[Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/3/4 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
> You're assuming that those who ranked "no credit is needed" first will be
> happy with attribution by URL, and you're assuming that those who ranked
> "credit can be given to the community" will by happy with attribution by
> URL.  But these people will also probably be happy with attribution by
> listing of authors.  So you can easily draw the conclusion that a
> significant majority of the community will by happy with attribution by
> listing of authors.  In fact, making your assumption you could say that the
> survey showed that 100% of them are happy with it.

I think it is reasonable to go with the simplest solution that a
significant majority are happy with (I'm assuming everyone is in
favour of making things as easy for reusers as possible, while
maintaining what they consider adequate attribution). The options
given, in order of simplest to most difficult are:

No credit
Credit to "Wikipedia" (or similar)
Link to article
Link to history
link online, full list of authors offline
full list of authors

(Does anyone disagree with that ordering? I don't think it should be
very controversial. I would be interested to know how many people
didn't order the choices in a way compatible with this ordering - by
that, I mean starting at a certain point as (1), then assigning
subsequent places to subsequent options until you reach the end and
ranking the remaining options in reverse order - and by how much they
varied.)

If we look at just people's first choices (assuming they ranked the
options in way compatible with my ordering, first choices are
sufficient) then:

12.11% would be happy with no credit
39.48% would be happy with credit to "Wikipedia"
69.66% would be happy with linking to the article
80.89% would be happy with linking to the version history

That clearly shows that a significant majority would be happy with
attribution-by-URL (you can argue over where the URL should point).