This is the third time these questions have turned around just on this
project. We ARE erring on the side of caution which is why we have all
the image pages (unlike others...).
I wouldn't mind doing more but I would question the value of useless
gestures. For example if you say who wrote what is irrelevant I can
get a list of the 60,000 editors including IP addresses who have
edited any of these articles and add it as plain text at the foot of
the license page (similar to the German DVD model) but does that
really help? Legally I think its irrelevant but I would do it if it
helped feelgood for contributers which is fair enough as an object.
But isn't the point that Wikipedia should be credited and their fame
comes from contributing to Wikipedia, whose greater glory we are
supporting? We also have to consider the issue of "names which give
offence". etc. If we do it this year I am prepared to bet the
contributing list will include minor edits by user "Mr X is a ***"
which userid was only deleted after an article was modified by them.
As mentioned in the blog post I am already struggling with the number
of unhelpful image descriptions and contributers names from the
images, not to mention ones hoping "this *!?"!* upload works better
than the last one". Try running a rude word checker over the image
pages. While you are at it I notice there are a lot of obscene
redirects around presumable from people who want to tell their mates
"if your search for c*** on Wikipedia it returns an article on person
X" so rude word checking the redirect database would be a good thing
to set up too. Sigh.
There is a whole series of questions on what is a compliation and is
Wikipedia a publisher etc. but my reading of the license is you have
to provide a means of knowing you did what. Doing so locally is
impossible (and not explicitly asked for) doing so by giving
directions to find this elsewhere is what we do. Anything in between
we could do but its fluff. Why don't you write 400 words on how
Wikipedia is put together and by whom and I'll include that. That
would achieve much more in terms of children understanding what is
black and white does not fall out of the sky.
Andrew
On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 12:16 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Sent off-list by accident:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>
Date: 2008/10/24
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] SOS Children Wikipedia Selection 2008/9
BitTorrent link up
To: Andrew Cates <Andrew(a)soschildren.org>
2008/10/24 Andrew Cates <Andrew(a)soschildren.org>rg>:
Hi Guys,
I have left a fairly full reply to this on the WMF blog awaiting
approval from Jay and also it is discussed on the project pages on
Wikipedia, over several years. There is a gap between the wording of
licenses and urban myths circulating about what they say.
Broadly the GFDL demands that authors are "credited" but does not
include anything on how you idenitify them (unlike the creative
commons licenses). Either this means to comply with GFDL you need to
carry a local copy of the edit history (which provides the only local
way of identifying authors, albeit in a tedious fashion) including all
10,000 versions of the Global Warming article
complete with every
piece of obscene vandalism etc.) or this means you have to
credit
authors providing a theoretically possible route to identify them.
Nothing in between this is any better than the second option since to
find an author for a piece of text you still have to go to the page
history on Wikipedia. The German DVD which carries an author list copy
locally which may be better for egos but is not more compliant than
us: to get the author who wrote xyz is still a long trip through WP
page histories. There is no different in license terms between a link
back and any other way given of directing the reader to the page
histories in Wikipedia. GFDL does not mention "link" (see
Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License)
Some of the CC licenses include carrying a local copy of an artists
preferred name (we do this as we carry the image pages).
Sure, it's been discussed constantly for the last 7 years and there
has been no conclusion, so I would strongly advise erring on the side
of caution. I see no reason to include each revision, the GFDL only
talks about listing authors, not listing who wrote each bit. That
means you just need the history page, not all the pages it links to.
An obscure and non-explicit reference to a page that may well not be
accessible to the reader, hidden away on a page I doubt more than 1%
of users will read (or even be able to find if they wanted to know who
wrote an article) is hardly in the spirit of the license, is it? All
you need to do is include a list of names (and/or pseudonyms) with
each article, that isn't hard.
If you want to encourage the use of free content, you need to do it
properly. That you can convince yourself that you're just about
complying with the license if you stand on your head and squint as you
look at it is not enough.
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