On 10/29/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 29/10/2007, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 10/29/07, Eugene van der Pijll
<eugene(a)vanderpijll.nl> wrote:
> Not really, 99% of our text is written by Wikipedians, who have no
> expectation to be prominently attributed; we have taken many of our
best
> pictures from outsiders, many of whom expect
more prominent credit to
be
given.
They don't care about, and haven't ever explicitly agreed to
Wikipedia's internal rules on attribution.
Cite?
Text on Wikipedia is almost universally released under GFDL
specifically to be used on Wikipedia. We rarely take text from
anywhere else except in specific quotes, which we would always
attribute (no point quoting someone without saying who you're
quoting), and are used under fair use rather than being released under
a certain license, anyway. We often take images from other places
where they have been released under a variety of licenses, often we no
intention for them to be used on Wikipedia. There is a big difference.
(Whether or not it's a legally significant difference, I don't know,
but it is a big difference.)
And Wikipedia's methodology for "honoring" authorship under the GFDL is
also
something of a stretch.
To quote the GFDL:
"List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities
responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified Version,
together with at least five of the principal authors of the Document (all of
its principal authors, if it has fewer than five), ..."
where
"For works in formats which do not have any title page as such, 'Title Page'
means the text near the most prominent appearance of the work's title,
preceding the beginning of the body of the text."
Taken at face value, I'd say the default format envisioned for the GFDL is
that a list of authors should appear adjacent to article's title (rather
than an edit history placed on a seperate page). Whether Wikipedia's
approach technically satisfies the GFDL or not is one of those pesky issues
that might even end up in court one day. Regardless, I am sure that if we
did list all (or some) of an article's authors at the top of each page, then
the question of whether it makes sense to identify photographers as well
would be more simpler.
-Robert Rohde