[Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results

[Anthony]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 1:00 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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).


What constitutes a significant majority?  What if the survey results had
said that a significant majority was happy with their work being released
into the public domain.  Would you then find it reasonable to release
*everyone's* work into the public domain?

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).


Order of difficulty is not the same as order of happiness.  I would be
happier with "no credit" than "credit to Wikipedia".