[Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language

[David Gerard]

2009/3/15 Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb at gmail.com>:

> This would still give the wrong data if the page has been moved to
> [[Xenu (Scientology)]] and the [[Xenu (disambiguation)]] is moved to
> [[Xenu]], which isn't a totally unreasonable outcome.
> You'd have to use something like:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/authors/46634
> as an alias for:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46634&action=history
> or have it forward to something like this better yet if it can be
> tweaked to accept a `page_id` parameter instead of a title (ideally
> made part of the software proper):
> http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/Contributors.php?wikilang=en&wikifam=.wikipedia.org&grouped=on&page=Xenu


Would this mean the vicious lunatic arsehole contributor (note I don't
say "hypothetical" there, there are quite enough real-world examples
of unbalanced nutters out to nail us on anything) who takes the
mug-maker to court would win, or lose? To what extent? If the link was
correct at the time, they could point to having followed the Wikimedia
FAQ on the subject and completely demonstrate a good-faith attempt to
keep to the license per wording and guidelines?

This is what "law is squishy" means. It's not sane or reasonable to
require that the Foundation's guidelines specify only actions that
would be mathematically provably robust in all possible circumstances
for an indefinite time into the future; in civil litigation, as any
such suit would be, one does in fact get a lot of points for doing the
reasonable thing to the best of one's abilities.


- d.




- d.