[Foundation-l] Re-licensing

[Erik Moeller]

2009/1/22 geni <geniice at gmail.com>:
> Err your proposed solution wouldn't greatly change the situation there
> since it could require up to a quarter of a million credits and about
> 50,000 urls. Since most wikipedia nics are rather shorter than URLs I
> find it questionable that that would count as an improvement.

A single URL could point to a list of all contributors for all
articles. I agree that under the proposed principles of attribution, a
lot of individual names would still have to be included, though
probably far fewer than right now. (They could actually be more
visibly included as 'credit: foo, bar' under the articles, which IMO
underscores that the proposed regime, where direct credit is given,
encourages it to be more visible and significant.)  One of the
interesting things about the German book is that it's a collection of
many thousands of tiny article summaries, which still triggers the
worst of any attribution regime that requires direct name attribution.

I do agree with you, Mike and others who have pointed out that we want
to retain flexibility in application. I'm not arguing for absolutely
rigid attribution requirements, and to the extent that the current
proposal suggests that, it should be revised. I am, however, arguing
for articulating principles and demonstrating them through guidelines
and examples, so that there's no ambiguity about our general
understanding of what we mean with reasonable applications.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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