[Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language

[Ray Saintonge]

Michael Peel wrote:
> On 20 Mar 2009, at 08:57, Tim Landscheidt wrote:
>   
>> Is this problem really exclusive to online references? I'd
>> guess there is plenitude of author references to "[...] et
>> al." (or none at all) out there that cannot be resolved
>> without access to a catalog or the source material itself
>> and become "devoid of meaning" at the latest when these re-
>> sources are destroyed or not accessible.
>>     
> I'm not talking about references to a text, I'm talking about a copy  
> of the text. That's completely different. Please, give me examples of  
> where text is reprinted with the authors attributed as "[...] et al."  
> or none at all.
>
>   
A copy of Wikipedia text is frequently used in eBay descriptions of 
books.  The attribution is simply to Wikipedia, and does not progress so 
far as to say "[...] et al."  That's about as much as anyone could 
reasonably expect, no matter what the licence says. 

Only my own laziness and the economics of publishing prevent me from 
putting together a book of related Wikipedia articles.  (Maybe a 
wiki-guide to Vancouver in time for the upcoming Olympics.) If I did I 
could do so safely in the knowledge that no-one would sue me. For any 
author to expect otherwise is to suffer (to use Milos's appropriate 
term) from "bourgeois egotism."

Ec