[Wikipedia-l] FDL used to stifle distribution of articles
Bryan Derksen
bryan.derksen at shaw.ca
Sun Nov 30 04:05:14 UTC 2003
At 09:10 PM 11/29/2003 +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
>This would place an unacceptable burden on third parties as they would
>have to carry along the complete history of every page thtey use (since
>there is no automated way to determine who is a principal author),
Not currently, but I can't see why an automatic algorithm can't be created
that does an adequate job. Have it compare diffs and determine what
percentage of the current article's text was originally typed in by each
author, for example, and then pick the users with the five biggest scores.
This would need some tricks to account for special cases, though,
especially things like rearrangements of existing text that look like
massive additions/deletions but which aren't really. Could take a lot of
computer resources, so maybe it could be done only when generating
"downloadable" archive bundles.
Does anyone know if there's an accepted legal definition of "principal
author" anyway? If not, then would counting the number of characters in the
current version of the article that an author contributed be a reasonable
way of defining it for Wikipedia's purposes?
>a history which on the English Wikipedia is now so large that we can't even
>store it in a single file anymore (over 2 gigabytes). Not to mention that
>having such a list in articles is cumbersome and annoying.
The licence only requires five names attached to the work; that's a single
line of small text, which can be tucked down at the bottom of the page
somewhere discreet. It could be a configurable option, even, if people
don't like the clutter. The whole entire history would not be required
then; if the page already lists the five main authors when it's displayed
then you can just copy the entire page wholesale into your derivative work.
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