[Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal

[Platonides]

Erik Moeller wrote:
> Because I don't think it's good to discuss attribution as an abstract
> principle, just as an example, the author attribution for the article
> [[France]] is below, excluding IP addresses. According to the view
> that attribution needs to be given to each pseudonym, this entire
> history would have to be included with every copy of the article.
> Needless to say, in a print product, this would occupy a very
> significant amount of space. Needless to say, equally, it's a
> significant obligation for a re-user. And, of course, Wikipedia keeps
> growing and so do its attribution records.
> 
> The notion that it's actually useful to anyone in that list is dubious
> at best. A vast number of pseudonyms below have no meaning except for
> their context in Wikipedia. I think requiring this for, e.g., a
> wiki-reader on countries makes it significantly less likely for people
> to create such products,

Not that creating a wiki-reader of countries is easier either. Although
if they are using WMF articles dumps they'll have more problems because
they don't include attribution. So the problem is basically collecting
the authors. If they were incorporated (eg. bug 16082) showing the list
is even easier than the content itself.


> The idea that we can meaningfully define the number of cases where
> this requirement is onerous and the number where it isn't through
> simple language is not at all obvious to me. Whether something is
> onerous is in part a function of someone's willingness and ability to
> invest effort, not whether they are creating something that's intended
> for online and offline use.

We can at least document what we consider not onerous (ie. lazyness on
part of the reuser not to do). I think we can advance much more on that
path (and maybe then generalise). One of such statements could be
"A DVD release shouldn't include just a url to the history".
Anyone here doesn't find it reasonable?

Yes, there will be borderline cases, but most of them can be grouped
together. If people find that is onerous we should also work on making
the task easier for them (eg. adding an Authors tab as proposed). For
instance, it once was hard to get the contributors list. Now there're
several tools to do it.