[Foundation-l] Attribution survey and licensing next steps

[Erik Moeller]

2009/3/7 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>:
> I'm curious, why did you include options that aren't actually
> available? No credit and credit to the community are clearly not in
> keeping with the license, so knowing who would accept them isn't
> particularly useful (although I'm not sure it hurts).

We tried to surface people's "true preference" for an attribution
model. (While of course the provided options can't capture everything,
the relatively low number of write-in options for additional
attribution models suggests that respondents generally found their
views represented somewhere in the continuum of given options.)
People's true preferences should guide our thinking process, and if we
clouded the available options with perceived or real constraints, we
wouldn't be able to approximate the best feasible solution. It helps
us to uncover both where people may be willing to compromise and where
they may not be.

For example, if the survey had shown community credit to be highly
desired and not controversial at all, that would be interesting: We
could have an informed conversation about whether we should try to
accommodate that model after all. As it is, it's the second most
popular first option, but with 15.29% ranking it as their
second-to-last option, it's also somewhat polarizing. A link to the
article, on the other hand, is the first or second option for more
than 60% of respondents, and the last or second-to-last option for
only 3.47%.

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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