[Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results

[Anthony]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 12:34 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/3/4 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
> > 1) Have the numbers been released?  All I saw was a selective summary.
> > 2) What do you think they're conclusive of?
>
> The numbers given by Erik at the start of this thread are sufficient
> to draw the conclusion that a significant majority of the community
> will be happy with attribution by URL.


Less than half of people answering the survey ranked attribution by URL
first.

You're assuming that those who ranked "no credit is needed" first will be
happy with attribution by URL, and you're assuming that those who ranked
"credit can be given to the community" will by happy with attribution by
URL.  But these people will also probably be happy with attribution by
listing of authors.  So you can easily draw the conclusion that a
significant majority of the community will by happy with attribution by
listing of authors.  In fact, making your assumption you could say that the
survey showed that 100% of them are happy with it.


> My one concern with the survey is that the options were not
> particularly clearly defined - I'm not sure everyone taking it would
> have understood what the online/offline split was all about.


It was horribly designed, but this much seems true -  1 in 5 Wikipedians
surveyed expect that an offline copy of a Wikipedia article to which they
have contributed, will contain their name.  But according to Creative
Commons, CC-BY-SA does not require such attribution.