[Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal

[Sam Johnston]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 9:56 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's by no means guaranteed that if we include "
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dentistry&curid=8005&action=history
> "
> in a printed book in 2009 it will still be accessible in 2019.
>

You're right, which is another great reason *not* to link to the history
page URLs  (which are as ugly as sin) but to the article directly (which is
*significantly* more useful for the reusers' users). While I find it very
hard to believe Wikipedia will cease to exist, the same can't necessarily be
said for PHP and ugly GET requests are already a dying breed... If we do
eventually find a sensible way to identify primary authors then we can
always promote them to the article page, or a separate info/credits page
(which could include other metadata like creation date, edit and editor
counts, etc.).

On the other hand if we *must* have a separate link then perhaps appending
'/info', '/credit' or similar to the article URL would be a better choice.
Alternatively we could set up something like a purl partial redirect or even
run our own short link service (eg http://wikipedia.org/x9fd) which would
reliably point at a specific version and survive moves etc.

There are plenty of solutions - we just need to work out which one works
best and offends the least people.

Sam


> On the other hand, if we printed out the names in the book... then as long
> as you have the book you have the names, because they travel together. We
> may change the syntax of the history link, the most common method for
> locating content on the web may change (either structurally, or because of
> device evolution), or the sites might for some reason come down. We should
> also consider that ideally we want our content to be usefully credited in
> areas of the world where Internet access is very limited, or where
> Wikipedia
> is specifically blocked. Thinking ahead, these are the parts of the world
> most likely to be using a paper Wikipedia anyway.
>
> I do understand that there are mediums where this is impossible, and I
> think
> perhaps the solution requires an outline that describes different (but
> reasonable) standards based on medium category, broadly interpreted.
>
> Nathan
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