[Foundation-l] Attribution made cleaner?

Andrew Gray andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
Mon Feb 2 23:26:54 UTC 2009


2009/2/2 Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu>:
> I advocate a much more flexible attribution scheme than listing the authors
> or printing a url to the history page. I think a simple (Wikipedia) is a
> sufficient attribution for text. If you have the text it is trivial to find
> the original author of that text. It's not so trivial with images, but a
> link to the history page of an image can be embedded in its metadata.

There's two different issues, here, really, and I think you're chasing
a different one to my original suggestion. I'm certainly not saying
that this method for generating names is automatically a mandate to
require they be used to top and tail every article - just that if
someone does attribute that way, it'll help them do it better.

*However* we decide that downstream reused material should be
attributed, be it heavily or as lightly as possible, there's going to
be a step in the process - perhaps only an optional one - where
someone takes a Wikipedia article and tries to shake out some authors.
Figuring out how to make that work efficiently and cleanly and
helpfully is a good thing in and of itself, whatever conclusion the
main debate comes to.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk




More information about the wikimedia-l mailing list