a violation of our
> author's expectations."

Luckily, that is not required.