[WikiEN-l] Escaping the GDFL -- can it be done?

[Jake Nelson]

Fastfission wrote:
> -- it also does not help this that many of those which are "most
> important" for encyclopedia are also the ones with the most edits.
> Though I wonder -- if an edit is reverted, does the editor still have
> the ability to claim authorship? I can see different answers to that,
> none of which I'm completely satisfied.

If an editor has not written any part of the current article, they don't 
really have a claim to authorship of that article. (The licensing issue 
is actually one of the better reasons for mass-reverting trolls' edits. 
With the improved revision deletion coming, it becomes somewhat easier 
to handle these things, too...) "Not written any part" shouldn't be 
taken too literally, however- just replacing someone's words inline 
doesn't automatically make their claim go away.

If you look in depth at the history of a lot of our very-heavily-edited 
articles, after a while they start actually going downhill in quality, 
losing consistency and readability. Other times, we find a copyvio in 
the history somewhere. This leads to someone starting a clean rewrite at 
a /Temp page, which then replaces the old version. This method could 
productively be used with articles with improperly licensed 
contributions as well, and if done on the cruftiest articles, can 
improve overall quality.

Of course, before replacing content, we should go to everyone we can 
still find who has live contributions in the database and get them to do 
the CC-template-thing (and also the {{WikimediaTextLicensing}} template, 
if possible) (see [[en:User:Jake Nelson]] for mine, for example).

Changing the submit text for present and future contribs seems easy and 
solid to me- changing it for past ones, I'd hold off on until it's made 
clear with people...

-- Jake Nelson
[[en:User:Jake Nelson]]