[WikiEN-l] Attributing "attribution required" free images

[Robert Rohde]

On 10/30/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 30, 2007 10:46 AM, Zoney <zoney.ie at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I absolutely agree with viewpoint no. 2. Furthermore, beyond images, I
> do
> > think we should have attribution on article pages. It isn't hard for the
> > vast majority of articles. Merely from a copyright point of view, you
> only
> > need to put authors responsible for substantial original content in the
> > article (i.e. tweakers, sentence/section/structure reworkers, grammer,
> etc.
> > do not require attribution).
>
> And how the heck do we find them?  In many cases they aren't the
> author of the first revision.
>
> I'm not saying that it can't be done, .. but it's not trivial, and it
> can't be done automatically (thus my recommendation for a manually
> editable credits page).


If you ignore the substantial problem of text migrating from one article to
another (admittedly a big deal), then I would have to disagree that it can't
be done automatically.  It shouldn't be done in real time, but a computer
with access to the full revision history could figure out how much of the
current text each historical contributor was responsible for, and this could
be used to identify primary authors and add their names via a bot.  It's not
a trivial problem but the existing research efforts on the persistance and
evolution of text in wiki articles already largely address these issues.

-Robert Rohde