[Licom-l] External content attribution

[Erik Moeller]

(I am CC-ing Ariel Glenn as he will help with the implementation of
the new licensing terms.)

During the licensing discussion, some people correctly pointed out
that the proposed terms on the edit screen didn't include any mention
of third party content: what is it, under what circumstances can it be
imported, what should attribution look like, etc.? We did propose to
state the following in the copyright policy:

"You may import any text from other sources that is available under
the CC-BY-SA license, even if it is not available under the GNU Free
Documentation License. You are under no obligation whatsoever to
obtain such content also under the GFDL. However, you may not import
text that is only available under the GFDL. If you import text under
the CC-BY-SA license, you must abide by the terms of the license;
specifically, you must, in a reasonable fashion, credit the author(s).
Where such credit is commonly given through page histories (such as
wiki-to-wiki copying), it is sufficient to give attribution in the
edit summary, which is recorded in the page history, when importing
the content."

I would propose the following to address any remaining uncertainty:

PROPOSAL 1: Amend the terms of the edit screen. Replace the following phrase:

"You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it
from a public domain or similar free resource."

With:

"If you did not write this yourself, it must be available under terms
consistent with ((copyright policy)), and you agree to follow any
relevant licensing requirements."

PROPOSAL 2: Issue a recommendation for each project community to
develop guidelines for the attribution and inclusion of external
content. This recommendation could look roughly like this:

"Whereas the WMF licensing update decision was explicitly designed to
facilitate import of existing educational content under CC-BY-SA and
compatible licenses into Wikimedia projects, we hereby recommend that
each Wikimedia project (e.g. "the English Wikipedia", "the Spanish
Wikibooks")  develop guidelines for when the inclusion of externally
published content is appropriate, and how attribution should occur
inside the project. Care should be taken to respect the wishes of
copyright holders: if externally published content cannot be
attributed in a fashion that is agreeable to the copyright holder
(consistent with the license they published it under) and to the
project community, it cannot be included."

PROPOSAL 3: Amend the terms of the copyright policy to include a sentence:

"Further guidelines on attribution and inclusion of external content
can be found in ((attribution-guidelines-url))".

That sentence would only be rendered out if the
((attribution-guidelines-url)) message exists, i.e., if the community
has developed the necessary guidelines.

Thoughts? If this makes sense as a start, I'll begin hacking on the
final site terms with these changes in mind.

Erik
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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