[Foundation-l] Re-licensing

[Erik Moeller]

2009/1/22 Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu>:
> Requirement would be to give credit via the credit URL, and by mentioning the
> principal authors listed at that URL. What authors will be listed at that URL
> is something that we may change at our leisure: for example, this may be the
> proposed list of five authors, or none if more than five; or it may be a list
> of authors that is no longer than 1% of the length of the article, or none of
> longer; or, when appropriate software is developed, the list of principal
> authors as recognised by the software; it may even differ from project to
> project, for example Wikisource may choose to credit the authors manually (it
> is already doing something similar); and so on and so forth.

This is a constructive and useful proposal, thank you.

I agree with Milos when he states in another thread that we need to
think further about a solution that is satisfactory to a greater
number of people, at least when it comes to standardizing attribution
requirements with effective application to all past edits ever made.
(At minimum, I would like some more data to inform our decisions.) I
also believe that the Wikimedia Foundation can responsibly and
reasonably determine what attribution model it wants to apply going
forward.

For example, if WMF decides that a guaranteed by-name attribution is
not reasonable, scalable, and detrimental to the goals of WMF, it can
responsibly tell people that. People who have made past edits could be
given the option to have _those_ edits always attributed by name. The
community could gradually factor out those edits if it considers them
to be cumbersome.

This would cause some people to leave, but WMF could decide that
causing some people to leave or fork is worth it in order to encourage
greater re-use of content. It's similar to telling people that
multimedia files for noncommercial use only are not welcome.
Essentially, it would be a further refinement of the standards of
freedom for the projects.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate