On 10/29/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
On 29/10/2007, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/29/07, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@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