Mailing List Archive

2008/10/20 Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org>:
> The GFDL has specific attribution requirements that were designed for
> software manuals. What's appropriate attribution for a wiki, where a
> page can have thousands of authors, and a collection of pages is very
> likely to? I would like to start a broad initial discussion on this
> topic; it's likely that the issue will need to be raised more
> specifically in the context of possible modifications to the GFDL or a
> migration to CC-BY-SA.

Excellent question, I think this is going to be a very interesting, if
long, discussion.

> The relevant GFDL clause states: "List on the Title Page, as authors,
> one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the
> modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of
> the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors,
> if it has fewer than five), unless they release you from this
> requirement."
>
> Most people have chosen to ignore the "principal authors" requirement
> and to try to attribute every author instead because there's no
> obvious way to determine who the principal authors are. I remember a
> few years back that Anthony tried a completely different approach,
> where he created a full copy of Wikipedia (under the assumption that
> it's a single GFDL work) and attributed it to five people on the
> frontpage. Anthony, please correct me if my recollection is incorrect.

That's one of several dozen ways of interpreting the GFDL, how about
we ignore how things are done now and just look at how things should
be done in the future?

> The community process that has developed with regard to GFDL
> compliance on the web has generally tacitly favored a link to the
> article and to its history as proper credit. But, for printed books,
> publishers have generally wanted to be more in compliance with the
> letter of the license. So, the Bertelsmann "Wikipedia in one volume"
> includes a looong list of authors in a very tiny font.
>
> Is that practical? How about Wikipedia articles on passenger
> information systems (screens on subways, airplanes)? How about small
> booklets where there isn't a lot of room for licensing information?
> Should a good license for wikis make a distinction between print and
> online uses?

Online you can link to an off-site credits page which you can't do in
print or in off-line electronic versions, so I think a distinction is
a good idea. We want people to reuse our content as much as possible
which means we should make reusing it as easy as possible. Including
an appropriate link is far easier than attributing contributors
yourself. In print, that isn't possible, so they'll have to include
the names directly (a printed URL is pretty useless).

> I haven't heard anyone argue strongly for full inclusion of the
> _license text_. But I'd like to hear opinions on the inclusion of
> username lists.

Again, online you can link to an off-site copy of the license, in
print you can't, so I would support including the license text in
printed copies of large amounts of content (for a yet to be determined
definition of "large"). Smaller amounts of printed content should
include a much shorter summary of the license since that's all that is
practical.

> My personal preference would be a system where we have a special
> "credits" URL for each article, something like

Isn't that basically what we already have with the history page
(possibly reformatted at bit)? I think we should certainly keep
history pages.

> Aside from what the legal implications of any given approach are, the
> first question I think that needs to be answered is what's desirable.
> Thoughts?

The legal implications do certainly need to be considered, however.
Moral rights to attribution may well get in the way. Mike Godwin can
advise on US law, but someone needs to make official contact with
lawyers in other jurisdictions and get advice. Our content needs to be
reusable in any jurisdiction (to the extent possible, it's conceivable
that some jurisdictions will have laws that are completely
incompatible with our goals and we'll have to give them up as a lost
cause [.a local chapter could lobby for a change in the law, of
course]). This mailing list is not the place for a detailed discussion
of the law, but that discussion does need to take place (between WMF,
CC, FSF and lots and lots of lawyers from all over the world - this
will probably cost a lot of money since you'll be lucky to find people
willing to work pro-bono is every significant jurisdiction, but is
essential).

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Norwegian law says principal authors should be attributed, and I believe
its the correct thing to do. It is not a good reason to say that today
we can't identify those authors. Most of the articles I've been involved
in writing has had very few principal authors, most of them only one or
two.

In Norwegian law the principal authors can choose what to do with the
article, even relicense it, without asking any of the other writers.

It should be interesting to make some statistics over how many principal
authors there are for articles from Wikipedia. I think the nom are
pretty few, even for those articles that has grown very large.

John

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> It should be interesting to make some statistics over how many principal
> authors there are for articles from Wikipedia. I think the nom are
> pretty few, even for those articles that has grown very large.

That would, indeed, be interesting, but it would require a definition
of "principal author".

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On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 12:46 PM, Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> The GFDL has specific attribution requirements that were designed for
> software manuals. What's appropriate attribution for a wiki, where a
> page can have thousands of authors, and a collection of pages is very
> likely to? I would like to start a broad initial discussion on this
> topic; it's likely that the issue will need to be raised more
> specifically in the context of possible modifications to the GFDL or a
> migration to CC-BY-SA.

<snip>

I thought about this a fair amount when putting together "How
Wikipedia Works." We opted there for using the first five authors as
determined by this script:
http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl
precisely to avoid the pages-of-tiny-print problem (though there is a
certain satisfaction in seeing one's own name in print even if you
only copyedited an article once.) (see our full credits at:
http://howwikipediaworks.com/ape.html).

Of course, first-five doesn't solve much of anything in terms of true
attribution; there were certain cases where I knew those names were
people who had primarily reverted vandalism rather than the people who
had come up with the bulk of the ideas in the text (this is especially
true for policies, which often started with sweeping essays written by
an individual who was bringing together thoughts and practice back in
2003 or 2004). In a few important cases, the early history is lost to
the ages (and disk failure), and it's only through anecdote and
deduction that you'll figure out how, say, Larry Sanger contributed to
NPOV. I stuck to this algorithm anyway for the sake of consistency,
however. I think in practice, however, listing individual authors of
any particular article, whether you list only a few or all of them,
invariably overvalues some people's contributions, undervalues others,
and totally ignores anonymous contribs, and also doesn't do much for
preserving everyone's copyright claims since so many people are
completely pseudonymous.

So, stepping away from what the GFDL & CC currently specify, I think
that moving to a corporate model of citing authors makes sense. When
you contribute to Wikipedia, you're contributing to specific, discrete
pages. So what about using a page-level model citation like:

Credit: Contributors to "Foobar article." From Wikipedia, The Free
Encyclopedia. Accessed July 17, 2012. permanent URL here. List of
contributors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar/history.

And using either a perma-link to the history that's tied to the date
of the perma-link used, or some other kind of stable history/credits
link like Erik proposes? We keep this data and intend to keep it for
the future, presumably, so offering up a link to it seems reasonable
as long as the page-site combination is adequately referenced.

-- Phoebe

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John at Darkstar wrote:
> Norwegian law says principal authors should be attributed, and I believe
> its the correct thing to do. It is not a good reason to say that today
> we can't identify those authors. Most of the articles I've been involved
> in writing has had very few principal authors, most of them only one or
> two.
>
> In Norwegian law the principal authors can choose what to do with the
> article, even relicense it, without asking any of the other writers.
>
> It should be interesting to make some statistics over how many principal
> authors there are for articles from Wikipedia. I think the nom are
> pretty few, even for those articles that has grown very large.
>
> John
>

In Finnish moral rights law, the right to be identified
as the author of ones work is inalienable and absolute,
and cannot be voided even through a contractual
transaction.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen


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Thomas Dalton writes:

> The legal implications do certainly need to be considered, however.
> Moral rights to attribution may well get in the way. Mike Godwin can
> advise on US law, but someone needs to make official contact with
> lawyers in other jurisdictions and get advice.

FWIW, any lawyer who deals with copyright in any kind of international
environment is aware of moral-rights issues. If specific questions and
concerns come up, of course, I have a network of international lawyers
I can reach out to.

> This mailing list is not the place for a detailed discussion
> of the law, but that discussion does need to take place (between WMF,
> CC, FSF and lots and lots of lawyers from all over the world - this
> will probably cost a lot of money since you'll be lucky to find people
> willing to work pro-bono is every significant jurisdiction, but is
> essential).

I don't think you're correct to suppose that "lots and lots of
lawyers" are required. Copyright is, after all, very largely
harmonized among very many nations as a result of several
international agreements. Also, since United States is a bit of an
outlier when it comes to enforcement of moral rights, we wouldn't
impose a U.S. norm on how to interpret or understand moral rights of
attribution. In implementation, as it happens, I think the moral-
rights issue will turn out to be less of a practical problem than you
imagine (because I don't think attribution problems will generate
enough friction for us to worry about). Moral-rights issues tend to
arise when substantial authorship and attribution questions are
obvious and clear -- in short, not the kind of authorship and
attribution issues that normally arise in a collaborative enterprise
like a Wikimedia project.


--Mike





--Mike





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On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 9:46 PM, Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> It's also conceivable to require full author attribution for printed
> collections of a certain length or printed in certain quantity. (The
> GFDL has "in quantity" rules, but they do not seem to apply in any way
> to the authorship information.)

This approach seems to me as a reasonable one. However, it has to be
defined well. If someone, let's say, prints the whole Wikipedia in
English, I don't see why not to print one more (or 10 more) books with
the list of authors. At the other side, it is true that it is not
reasonable to demand printing authors on a flier.

I've got one other, a very general idea about the solution. Here is the sketch:

- List of authors of particular articles should be printed
periodically. Yearly, or one in two or three years. Of course, we
should find some automatic way for gathering such data. (Maybe via
some specific user boxes.)
- Any printed book may refer to such periodical as the source of the
list of authors.
- Strictly speaking, this means that sources from Wikipedia in such
way may be used only from dumps which were sources for the printed
list of authors. If they are using newer articles, they should list
authors which contributed in the mean time. Generally, I think that
this approach is a reasonable one because it is not necessary anymore
to use the newest article to make a book about the most of the issues.
Otherwise, if someone is really willing to be up to date about some
current events, they should spend some more time in finding the rest
of the authors. Of course, we should make free software tools for
doing that.
- This is, also a good fund raising movement. If companies which are
willing to print books based on Wikipedia content are willing to have
such printed papers (and additions) once per month, then they should
give money to WMF to do so. If they are willing to have "the frozen
version" of Wikipedia for that time, they should give money for
servers; and so on.

But, it is not just related to Wikimedia. If Wikimedia introduces such
approach, supported by license, it may be a good source for funding
similar projects for keeping bibliographical data consistent. Which
is, at last, a very important issue in building a valid scientific
resource.

And, of course, it is not about fliers, it is not about full
encyclopedias. It is for the rest of usage. Defining what are the
borders is the task and it may be discussed a lot about it.

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--- On Mon, 10/20/08, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro@gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Monday, October 20, 2008, 4:21 PM
> John at Darkstar wrote:
> > Norwegian law says principal authors should be
> attributed, and I believe
> > its the correct thing to do. It is not a good reason
> to say that today
> > we can't identify those authors. Most of the
> articles I've been involved
> > in writing has had very few principal authors, most
> of them only one or
> > two.
> >
> > In Norwegian law the principal authors can choose what
> to do with the
> > article, even relicense it, without asking any of the
> other writers.
> >
> > It should be interesting to make some statistics over
> how many principal
> > authors there are for articles from Wikipedia. I think
> the nom are
> > pretty few, even for those articles that has grown
> very large.
> >
> > John
> >
>
> In Finnish moral rights law, the right to be identified
> as the author of ones work is inalienable and absolute,
> and cannot be voided even through a contractual
> transaction.
>


I don't believe the right to be identified as an author is necessarily the same disscusion as the attribution appropriate for various formats. Publishing a work without any explict attribution to an author =! voiding that author's right to be identified as an author of the work.

Birgitte SB


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Hoi,
Think of the trees. Consider the enormous waste of paper and ink needed to
do justice to all the people who contribute. Consider where this data is
mostly used, I do argue that a clear reference to sources used and a link to
for instance the history pages should more then suffice.

Our aim is to provide information. Our aim is to provide the freedom to
continue on top of what came before. This link to an history and the
continuation of a work under the same license is what is really important.
The rest is effectively an ambiguous pumping of egos. Ambiguous because of
the lack of clarity whose ego to pump.
Thanks,
Gerard

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 9:46 PM, Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> The GFDL has specific attribution requirements that were designed for
> software manuals. What's appropriate attribution for a wiki, where a
> page can have thousands of authors, and a collection of pages is very
> likely to? I would like to start a broad initial discussion on this
> topic; it's likely that the issue will need to be raised more
> specifically in the context of possible modifications to the GFDL or a
> migration to CC-BY-SA.
>
> The relevant GFDL clause states: "List on the Title Page, as authors,
> one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the
> modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of
> the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors,
> if it has fewer than five), unless they release you from this
> requirement."
>
> Most people have chosen to ignore the "principal authors" requirement
> and to try to attribute every author instead because there's no
> obvious way to determine who the principal authors are. I remember a
> few years back that Anthony tried a completely different approach,
> where he created a full copy of Wikipedia (under the assumption that
> it's a single GFDL work) and attributed it to five people on the
> frontpage. Anthony, please correct me if my recollection is incorrect.
>
> The community process that has developed with regard to GFDL
> compliance on the web has generally tacitly favored a link to the
> article and to its history as proper credit. But, for printed books,
> publishers have generally wanted to be more in compliance with the
> letter of the license. So, the Bertelsmann "Wikipedia in one volume"
> includes a looong list of authors in a very tiny font.
>
> Is that practical? How about Wikipedia articles on passenger
> information systems (screens on subways, airplanes)? How about small
> booklets where there isn't a lot of room for licensing information?
> Should a good license for wikis make a distinction between print and
> online uses?
>
> I haven't heard anyone argue strongly for full inclusion of the
> _license text_. But I'd like to hear opinions on the inclusion of
> username lists.
>
> My personal preference would be a system where we have a special
> "credits" URL for each article, something like
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/credits/World_War_II
>
> which would list authors and also provide full licensing information
> for all media files. If we had a specific collection of articles, the
> system could support this using collection IDs:
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/collection_credits/Bertelsmann_One_Volume_Encyclopedia
>
> (These URLs are completely made up and have no basis in reality.)
>
> The advantage that I see of such an approach is that it would allow us
> to standardize and continually refine the way we display authorship
> information, and benefit the free sharing of content with a very
> lightweight process. The disadvantage (if it is perceived as such) is
> that if we would officially recommend such attribution in printed
> books, individual contributors would be less likely to see their
> username in print. But we might see more print uses because it would
> make the attribution more manageable.
>
> It's also conceivable to require full author attribution for printed
> collections of a certain length or printed in certain quantity. (The
> GFDL has "in quantity" rules, but they do not seem to apply in any way
> to the authorship information.)
>
> Aside from what the legal implications of any given approach are, the
> first question I think that needs to be answered is what's desirable.
> Thoughts?
> --
> Erik Möller
> Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
>
> Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
>
> _______________________________________________
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> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
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>
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On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 2:36 PM, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> --- On Mon, 10/20/08, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> From: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro@gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?
>> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
>> Date: Monday, October 20, 2008, 4:21 PM
>> John at Darkstar wrote:
>> > Norwegian law says principal authors should be
>> attributed, and I believe
>> > its the correct thing to do. It is not a good reason
>> to say that today
>> > we can't identify those authors. Most of the
>> articles I've been involved
>> > in writing has had very few principal authors, most
>> of them only one or
>> > two.
>> >
>> > In Norwegian law the principal authors can choose what
>> to do with the
>> > article, even relicense it, without asking any of the
>> other writers.
>> >
>> > It should be interesting to make some statistics over
>> how many principal
>> > authors there are for articles from Wikipedia. I think
>> the nom are
>> > pretty few, even for those articles that has grown
>> very large.
>> >
>> > John
>> >
>>
>> In Finnish moral rights law, the right to be identified
>> as the author of ones work is inalienable and absolute,
>> and cannot be voided even through a contractual
>> transaction.
>>
>
>
> I don't believe the right to be identified as an author is necessarily the same disscusion as the attribution appropriate for various formats. Publishing a work without any explict attribution to an author =! voiding that author's right to be identified as an author of the work.
>
> Birgitte SB

Agreed. I don't think anyone is suggesting that *wikipedia itself* is
doing away with the kind of attribution we currently provide; the
question is what standard reusers of content should be held to.
Arguably, the simpler the standard the more likely people are to
adhere to it. A minimum standard also wouldn't prevent anyone from
going above and beyond and crediting the entire list of authors, say,
if they wanted to.

-- phoebe

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2008/10/20 Mike Godwin <mgodwin@wikimedia.org>:
>
> Thomas Dalton writes:
>
>> The legal implications do certainly need to be considered, however.
>> Moral rights to attribution may well get in the way. Mike Godwin can
>> advise on US law, but someone needs to make official contact with
>> lawyers in other jurisdictions and get advice.
>
> FWIW, any lawyer who deals with copyright in any kind of international
> environment is aware of moral-rights issues. If specific questions and
> concerns come up, of course, I have a network of international lawyers
> I can reach out to.

There is a difference between being aware of an issue and knowing how
that issue affects each jurisdiction. It's good to hear that you
already have a network of international lawyers to call on.

>> This mailing list is not the place for a detailed discussion
>> of the law, but that discussion does need to take place (between WMF,
>> CC, FSF and lots and lots of lawyers from all over the world - this
>> will probably cost a lot of money since you'll be lucky to find people
>> willing to work pro-bono is every significant jurisdiction, but is
>> essential).
>
> I don't think you're correct to suppose that "lots and lots of
> lawyers" are required. Copyright is, after all, very largely
> harmonized among very many nations as a result of several
> international agreements. Also, since United States is a bit of an
> outlier when it comes to enforcement of moral rights, we wouldn't
> impose a U.S. norm on how to interpret or understand moral rights of
> attribution. In implementation, as it happens, I think the moral-
> rights issue will turn out to be less of a practical problem than you
> imagine (because I don't think attribution problems will generate
> enough friction for us to worry about). Moral-rights issues tend to
> arise when substantial authorship and attribution questions are
> obvious and clear -- in short, not the kind of authorship and
> attribution issues that normally arise in a collaborative enterprise
> like a Wikimedia project.

While copyright is largely harmonised, does that include moral rights?
From what I've heard, they seem to vary quite widely. I don't really
imagine anything about them, I don't know enough to, I just know it's
not an issue that should be dismissed without due consideration. It
really only takes one person to decide to cause a fuss and you end up
with a mess on your hands - I'm not sure it's wise to rely on
something not causing friction to get out of having to follow the law
to the letter.

The thing with experts is that you often need to contact them in order
to find out if there is anything worth contacting them about.

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On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 3:46 PM, Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org> wrote:
[snip]
> What's appropriate attribution for a wiki, where a
> page can have thousands of authors, and a collection of pages is very
> likely to?

Wikipedia articles seldom have more than a few authors. Many even more
than a single copyright bearing author of the page text (plus a few
additional authors for illustrations).

Collections obviously have more authors in total, but I don't think
the situation is very different from a traditional dead tree
encyclopaedia, which typically has one or a few authors per article
and a great many authors in total in total.

One difference is that traditional encyclopaedias usually compensate
their authors financially while authors on Wikipedia receive only
positive Karma from furthering the social mission and the reputational
boost that comes from their good work having tractable attribution
that links their work back to them.

My long standing recommendation for free content licensing in the
context of collaborative works is well embodied in this
recommendation:

http://meta.wikimedia.oro/wiki/GFDL_suggestions#Proposed_attribution_text

What shouldn't be done is create rules which gives special privileged
to some parties for virtue of running a website (remember, websites
are not communities. The community may entirely leave and they should
not have to attribute their initial webhost for all eternity), and
failing to ensuring that there is a way to trace creations back to
their creators.

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Birgitte SB wrote:
>
> --- On Mon, 10/20/08, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>> From: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro@gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?
>> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
>> Date: Monday, October 20, 2008, 4:21 PM
>> John at Darkstar wrote:
>>
>>> Norwegian law says principal authors should be
>>>
>> attributed, and I believe
>>
>>> its the correct thing to do. It is not a good reason
>>>
>> to say that today
>>
>>> we can't identify those authors. Most of the
>>>
>> articles I've been involved
>>
>>> in writing has had very few principal authors, most
>>>
>> of them only one or
>>
>>> two.
>>>
>>> In Norwegian law the principal authors can choose what
>>>
>> to do with the
>>
>>> article, even relicense it, without asking any of the
>>>
>> other writers.
>>
>>> It should be interesting to make some statistics over
>>>
>> how many principal
>>
>>> authors there are for articles from Wikipedia. I think
>>>
>> the nom are
>>
>>> pretty few, even for those articles that has grown
>>>
>> very large.
>>
>>> John
>>>
>>>
>> In Finnish moral rights law, the right to be identified
>> as the author of ones work is inalienable and absolute,
>> and cannot be voided even through a contractual
>> transaction.
>>
>>
>
>
> I don't believe the right to be identified as an author is necessarily the same disscusion as the attribution appropriate for various formats. Publishing a work without any explict attribution to an author =! voiding that author's right to be identified as an author of the work.
>
>

As a matter of fact, I don't believe this is accurate.

As I understand it, the "paternity right" in the
Finnish section on moral rights in law, implies
that publication without attribution, can happen
with explicit permission of the author, but the
author can rescind that permission at any time.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen



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2008/10/20 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>:
> My long standing recommendation for free content licensing in the
> context of collaborative works is well embodied in this
> recommendation:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.oro/wiki/GFDL_suggestions#Proposed_attribution_text

I think this is a very good proposal. I like the proposed modification
to only require the five principal authors to be attributed if they
are provided to begin with: It should not be the obligation of
re-users to determine who the principal authors are.

This language would, arguably, do away with the 4pt author name
listings in some publications -- which some people may consider to be
a bad thing.
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 6:16 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
<cimonavaro@gmail.com> wrote:
> As a matter of fact, I don't believe this is accurate.
>
> As I understand it, the "paternity right" in the
> Finnish section on moral rights in law, implies
> that publication without attribution, can happen
> with explicit permission of the author, but the
> author can rescind that permission at any time.
[snip]

That behaviour is, as I understand it, typical of moral rights (in
places which acknowledge them). The notion is that you can't contract
away attribution (or other 'moral rights') any less than you can sell
yourself into slavery because attribution (like freedom) is a moral
right and not an economic right.

Some moral rights implementations are potentially very harmful to free
content as we know it: You wouldn't want to be forced to remove an
improved version of a document simply because a sour original author
has decided he dislikes you and that your enhancements are prejudicial
to his reputation. But attribution is not an example of a problematic
right, for the most part.

I think there is an second interrelated issue: There is a notion in
some places that some nearly invisible and almost always unread "terms
of service" can represent an agreement to abandon your right of
attribution. I think this is bogus even in places where it is
attribution is 'only' an economic right. However attribution is
handled the principle of least surprise should always be heeded.

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Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> Some moral rights implementations are potentially very harmful to free
> content as we know it: You wouldn't want to be forced to remove an
> improved version of a document simply because a sour original author
> has decided he dislikes you and that your enhancements are prejudicial
> to his reputation. But attribution is not an example of a problematic
> right, for the most part.
>
>
What appears to be a big distinction between moral rights laws in
European countries and in English speaking countries is the burden of
proving that a change is indeed prejudicial to one's reputation. In a
common law country the presumption of innocence implies that prejudice
must be proved.

Ec

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>
> I don't believe the right to be identified as an author is necessarily the same disscusion as the attribution appropriate for various formats. Publishing a work without any explict attribution to an author =! voiding that author's right to be identified as an author of the work.
>
> Birgitte SB
>

Can you give an example?
John

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> As I understand it, the "paternity right" in the
> Finnish section on moral rights in law, implies
> that publication without attribution, can happen
> with explicit permission of the author, but the
> author can rescind that permission at any time.
>
>
> Yours,
>
> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
>

In Norway a few news wire companies does not attribute the journalists,
and it seems to be legal, but it is claimed at least by one person to be
due to their employment by the company. Then they transfers the rights
to the company. I can't see how a license could make the same thing
happen, but this would work somehow.

Note also that in Norway a principal author can make decissions against
the coauthors will

John

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John at Darkstar wrote:
>> As I understand it, the "paternity right" in the
>> Finnish section on moral rights in law, implies
>> that publication without attribution, can happen
>> with explicit permission of the author, but the
>> author can rescind that permission at any time.
>>
>>
>> Yours,
>>
>> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
>>
>>
>
> In Norway a few news wire companies does not attribute the journalists,
> and it seems to be legal, but it is claimed at least by one person to be
> due to their employment by the company. Then they transfers the rights
> to the company. I can't see how a license could make the same thing
> happen, but this would work somehow.
>
> Note also that in Norway a principal author can make decissions against
> the coauthors will
>
> John
>

There is recent case law on this point in Finland, where it
was found that being a director of the movie did not make
it legal to make significant alterations to a movie manuscript
when shooting the movie, against the wishes of the
scriptwriter. [1] I understand that would be a shocking
result in Hollywood.

[1] "Riisuttu Mies" (the movie was given a stiff fine, and theatrical
distribution was forbid, though the scriptwriter has allowed
television showings and video distribution)


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

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On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 3:46 PM, Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> The relevant GFDL clause states: "List on the Title Page, as authors,
> one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the
> modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of
> the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors,
> if it has fewer than five), unless they release you from this
> requirement."
>

There's another relevant clause: "Preserve the section Entitled "History",
Preserve its Title, and add to it an item stating at least the title, year,
new authors, and publisher of the Modified Version as given on the Title
Page. If there is no section Entitled "History" in the Document, create one
stating the title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as given on
its Title Page, then add an item describing the Modified Version as stated
in the previous sentence."

Now, when I first read that I interpreted "authors" to mean all authors, but
I've heard someone else interpret it to mean "authors...as given on its
Title Page", which in the case of Wikipedia articles, would be no one.


> Most people have chosen to ignore the "principal authors" requirement
> and to try to attribute every author instead because there's no
> obvious way to determine who the principal authors are. I remember a
> few years back that Anthony tried a completely different approach,
> where he created a full copy of Wikipedia (under the assumption that
> it's a single GFDL work) and attributed it to five people on the
> frontpage. Anthony, please correct me if my recollection is incorrect.
>

That's extremely misleading and/or incorrect. I listed 5 authors on the
title page (http://web.archive.org/web/20050202210758/http://mcfly.org/),
but I listed *all* the authors on a page which I linked from a page entitled
"GFDL History" (
http://web.archive.org/web/20050217045214/en.mcfly.org/GFDL_History, which
unfortunately does not contain the linked page, probably because it was so
huge). Furthermore, I did not base my use on the assumption that Wikipedia
is a single GFDL work. Rather, I based my use on the assumption that
*either* Wikipedia is a single GFDL work *or* that it could be merged into a
single work under section 5 "Combining Documents".

Also, I would like to point out that the GFDL does not say to list *the*
five principal authors, it says to list "five *of* the principal authors".
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On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 4:30 PM, John at Darkstar <vacuum@jeb.no> wrote:

> In Norwegian law the principal authors can choose what to do with the
> article, even relicense it, without asking any of the other writers.
>

That's true under US law too, if the work is treated as a work of joint
authorship.
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On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 10:35 PM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 3:46 PM, Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> Most people have chosen to ignore the "principal authors" requirement
>> and to try to attribute every author instead because there's no
>> obvious way to determine who the principal authors are. I remember a
>> few years back that Anthony tried a completely different approach,
>> where he created a full copy of Wikipedia (under the assumption that
>> it's a single GFDL work) and attributed it to five people on the
>> frontpage. Anthony, please correct me if my recollection is incorrect.
>>
>
> That's extremely misleading and/or incorrect. I listed 5 authors on the
> title page (http://web.archive.org/web/20050202210758/http://mcfly.org/),
> but I listed *all* the authors on a page which I linked from a page entitled
> "GFDL History" (
> http://web.archive.org/web/20050217045214/en.mcfly.org/GFDL_History, which
> unfortunately does not contain the linked page, probably because it was so
> huge).
>

Ah, here it is:
http://web.archive.org/web/20071009040722/en.mcfly.org/Wikipedia+contributors,
which was linked from *both* the title page and the GFDL History page.

An explanation of how I complied with the GFDL is at
http://web.archive.org/web/20071008202154/en.mcfly.org/McFly_copyrights
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I've asked about this some time back, and the answare was that Wikipedia
is a collection of independent work, meaning each one of them has to
list the principal authors of that work. The collection as such is a
database and may or may not be a work in itself.

Also, a failure to state the principal authors does not release any
later work from giving due attribution. The attribution is a property of
the work itself and not for some random copy of the work, that is each
copy has to give due respect to the authors of the work not the authors
of the previous copy.

John

Anthony skrev:
> On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 3:46 PM, Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> The relevant GFDL clause states: "List on the Title Page, as authors,
>> one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the
>> modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of
>> the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors,
>> if it has fewer than five), unless they release you from this
>> requirement."
>>
>
> There's another relevant clause: "Preserve the section Entitled "History",
> Preserve its Title, and add to it an item stating at least the title, year,
> new authors, and publisher of the Modified Version as given on the Title
> Page. If there is no section Entitled "History" in the Document, create one
> stating the title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as given on
> its Title Page, then add an item describing the Modified Version as stated
> in the previous sentence."
>
> Now, when I first read that I interpreted "authors" to mean all authors, but
> I've heard someone else interpret it to mean "authors...as given on its
> Title Page", which in the case of Wikipedia articles, would be no one.
>
>
>> Most people have chosen to ignore the "principal authors" requirement
>> and to try to attribute every author instead because there's no
>> obvious way to determine who the principal authors are. I remember a
>> few years back that Anthony tried a completely different approach,
>> where he created a full copy of Wikipedia (under the assumption that
>> it's a single GFDL work) and attributed it to five people on the
>> frontpage. Anthony, please correct me if my recollection is incorrect.
>>
>
> That's extremely misleading and/or incorrect. I listed 5 authors on the
> title page (http://web.archive.org/web/20050202210758/http://mcfly.org/),
> but I listed *all* the authors on a page which I linked from a page entitled
> "GFDL History" (
> http://web.archive.org/web/20050217045214/en.mcfly.org/GFDL_History, which
> unfortunately does not contain the linked page, probably because it was so
> huge). Furthermore, I did not base my use on the assumption that Wikipedia
> is a single GFDL work. Rather, I based my use on the assumption that
> *either* Wikipedia is a single GFDL work *or* that it could be merged into a
> single work under section 5 "Combining Documents".
>
> Also, I would like to point out that the GFDL does not say to list *the*
> five principal authors, it says to list "five *of* the principal authors".
> _______________________________________________
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> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
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>

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I wonder, could it be easier to solve the attribution problem with GFDL,
and perhaps adjust that license so a clearly identifiable source of the
license is sufficient? That solves most the problem with todays use of
the GFDL license.

The attribution problem isn't that difficult to solve. It is possible to
identify who wrote which parts of an article. It is also possible to say
something about which parts clearly constitutes _content_ and which
parts are not content but purely factual statements, that is templates.
The authors that is involved in producing content are those that belongs
in the category principal authors, and among them some will be possible
to identify as truly principal authors.

The main problem with the GFDL is how to clearly identify the work as
licensed under GFDL. Today this leads to the printing of the whole
license text, but the only thing necessary is identification of the
license in a clearly visible manner.

Rethink the whole problem, whats necessary is to be able to identify a
work and as part of this be able to identify the license and other data.
Perhaps something like an ISBN-number for any authored work, and then
some kind of magic site that can act as a broker between those who need
additional information and those who deliver such information. This
could be a step further than today, not only identifying which license a
particular work uses, but also licensing of previous version and how it
relates to other parts of a collection of works.

John

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On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 11:44 PM, John at Darkstar <vacuum@jeb.no> wrote:
[snip]
> The main problem with the GFDL is how to clearly identify the work as
> licensed under GFDL. Today this leads to the printing of the whole
> license text, but the only thing necessary is identification of the
> license in a clearly visible manner.

One of the proposed FSF GFDL revision drafts had a size threshold for
triggering the requirement to reproduce the license text.
(http://gplv3.fsf.org/comments/gfdl-draft-1.html; 6a)

Informing people of their rights is important: Since if they don't
know them they might as well not have them. If the license text is
well written, or at least has a good preamble, then including it can
go a long way to further understanding of Free content (it's not just
no cost!), unfortunately the FDL isn't clear and don't have a clear
preamble. But the GPLv3 very much is and does, so it can be done.

Including a single license copy squeezed onto a page along with 1000
pages of information is pretty non-burdensome, even in printed form.
Certainly no worse than all the other random overhead pages a book
typically contains.

The thresholds in the proposed draft may be probably too low to remove
this burden (it was something like 20k words or 10 pages), but it's an
indication that the general approach may be acceptable to the
drafters.


> Rethink the whole problem, whats necessary is to be able to identify a
> work and as part of this be able to identify the license and other data.
> Perhaps something like an ISBN-number for any authored work, and then
> some kind of magic site that can act as a broker between those who need
> additional information and those who deliver such information. This
> could be a step further than today, not only identifying which license a
> particular work uses, but also licensing of previous version and how it
> relates to other parts of a collection of works.

Hm. Well it would have to be Universal, and it purpose is Locating
Resources, so we could call it a ULR! This seems somehow familiar. ;)

More seriously, a clearing house would be interesting and very useful.
But I think in terms of providing licensing information it still makes
sense to always tag along: "year, basic attribution; license" if
nothing else. A clearing house identifier would be bonus.


The other *must solve* issue is the gratuitous incompatibility with
similar but different licenses: You can't create a new work that is
derived from both third-party FDL content and third-party CC-By-SA
content while strictly conforming with the licenses. (many people
would call this the most significant problem with the FDL today,
thought it's also true of all other existing copyleft free content
licenses)

I think that almost everyone agrees that you ought to be able to do
this (the most negative thing I've seen said about it is that you
ought to respect the most restrictive of the combined terms in this
case), and there are a number of ways to address this. My preferred
way is to just have the licenses explicitly enumerate compatible
licenses and the rules for combined works. GPLv3 addressed the
compatibility question in a different way, but it was addressed
successfully there, so again it has been proven that it can be done.

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Thomas Dalton writes:

> There is a difference between being aware of an issue and knowing how
> that issue affects each jurisdiction.

Hey! Thanks for letting me know about that!

> While copyright is largely harmonised, does that include moral rights?

More or less.

> The thing with experts is that you often need to contact them in order
> to find out if there is anything worth contacting them about.

This had never occurred to me!


--Mike



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Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>
>
> The other *must solve* issue is the gratuitous incompatibility with
> similar but different licenses: You can't create a new work that is
> derived from both third-party FDL content and third-party CC-By-SA
> content while strictly conforming with the licenses. (many people
> would call this the most significant problem with the FDL today,
> thought it's also true of all other existing copyleft free content
> licenses)
>
> I think that almost everyone agrees that you ought to be able to do
> this (the most negative thing I've seen said about it is that you
> ought to respect the most restrictive of the combined terms in this
> case), and there are a number of ways to address this. My preferred
> way is to just have the licenses explicitly enumerate compatible
> licenses and the rules for combined works. GPLv3 addressed the
> compatibility question in a different way, but it was addressed
> successfully there, so again it has been proven that it can be done.
>
>

As I understand it (correct me if I am wrong), one of the
salient problems with "close but no cigar" license compatibility
is that a license either *is* "viral", or it *is not*. And getting
by that is near impossible in a way that is coherent.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

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On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 12:26 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
<cimonavaro@gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> As I understand it (correct me if I am wrong), one of the
> salient problems with "close but no cigar" license compatibility
> is that a license either *is* "viral", or it *is not*. And getting
> by that is near impossible in a way that is coherent.

Nope.

Basically you can't be compatible and not expose yourself to some
weaknesses in the other license: You're exposed to the risk that the
other is two permissive if you follow a "allow any act permitted by
either" combination, or too restrictive if you follow a "allow only
acts permitted by both", or some variant depending on how the
combination permission is constructed. If both licenses are copyleft
(what you're calling viral) then you may end up in a case where
further downstream works must be under the combined licenses, unless
that situation is specifically avoided in *both* copyleft licenses.

...But if you consider compatibility to be important (and I think
everyone can agree that it's at least somewhat important some of the
time) then your only other alternatives are getting both works dual
licensed or both re-licensed under a single license. Neither of which
should be better than the controlled exposure.


You don't have to take my word for it, There is an existence proof:
GPLv3 accomplishes license compatibility with other licenses, not
merely license which allow covered works to be simply re-licensed as
GPLv3.

See:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#WhatDoesCompatMean

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html Section 7

(actually, the AGPL compatibility in Section 13 is basically the type
of compatibility I prefer: Explicit bidirectional compatibility with
defined terms)

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2008/10/21 Mike Godwin <mgodwin@wikimedia.org>:
>
> Thomas Dalton writes:
>
>> There is a difference between being aware of an issue and knowing how
>> that issue affects each jurisdiction.
>
> Hey! Thanks for letting me know about that!

You're welcome.

>> While copyright is largely harmonised, does that include moral rights?
>
> More or less.

The "or less" is the bit you need to worry about, then.

>> The thing with experts is that you often need to contact them in order
>> to find out if there is anything worth contacting them about.
>
> This had never occurred to me!

Perhaps you should try thinking things through properly in future, then.

(NB: Claiming a statement is sarcastic does not making it false. From
your previous email is quite clear that your statements in this email
are true despite the fact that you most likely believe you are being
sarcastic.)

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On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 11:11 PM, John at Darkstar <vacuum@jeb.no> wrote:

> I've asked about this some time back, and the answare was that Wikipedia
> is a collection of independent work, meaning each one of them has to
> list the principal authors of that work. The collection as such is a
> database and may or may not be a work in itself.
>

1) Who told you that? 2) Can the names be combined into a single list? I
don't see why not.

Also, a failure to state the principal authors does not release any
> later work from giving due attribution. The attribution is a property of
> the work itself and not for some random copy of the work, that is each
> copy has to give due respect to the authors of the work not the authors
> of the previous copy.


Absolutely agreed. My longstanding interpretation of the GFDL was that
attribution of all (non de-minimus) authors was required, in the section
Entitled History. Considering moral rights laws and the ethical principles
behind them, I still believe this is the correct interpretation, and that
the phrase "as given on its Title page" should be interpreted to apply only
to "publisher of the Document".
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> Absolutely agreed. My longstanding interpretation of the GFDL was that
> attribution of all (non de-minimus) authors was required, in the section
> Entitled History. Considering moral rights laws and the ethical principles
> behind them, I still believe this is the correct interpretation, and that
> the phrase "as given on its Title page" should be interpreted to apply only
> to "publisher of the Document".

If memory serves (it's been a while since I read the license
properly), the "5 principal authors" thing is for re-use, the
"preserve the section entitled history" thing is for modifications.
The two are different uses of the license. If you're just using the
content as is it's far easier than if you're modifying it.

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On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 8:38 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com>wrote:

> > Absolutely agreed. My longstanding interpretation of the GFDL was that
> > attribution of all (non de-minimus) authors was required, in the section
> > Entitled History. Considering moral rights laws and the ethical
> principles
> > behind them, I still believe this is the correct interpretation, and that
> > the phrase "as given on its Title page" should be interpreted to apply
> only
> > to "publisher of the Document".
>
> If memory serves (it's been a while since I read the license
> properly), the "5 principal authors" thing is for re-use, the
> "preserve the section entitled history" thing is for modifications.
> The two are different uses of the license. If you're just using the
> content as is it's far easier than if you're modifying it.


Nope, they're both for modifications. If you're just making a verbatim
copy, you preserve any attribution in the original as a natural part of not
making any modifications. Of course, in the case of Wikipedia, the original
isn't properly attributed in the first place.
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Thomas Dalton writes:
>
>>> While copyright is largely harmonised, does that include moral
>>> rights?
>>
>> More or less.
>
> The "or less" is the bit you need to worry about, then.

Wow, thanks.

>>> The thing with experts is that you often need to contact them in
>>> order
>>> to find out if there is anything worth contacting them about.
>>
>> This had never occurred to me!
>
> Perhaps you should try thinking things through properly in future,
> then.
>
> (NB: Claiming a statement is sarcastic does not making it false. From
> your previous email is quite clear that your statements in this email
> are true despite the fact that you most likely believe you are being
> sarcastic.)

I am truly impressed, not only with your exceptional knowledge of
moral-rights jurisprudence, but also with your assessment of my legal
abilities and your insightful interpretation of my comments. It's a
wonder that I ever managed to accomplish anything without the insight
of Thomas Dalton, especially with regard to this tricky copyright stuff.

It's true, Thomas -- I'm a dope, and I need your wisdom to straighten
me out.


--Mike





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On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 4:59 PM, Mike Godwin <mgodwin@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> Thomas Dalton writes:
>>
>>>> While copyright is largely harmonised, does that include moral
>>>> rights?
>>>
>>> More or less.
>>
>> The "or less" is the bit you need to worry about, then.
>
> Wow, thanks.
>
>>>> The thing with experts is that you often need to contact them in
>>>> order
>>>> to find out if there is anything worth contacting them about.
>>>
>>> This had never occurred to me!
>>
>> Perhaps you should try thinking things through properly in future,
>> then.
>>
>> (NB: Claiming a statement is sarcastic does not making it false. From
>> your previous email is quite clear that your statements in this email
>> are true despite the fact that you most likely believe you are being
>> sarcastic.)
>
> I am truly impressed, not only with your exceptional knowledge of
> moral-rights jurisprudence, but also with your assessment of my legal
> abilities and your insightful interpretation of my comments. It's a
> wonder that I ever managed to accomplish anything without the insight
> of Thomas Dalton, especially with regard to this tricky copyright stuff.
>
> It's true, Thomas -- I'm a dope, and I need your wisdom to straighten
> me out.
>
^

Thomas, Mike, as much as I'm amused by this debate, can we drop this
here? It's getting unproductive, really.

Thanks,
Michael

--
Michael Bimmler
mbimmler@gmail.com

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Anthony skrev:
> On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 11:11 PM, John at Darkstar <vacuum@jeb.no> wrote:
>
>> I've asked about this some time back, and the answare was that Wikipedia
>> is a collection of independent work, meaning each one of them has to
>> list the principal authors of that work. The collection as such is a
>> database and may or may not be a work in itself.
>>
>
> 1) Who told you that? 2) Can the names be combined into a single list? I
> don't see why not.

*is* should be *can be* in the first sentence.

The person, the actual name is insignificant, said that such a
collection is an independent work and should be attributed as such
together with attribution for each contained work. It is also possible
to interpret it as a database, sort of special notation in
"Åndsverksloven" (http://www.lovdata.no/all/hl-19610512-002.html#43) -
law about artistic works or intellectual property or something like that
- it gives the database protection as if it is a work of art. It is not
obvious which one is most suitable for Wikipedia. An interpretation as a
database seems more on line with WMF being an isp.

I don't think it really says anything about attribution for the content
of the database, but §6, which does not apply to a database says; Er det
to eller flere opphavsmenn til et åndsverk uten at de enkeltes ytelser
kan skilles ut som særskilte verk, erverver de opphavsrett til verket i
fellesskap. If there are two or more creators for a work of art and none
of the contributions can be singled out as independent works, they will
collectively own the "copyright". I use quotation as opphavsrett is not
similar to copyright but its close enough. Note that the articles in
Wikipedia is clearly independent works that can be singled out, which
means they should be attributed individually.

Attribution can be organized any way appropriate as long as it is
according to "good practice. The same § 3 says this "The rights after
the first and second paragraphs can not be released, unless the use of
the work in question is limited after the nature and scope." That is, a
license that does not request attribution can't be used in such a
manner, you may use it but still you will have to attribute the authors.
It is although possible to say that a limited use can be done without
attribution, lets say someone printing out a single hardcopy.

> Also, a failure to state the principal authors does not release any
>> later work from giving due attribution. The attribution is a property of
>> the work itself and not for some random copy of the work, that is each
>> copy has to give due respect to the authors of the work not the authors
>> of the previous copy.
>
>
> Absolutely agreed. My longstanding interpretation of the GFDL was that
> attribution of all (non de-minimus) authors was required, in the section
> Entitled History. Considering moral rights laws and the ethical principles
> behind them, I still believe this is the correct interpretation, and that
> the phrase "as given on its Title page" should be interpreted to apply only
> to "publisher of the Document".
> __

My guess is that a history link should exist if appropriate, if
necessary at a the original publisher/isp/whattever (WM-site) but
prinsipal authors should be attributed anyhow at copies.

John

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Hoi,
I find it interesting to see how this thread is being weaved. If I read Erik
correctly, he is asking us what appropriate attribution is. He is asking any
and all observations. What I find is a thread about existing legalities.

When we observe the current practice, you find that people attribute by
referring to Wikipedia. This is an effective way of providing access to any
and all the people who have contributed to what has been used. When you read
the byzantine requirements under the different licenses, you have to be a
lawyer to understand them properly and there is no tooling to help you
define such things as "principal author" or the five most significant
authors.

If all we can do is discuss how things are currently legal, then we are not
looking for something that works practically. It is for practical reasons
that I wonder about the number of trees that have to be felled to attribute.
Certainly when you have a print of all the Wikipedia articles on the popes
of Rome and all the Christian saints and martyrs, you have a long list of
articles that may all need their own attribution. When you approach these
articles as a single work, you do no justice to the individual article and
its authors.

Really, why are we not talking about how this is to WORK for the people that
will use our data.. Please remember that this is what we do it for.
Thanks,
GerardM

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 9:46 PM, Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> The GFDL has specific attribution requirements that were designed for
> software manuals. What's appropriate attribution for a wiki, where a
> page can have thousands of authors, and a collection of pages is very
> likely to? I would like to start a broad initial discussion on this
> topic; it's likely that the issue will need to be raised more
> specifically in the context of possible modifications to the GFDL or a
> migration to CC-BY-SA.
>
> The relevant GFDL clause states: "List on the Title Page, as authors,
> one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the
> modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of
> the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors,
> if it has fewer than five), unless they release you from this
> requirement."
>
> Most people have chosen to ignore the "principal authors" requirement
> and to try to attribute every author instead because there's no
> obvious way to determine who the principal authors are. I remember a
> few years back that Anthony tried a completely different approach,
> where he created a full copy of Wikipedia (under the assumption that
> it's a single GFDL work) and attributed it to five people on the
> frontpage. Anthony, please correct me if my recollection is incorrect.
>
> The community process that has developed with regard to GFDL
> compliance on the web has generally tacitly favored a link to the
> article and to its history as proper credit. But, for printed books,
> publishers have generally wanted to be more in compliance with the
> letter of the license. So, the Bertelsmann "Wikipedia in one volume"
> includes a looong list of authors in a very tiny font.
>
> Is that practical? How about Wikipedia articles on passenger
> information systems (screens on subways, airplanes)? How about small
> booklets where there isn't a lot of room for licensing information?
> Should a good license for wikis make a distinction between print and
> online uses?
>
> I haven't heard anyone argue strongly for full inclusion of the
> _license text_. But I'd like to hear opinions on the inclusion of
> username lists.
>
> My personal preference would be a system where we have a special
> "credits" URL for each article, something like
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/credits/World_War_II
>
> which would list authors and also provide full licensing information
> for all media files. If we had a specific collection of articles, the
> system could support this using collection IDs:
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/collection_credits/Bertelsmann_One_Volume_Encyclopedia
>
> (These URLs are completely made up and have no basis in reality.)
>
> The advantage that I see of such an approach is that it would allow us
> to standardize and continually refine the way we display authorship
> information, and benefit the free sharing of content with a very
> lightweight process. The disadvantage (if it is perceived as such) is
> that if we would officially recommend such attribution in printed
> books, individual contributors would be less likely to see their
> username in print. But we might see more print uses because it would
> make the attribution more manageable.
>
> It's also conceivable to require full author attribution for printed
> collections of a certain length or printed in certain quantity. (The
> GFDL has "in quantity" rules, but they do not seem to apply in any way
> to the authorship information.)
>
> Aside from what the legal implications of any given approach are, the
> first question I think that needs to be answered is what's desirable.
> Thoughts?
> --
> Erik Möller
> Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
>
> Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
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2008/10/21 Mike Godwin <mgodwin@wikimedia.org>:
>
> Thomas Dalton writes:
>>
>>>> While copyright is largely harmonised, does that include moral
>>>> rights?
>>>
>>> More or less.
>>
>> The "or less" is the bit you need to worry about, then.
>
> Wow, thanks.
>

Worse than that. Technically most EU countries should have identical
moral rights clauses. Implementation of the clauses is inconsistent
and in many cases there is a lack of caselaw (although the lawsuit
over changing a bridge design failed).

For the average wikipedian on the ground the issue is less one of what
you can handle or find people to handle (I generally assume that the
foundation can deal with pretty much any copyright issues should it
have to) but how much attention we should be paying to moral rights at
all. At the moment we mostly ignore them (along with most non
copyright related IP stuff) but we don't know if this is a long term
viable approach.

--
geni

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2008/10/21 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com>:
> Really, why are we not talking about how this is to WORK for the people that
> will use our data.. Please remember that this is what we do it for.
> Thanks,
> GerardM
>


Problem is there are rather a different set of scenarios where
different standards are likely to be popular:


==Text==

Text from wikipedia can have a very large number of authors and in
many cases the work is a derivative of the work of every single
author. So lets look at the various uses for wikipedia text.

*Reproduction of a single article. In this case having to include an
author list longer than the article is a real problem. So people may
advocate being allowed to include a straight URL where the author list
can be found.

*reproduction of a collection of articles as a book (say a book on WW2
British submarines). In this case including a complete authorlist
while potentially rather uninformative would certainly be possible. A
URL would likely be regarded as a poor replacement.

*reproduction of an article in a non GFDL environment (say a single
article in a magazine). For a normal article a complete authorlist
would be possible but would tend to break down for WW2

*use in a power point presentation. Doesn't really matter. Whatever
requirements you put in place people just jam in a couple of slides at
the end with the stuff on it and rapidly shuffle past them.

*Recorded to vorbis/tape/mp3/45 whatever. Not too much a problem (with
the posible exception of the 45). There are various bits of text
reading software around that could read through the complete author
list although most people would stop listening there.

*Recorded for conventional radio. Serious problem here. no one is
going to want to waste airtime reading out too long a list of credits
at the same time things like
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=France&action=history would
be rather hard to read out on air.

*use in a computer game. As long as credit in the credit file is
accepted not a problem. In game credit is a bit of a headache.

==Photos==

Photos tend to have fewer authors but tend to be more frequently
deployed in situations where space is a premium.

*postcard. As long as putting credit on the back is accepted not a problem.

*jigsaw. as long as putting the credit on a separate object (in this
case the box) is accepted not a problem

*use in a computer game. As long as credit in the credit file is
accepted not a problem. In game credit may be possible via standard
watermark method

*Use on a T-shirt. There would be space but I have no idea where the
credit should be put.

*Tattoos. I'm not aware of any copyright cases over tattoos.

This is just a start and I haven't yet covered other forms of media
(video sound sculpture etc). I could have a shot if anyone is
interested.
.
--
geni

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Let me make a radical suggestion. One that, for the moment, ignores
all those overbearing legal questions.

Why not assume that the appropriate amount of attribution for a
Wikipedia article is essentially the amount that it has now?

When you look at a Wikipedia article there is no list of authors
(principal or otherwise). There is simply a link to "history", a
statement at the bottom of the page saying that the content is under
the GFDL, and a link to the GFDL. On the Wikipedia page itself, that
is essentially the full extent of the licensing and attribution.

I assume that practically all Wikipedia contributors are comfortable
with recieving this very low level of attribution for Wikipedia
articles.

So, by extension, perhaps the goal should be finding a way to codify
this scheme in a way that works both for us and for reusers. Namely,
making the requirements for redistribution of Wikipedia content to
simply be:

1) A link or reference to the article's history
2) A statement acknowledging the free content license
3) A link or reference to the text of that license

That's very simple and practical. One can add some details regarding
new versions and modifications, but even there I think you accomplish
more by keeping it simple.


Now I suspect there are about three dozen reasons why defining
attribution as simply a link to the history page is legally impossible
and incompatible with the GFDL. But even so, doesn't it make some
sense to start with: How are Wikipedia articles being used? and work
backwards backwards to construct the licensing scheme that best
resembles actual practice while still being legally rigorous?
Wikipedia authors don't seem to want or expect prominent and overt
acknowledgements when writing articles, so why should our licensing
scheme require reusers to add more overt statements than even we
ourselves have?

-Robert Rohde


On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 12:46 PM, Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> The GFDL has specific attribution requirements that were designed for
> software manuals. What's appropriate attribution for a wiki, where a
> page can have thousands of authors, and a collection of pages is very
> likely to? I would like to start a broad initial discussion on this
> topic; it's likely that the issue will need to be raised more
> specifically in the context of possible modifications to the GFDL or a
> migration to CC-BY-SA.
>
> The relevant GFDL clause states: "List on the Title Page, as authors,
> one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the
> modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of
> the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors,
> if it has fewer than five), unless they release you from this
> requirement."
>
> Most people have chosen to ignore the "principal authors" requirement
> and to try to attribute every author instead because there's no
> obvious way to determine who the principal authors are. I remember a
> few years back that Anthony tried a completely different approach,
> where he created a full copy of Wikipedia (under the assumption that
> it's a single GFDL work) and attributed it to five people on the
> frontpage. Anthony, please correct me if my recollection is incorrect.
>
> The community process that has developed with regard to GFDL
> compliance on the web has generally tacitly favored a link to the
> article and to its history as proper credit. But, for printed books,
> publishers have generally wanted to be more in compliance with the
> letter of the license. So, the Bertelsmann "Wikipedia in one volume"
> includes a looong list of authors in a very tiny font.
>
> Is that practical? How about Wikipedia articles on passenger
> information systems (screens on subways, airplanes)? How about small
> booklets where there isn't a lot of room for licensing information?
> Should a good license for wikis make a distinction between print and
> online uses?
>
> I haven't heard anyone argue strongly for full inclusion of the
> _license text_. But I'd like to hear opinions on the inclusion of
> username lists.
>
> My personal preference would be a system where we have a special
> "credits" URL for each article, something like
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/credits/World_War_II
>
> which would list authors and also provide full licensing information
> for all media files. If we had a specific collection of articles, the
> system could support this using collection IDs:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/collection_credits/Bertelsmann_One_Volume_Encyclopedia
>
> (These URLs are completely made up and have no basis in reality.)
>
> The advantage that I see of such an approach is that it would allow us
> to standardize and continually refine the way we display authorship
> information, and benefit the free sharing of content with a very
> lightweight process. The disadvantage (if it is perceived as such) is
> that if we would officially recommend such attribution in printed
> books, individual contributors would be less likely to see their
> username in print. But we might see more print uses because it would
> make the attribution more manageable.
>
> It's also conceivable to require full author attribution for printed
> collections of a certain length or printed in certain quantity. (The
> GFDL has "in quantity" rules, but they do not seem to apply in any way
> to the authorship information.)
>
> Aside from what the legal implications of any given approach are, the
> first question I think that needs to be answered is what's desirable.
> Thoughts?
> --
> Erik Möller
> Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
>
> Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

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Hoi,
The question is not what is compatible with the GFDL or CC-by-sa, the
question is what is appropriate. Those lead to different answers. I like
your approach to compare how things work in the real world and what is
stated in a license.

In the end it is about having a license that will work and that can be
enforced because it makes sense for our users.
Thanks,
GerardM

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 6:52 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde@gmail.com> wrote:

> Let me make a radical suggestion. One that, for the moment, ignores
> all those overbearing legal questions.
>
> Why not assume that the appropriate amount of attribution for a
> Wikipedia article is essentially the amount that it has now?
>
> When you look at a Wikipedia article there is no list of authors
> (principal or otherwise). There is simply a link to "history", a
> statement at the bottom of the page saying that the content is under
> the GFDL, and a link to the GFDL. On the Wikipedia page itself, that
> is essentially the full extent of the licensing and attribution.
>
> I assume that practically all Wikipedia contributors are comfortable
> with recieving this very low level of attribution for Wikipedia
> articles.
>
> So, by extension, perhaps the goal should be finding a way to codify
> this scheme in a way that works both for us and for reusers. Namely,
> making the requirements for redistribution of Wikipedia content to
> simply be:
>
> 1) A link or reference to the article's history
> 2) A statement acknowledging the free content license
> 3) A link or reference to the text of that license
>
> That's very simple and practical. One can add some details regarding
> new versions and modifications, but even there I think you accomplish
> more by keeping it simple.
>
>
> Now I suspect there are about three dozen reasons why defining
> attribution as simply a link to the history page is legally impossible
> and incompatible with the GFDL. But even so, doesn't it make some
> sense to start with: How are Wikipedia articles being used? and work
> backwards backwards to construct the licensing scheme that best
> resembles actual practice while still being legally rigorous?
> Wikipedia authors don't seem to want or expect prominent and overt
> acknowledgements when writing articles, so why should our licensing
> scheme require reusers to add more overt statements than even we
> ourselves have?
>
> -Robert Rohde
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 12:46 PM, Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> > The GFDL has specific attribution requirements that were designed for
> > software manuals. What's appropriate attribution for a wiki, where a
> > page can have thousands of authors, and a collection of pages is very
> > likely to? I would like to start a broad initial discussion on this
> > topic; it's likely that the issue will need to be raised more
> > specifically in the context of possible modifications to the GFDL or a
> > migration to CC-BY-SA.
> >
> > The relevant GFDL clause states: "List on the Title Page, as authors,
> > one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the
> > modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of
> > the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors,
> > if it has fewer than five), unless they release you from this
> > requirement."
> >
> > Most people have chosen to ignore the "principal authors" requirement
> > and to try to attribute every author instead because there's no
> > obvious way to determine who the principal authors are. I remember a
> > few years back that Anthony tried a completely different approach,
> > where he created a full copy of Wikipedia (under the assumption that
> > it's a single GFDL work) and attributed it to five people on the
> > frontpage. Anthony, please correct me if my recollection is incorrect.
> >
> > The community process that has developed with regard to GFDL
> > compliance on the web has generally tacitly favored a link to the
> > article and to its history as proper credit. But, for printed books,
> > publishers have generally wanted to be more in compliance with the
> > letter of the license. So, the Bertelsmann "Wikipedia in one volume"
> > includes a looong list of authors in a very tiny font.
> >
> > Is that practical? How about Wikipedia articles on passenger
> > information systems (screens on subways, airplanes)? How about small
> > booklets where there isn't a lot of room for licensing information?
> > Should a good license for wikis make a distinction between print and
> > online uses?
> >
> > I haven't heard anyone argue strongly for full inclusion of the
> > _license text_. But I'd like to hear opinions on the inclusion of
> > username lists.
> >
> > My personal preference would be a system where we have a special
> > "credits" URL for each article, something like
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/credits/World_War_II
> >
> > which would list authors and also provide full licensing information
> > for all media files. If we had a specific collection of articles, the
> > system could support this using collection IDs:
> >
> >
> http://en.wikipedia.org/collection_credits/Bertelsmann_One_Volume_Encyclopedia
> >
> > (These URLs are completely made up and have no basis in reality.)
> >
> > The advantage that I see of such an approach is that it would allow us
> > to standardize and continually refine the way we display authorship
> > information, and benefit the free sharing of content with a very
> > lightweight process. The disadvantage (if it is perceived as such) is
> > that if we would officially recommend such attribution in printed
> > books, individual contributors would be less likely to see their
> > username in print. But we might see more print uses because it would
> > make the attribution more manageable.
> >
> > It's also conceivable to require full author attribution for printed
> > collections of a certain length or printed in certain quantity. (The
> > GFDL has "in quantity" rules, but they do not seem to apply in any way
> > to the authorship information.)
> >
> > Aside from what the legal implications of any given approach are, the
> > first question I think that needs to be answered is what's desirable.
> > Thoughts?
> > --
> > Erik Möller
> > Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
> >
> > Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
>
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On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 11:57 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com
> wrote:

> Hoi,
> I find it interesting to see how this thread is being weaved. If I read
> Erik
> correctly, he is asking us what appropriate attribution is. He is asking
> any
> and all observations. What I find is a thread about existing legalities.
>

The appropriate attribution is certainly no less than what was promised in
the first place.

When we observe the current practice, you find that people attribute by
> referring to Wikipedia.


Copyright violations on the Internet are rampant. So what?
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On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 4:40 AM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
....
> Absolutely agreed. My longstanding interpretation of the GFDL was that
> attribution of all (non de-minimus) authors was required, in the section
> Entitled History. Considering moral rights laws and the ethical principles
> behind them, I still believe this is the correct interpretation, and that
> the phrase "as given on its Title page" should be interpreted to apply only
> to "publisher of the Document".

I actually based my only-citing-five-authors-per-article tactic on
advice from Eben Moglen, who as I understood it, felt that as long as
our metric was consistent and we linked back to the history on
Wikipedia, citing all the authors of every article in our print
version was not necessary.

In general, I think part of the trouble with the GFDL as it stands is
that very different interpretations are not only possible but likely
among people who have spent a good deal of time thinking about and
studying it. The intention is clear -- provide appropriate attribution
to the people who wrote the thing you're trying to cite -- but the
implementation is entirely murky. Pity the random person who tries to
reuse content and has to figure out the license...
-- phoebe

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On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 1:07 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen@gmail.com>wrote:

> Hoi,
> The question is not what is compatible with the GFDL or CC-by-sa, the
> question is what is appropriate.


Appropriate for what? Are we considering starting a new project, or
something?
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On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 12:52 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde@gmail.com> wrote:
> Why not assume that the appropriate amount of attribution for a
> Wikipedia article is essentially the amount that it has now?
[snip]

This is basically what is proposed at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GFDL_suggestions but there are a few
differences such as:

# Conventional named attribution be preserved in cases where it is
easy and reasonable to do so.

Consider, we copy an image from RandomFreeContentPhotoHost and stick
it in a Wikipedia article without the author's knoweldge. Joe
publisher takes just that image and uses it in his printed book, and
captions the image "RandomImage (source: Wikipedia.org;
http://.../randomimage.jpg)".

This may well surprise and offend the author, and we'll have to deal
with someone yelling at US saying they revoke the license, and yelling
at the reusers "the license says you must provide attribution!", the
mess here would be doubly compounded if in the meantime we'd deleted
the image and made the publisher look like a liar.

In cases where attribution can be directly provided, we should avoid
the middle-man. This will match people's expectations.

# that history requirement doesn't depend on you linking to a
particular site, but to any that provides the history, which avoids
making a special right for initial ISPs and webhosts

Imagine: Wikipedia turns evil and the entire community moves as a
whole to NotEvilPediaâ„¢. Does it make any sense that NotEvilPedia must
forever direct everyone to the evil Wikipedia forever and always
simply because Wikipedia was the initial webhost for the community?

Of course not, the purpose of needing a history link is to provide
the history information not to invent a new class of content ownership
for ISPs. Anyone with a complete copy of the history should be able
to fulfill the roll.
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On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 9:52 AM, Robert Rohde <rarohde@gmail.com> wrote:
> Let me make a radical suggestion. One that, for the moment, ignores
> all those overbearing legal questions.
>
> Why not assume that the appropriate amount of attribution for a
> Wikipedia article is essentially the amount that it has now?
>
> When you look at a Wikipedia article there is no list of authors
> (principal or otherwise). There is simply a link to "history", a
> statement at the bottom of the page saying that the content is under
> the GFDL, and a link to the GFDL. On the Wikipedia page itself, that
> is essentially the full extent of the licensing and attribution.
>
> I assume that practically all Wikipedia contributors are comfortable
> with recieving this very low level of attribution for Wikipedia
> articles.
>
> So, by extension, perhaps the goal should be finding a way to codify
> this scheme in a way that works both for us and for reusers. Namely,
> making the requirements for redistribution of Wikipedia content to
> simply be:
>
> 1) A link or reference to the article's history
> 2) A statement acknowledging the free content license
> 3) A link or reference to the text of that license

<snip>

Totally agreed with this. See my message upthread. My sample citation
is missing an acknowledgment of the license; add that in and I think
you'd be good to go for most purposes. I think the concept "this came
from a bunch of authors on Wikipedia" makes more sense, intuitively,
as a crediting device than trying to say "this came from JoeBlow9567,
a particular Wikipedia contributor with bits of help from half-a-dozen
other people."

As for the argument that's cropped up occasionally that most articles
have only a few primary articles -- that is true for many articles but
by no means all, and we need to develop a metric that will work with
all cases, not just many of them. Additionally, as we go along,
Wikipedia pages will simply acquire more authors, not less, and we
need to develop a metric that will work over time. The problem I faced
when citing policies that had thousands and thousands of substantial
revisions is a perfect example of this.

-- phoebe

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On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 1:08 PM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
> Copyright violations on the Internet are rampant. So what?

Another point about attribution which we need to be mindful of is the
proposed Orphan Works law in the US which is getting closer and closer
to passing: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s110-2913

I expect it to make attentive copyright holders far more aggressive.
We can expect to get perfunctory complaints about many of our valid
fair use images just as we already receive from trademark holders.

In particular we can expect copyright holders to become more
aggressive with respect to attribution because unattributed (or
incorrectly attributed) copies floating around on the Internet will
cause an effective loss (if only temporary) of copyright protection.

(The orphan works act as currently drafted also has other risks
outside of current topic of discussion, such as the prohibition
against injunctive relief and the pure monetary damages focus which
may wedge copyleft enforcement, at least for works claimed to be
orphaned)

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On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 10:13 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 12:52 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Why not assume that the appropriate amount of attribution for a
>> Wikipedia article is essentially the amount that it has now?
> [snip]
>
> This is basically what is proposed at
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GFDL_suggestions but there are a few
> differences such as:
>
> # Conventional named attribution be preserved in cases where it is
> easy and reasonable to do so.
>
> Consider, we copy an image from RandomFreeContentPhotoHost and stick
> it in a Wikipedia article without the author's knoweldge. Joe
> publisher takes just that image and uses it in his printed book, and
> captions the image "RandomImage (source: Wikipedia.org;
> http://.../randomimage.jpg)".
>
> This may well surprise and offend the author, and we'll have to deal
> with someone yelling at US saying they revoke the license, and yelling
> at the reusers "the license says you must provide attribution!", the
> mess here would be doubly compounded if in the meantime we'd deleted
> the image and made the publisher look like a liar.
>
> In cases where attribution can be directly provided, we should avoid
> the middle-man. This will match people's expectations.
>
> # that history requirement doesn't depend on you linking to a
> particular site, but to any that provides the history, which avoids
> making a special right for initial ISPs and webhosts
>
> Imagine: Wikipedia turns evil and the entire community moves as a
> whole to NotEvilPedia™. Does it make any sense that NotEvilPedia must
> forever direct everyone to the evil Wikipedia forever and always
> simply because Wikipedia was the initial webhost for the community?
>
> Of course not, the purpose of needing a history link is to provide
> the history information not to invent a new class of content ownership
> for ISPs. Anyone with a complete copy of the history should be able
> to fulfill the roll.

Dude, now I really want to join NotEvilPedia. But where to host it? Sealand?

Also, agreed with both of these things, though how you determine
whether someone has a full copy of the history or not seems a little
dicey. We should really provide better easily-downloaded metadata for
articles (such as initial creation date, etc). And I would say that in
the photo example the proper credit would be both to the author & to
Wikipedia as source: Randomimage. (Credit: Joe Blow. Source:
Wikipedia.org, http://...randomimage.jpg, licensed under GFDL 11.16,
etc.)

-- phoebe

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Michael Bimmler writes:

> Thomas, Mike, as much as I'm amused by this debate, can we drop this
> here? It's getting unproductive, really.

I confess I am amused too, which is why I indulge myself. It's a bit
as if I were to show up at a programming conference and say something
like "You know, that C++ stuff is very complicated -- it requires a
knowledge of object-oriented-programming principles, you know."

If I were really self-important, I'd repeat this C++ pronunciamento
two or three times, ideally in front of a large group.


--m





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2008/10/21 Mike Godwin <mgodwin@wikimedia.org>:
>
> Michael Bimmler writes:
>
>> Thomas, Mike, as much as I'm amused by this debate, can we drop this
>> here? It's getting unproductive, really.
>
> I confess I am amused too, which is why I indulge myself. It's a bit
> as if I were to show up at a programming conference and say something
> like "You know, that C++ stuff is very complicated -- it requires a
> knowledge of object-oriented-programming principles, you know."
>
> If I were really self-important, I'd repeat this C++ pronunciamento
> two or three times, ideally in front of a large group.

To be more precise, it's as if you showed up to a programming
conference and said that to someone who had just dismissed OOP
principles as unimportant.

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geni writes:

> Worse than that. Technically most EU countries should have identical
> moral rights clauses. Implementation of the clauses is inconsistent
> and in many cases there is a lack of caselaw (although the lawsuit
> over changing a bridge design failed).

There's a reason for the lack of caselaw, even though implementation
among Berne signatory countries is inconsistent -- it's that truly
problematic moral-rights problems don't come up very much. What's
more, even if our own follow-through on attribution requirements of
GFDL (or CC-BY-SA) is less than it might be, the thing to note is that
we're actively trying to maintain attribution, even though a massively
collaborative environment such as Wikpedia makes such an effort both
difficult and (arguably) less than meaningful. Most moral-rights
disputes arise in cases where someone is actively trying to *remove*
attribution or to *misattribute* a work. That's not normally our
problem.

> For the average wikipedian on the ground the issue is less one of what
> you can handle or find people to handle (I generally assume that the
> foundation can deal with pretty much any copyright issues should it
> have to)

It's nice to know somebody assumes that.



--Mike





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Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Hoi,
> I find it interesting to see how this thread is being weaved. If I read Erik
> correctly, he is asking us what appropriate attribution is. He is asking any
> and all observations. What I find is a thread about existing legalities.
>

You are not wholly accurate. There is discussion about laws
which refer to the *fact* of law, that it is impossible to rely
on some copyleft "wishes" (which aren't really provisions
in those jurisdictions, no matter how one might click ones
red shoes together at the heels), when there are more
strict moral rights in play in those jurisdictions. Personally
I find it entirely appropriate in terms of attribution, that we
don't present un-necessary problems to downstream users.

The downstream users have to deal with legal facts on the
ground.

It would certainly be an evil trifecta for us, to ignore certain
facts of morality. We shouldn't do it because we *want*
people to safely re-use our content. We shouldn't do it
because we respect the fact that there is a genuinely
good reason why attribution is *the right thing* to do.
And thirdly, we shouldn't do it, because generous
attribution is a genuine incentive and an argument
in favour of wikipedia, in comparison to many other
compendia, which only list the whole list of contributors,
without specifying to which articles in their work they
have added wordage. (EB Micropaedia being a case in
point).



> When we observe the current practice, you find that people attribute by
> referring to Wikipedia. This is an effective way of providing access to any
> and all the people who have contributed to what has been used. When you read
> the byzantine requirements under the different licenses, you have to be a
> lawyer to understand them properly and there is no tooling to help you
> define such things as "principal author" or the five most significant
> authors.
>
This is a nice fiction, but not true, if a downstream user, which
I think is the focus in ultimo, is going for a fixed published media.
Linking is good, if what you have is on the internets, but if not,
not so hot. You are not provided access, if you can't follow the
link.

> If all we can do is discuss how things are currently legal, then we are not
> looking for something that works practically. It is for practical reasons
> that I wonder about the number of trees that have to be felled to attribute.
> Certainly when you have a print of all the Wikipedia articles on the popes
> of Rome and all the Christian saints and martyrs, you have a long list of
> articles that may all need their own attribution. When you approach these
> articles as a single work, you do no justice to the individual article and
> its authors.
>

Now, this I find quite silly on several grounds. First you
mentioned linking to history, and now you shift ground
and talk about felling trees. If you are felling trees, you
can't link to the history, to save your argument.

One might quite more legitimately worry about the amount
of trees that have to be felled to include citations, references
etc. In short, this argument is very poor indeed.

Do not be blinded by the fact that moral rights are
recognized in law, from the fact, that they are recognized
as such, because of a strong ethical foundation. Slavery not
being nice is not just a fact of law, there are strands and roots
deepset into general philosophy and ethology.


> Really, why are we not talking about how this is to WORK for the people that
> will use our data.. Please remember that this is what we do it for.

I think this is a case where asking the doctor to heal themselves
is not totally amiss...


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen



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Gregory Maxwell writes:

> Another point about attribution which we need to be mindful of is the
> proposed Orphan Works law in the US which is getting closer and closer
> to passing: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?
> bill=s110-2913
>
> I expect it to make attentive copyright holders far more aggressive.
> We can expect to get perfunctory complaints about many of our valid
> fair use images just as we already receive from trademark holders.

I would be surprised if the Orphan Works Act led to copyright holders'
being more aggressive, especially since the institutional copyright
industry is already hyper-aggressive. (They oppose the Orphan Works
Act.) The thrust of the Act is to address cases in which copyright
holders are difficult or impossible to determine. Aggressive
copyright holders almost by definition fail to fall into that class.


--Mike






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Thomas Dalton writes:

> To be more precise, it's as if you showed up to a programming
> conference and said that to someone who had just dismissed OOP
> principles as unimportant.

When you say "to be more precise," can you say what you mean, precisely?

It doesn't seem "more precise" to imply that anyone has dismissed
moral rights as unimportant.

A more careful reading -- yes, I know it is unreasonable to expect
careful reading -- might lead to an understanding that the particular
problem set relating to moral-rights jurisprudence is not terribly
applicable in a context in which the free licenses in question strive
for attribution (rather than attempting to dodge attribution or
misattribute creative works). Similarly, greater care might lead one
not to make grand pronouncements either about the number or diversity
of lawyers required to address the moral-rights issue (especially if
one is not a lawyer and not an expert on the issue), or about the
qualifications of a particular lawyer about whose background one may
know next to nothing.

Just a suggestion. (And I encourage anyone who hears me making
pronouncements about object-oriented programming to take me down a
notch.)


--Mike





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Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> Robert Rohde wrote:
>> Let me make a radical suggestion. One that, for the moment, ignores
>> all those overbearing legal questions.
>>
>>

This is only radical in the fashion ("radical" is based on
the word "root"), that it is reasonable to root ones head
in the sand. That is the common metaphor for ignoring
questions of significant import.


>> Why not assume that the appropriate amount of attribution for a
>> Wikipedia article is essentially the amount that it has now?
>>

Why not assume the moon is made of green cheese? The
significant point is that wikipedia articles will not be offered
in the same form as they are now, for very much longer.
There will be an increasing number of folks who will think
of fixed forms to market wikipedia articles, where a simple
internet link will not be a practical solution.

>> When you look at a Wikipedia article there is no list of authors
>> (principal or otherwise). There is simply a link to "history", a
>> statement at the bottom of the page saying that the content is under
>> the GFDL, and a link to the GFDL. On the Wikipedia page itself, that
>> is essentially the full extent of the licensing and attribution.
>>
>> I assume that practically all Wikipedia contributors are comfortable
>> with recieving this very low level of attribution for Wikipedia
>> articles.
>>
Attribution for wikipedia articles offered only in the form
that they are on the wikimedia sites, perhaps.

Do not make the mistake of extrapolating from that into
fixed media.

>> So, by extension, perhaps the goal should be finding a way to codify
>> this scheme in a way that works both for us and for reusers. Namely,
>> making the requirements for redistribution of Wikipedia content to
>> simply be:
>>
>> 1) A link or reference to the article's history
>> 2) A statement acknowledging the free content license
>> 3) A link or reference to the text of that license
>>
>> That's very simple and practical. One can add some details regarding
>> new versions and modifications, but even there I think you accomplish
>> more by keeping it simple.
>>

This is completely false and misleading. You simply can not
practically link from a fixed media to the internets. You can
tell people what to type into the browser, which will bring
you the right history etc. Sure, technically that is one form
of compliance, but that is going the route of "small print"
stuff that one employs, when one is not too particular about
the ethics of what is doing. That does not work for people
who actually do the editing in chief of articles. This approach
would really give them the shaft.

>>
>> Now I suspect there are about three dozen reasons why defining
>> attribution as simply a link to the history page is legally impossible
>> and incompatible with the GFDL. But even so, doesn't it make some
>> sense to start with: How are Wikipedia articles being used? and work
>> backwards backwards to construct the licensing scheme that best
>> resembles actual practice while still being legally rigorous?
>> Wikipedia authors don't seem to want or expect prominent and overt
>> acknowledgements when writing articles, so why should our licensing
>> scheme require reusers to add more overt statements than even we
>> ourselves have?
>>
>>

I will let that statement stand by itself, and let intelligent
readers draw their own conclusions...


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen


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On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 1:31 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
<cimonavaro@gmail.com> wrote:
> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
>> Robert Rohde wrote:
<snip>
>>> So, by extension, perhaps the goal should be finding a way to codify
>>> this scheme in a way that works both for us and for reusers. Namely,
>>> making the requirements for redistribution of Wikipedia content to
>>> simply be:
>>>
>>> 1) A link or reference to the article's history
>>> 2) A statement acknowledging the free content license
>>> 3) A link or reference to the text of that license
>>>
>>> That's very simple and practical. One can add some details regarding
>>> new versions and modifications, but even there I think you accomplish
>>> more by keeping it simple.
>>>
>
> This is completely false and misleading. You simply can not
> practically link from a fixed media to the internets. You can
> tell people what to type into the browser, which will bring
> you the right history etc. Sure, technically that is one form
> of compliance, but that is going the route of "small print"
> stuff that one employs, when one is not too particular about
> the ethics of what is doing. That does not work for people
> who actually do the editing in chief of articles. This approach
> would really give them the shaft.
<snip>

I am saying that a printed URL address in dead tree media to a site
that contains the appropriate information would be fine by me.
Perhaps you believe that it is totally unreasonable to draw a
connection between printed material and the web, but as the world
becomes increasingly connected, I see no fundemental problem with
this. You are of course entitled to your opinion, but you seem to be
broadly generalizing that this approach would be unethical and unfair
to editors, and as an editor I'd have to firmly disagree with you.

Also, keep in mind that we are discussing how licensing and
attribution might work. Obviously, any attempt to faithfully apply
the GFDL as currently constructed will be more cumbersome. But we
can't possibly get a better GFDL in the future unless we are willing
to discuss what we might want from it.

-Robert Rohde

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Robert Rohde wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 1:31 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
> <cimonavaro@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
>>
>>> Robert Rohde wrote:
>>>
> <snip>
>
>>>> So, by extension, perhaps the goal should be finding a way to codify
>>>> this scheme in a way that works both for us and for reusers. Namely,
>>>> making the requirements for redistribution of Wikipedia content to
>>>> simply be:
>>>>
>>>> 1) A link or reference to the article's history
>>>> 2) A statement acknowledging the free content license
>>>> 3) A link or reference to the text of that license
>>>>
>>>> That's very simple and practical. One can add some details regarding
>>>> new versions and modifications, but even there I think you accomplish
>>>> more by keeping it simple.
>>>>
>>>>
>> This is completely false and misleading. You simply can not
>> practically link from a fixed media to the internets. You can
>> tell people what to type into the browser, which will bring
>> you the right history etc. Sure, technically that is one form
>> of compliance, but that is going the route of "small print"
>> stuff that one employs, when one is not too particular about
>> the ethics of what is doing. That does not work for people
>> who actually do the editing in chief of articles. This approach
>> would really give them the shaft.
>>
> <snip>
>
> I am saying that a printed URL address in dead tree media to a site
> that contains the appropriate information would be fine by me.
> Perhaps you believe that it is totally unreasonable to draw a
> connection between printed material and the web, but as the world
> becomes increasingly connected, I see no fundemental problem with
> this. You are of course entitled to your opinion, but you seem to be
> broadly generalizing that this approach would be unethical and unfair
> to editors, and as an editor I'd have to firmly disagree with you.
>
> Also, keep in mind that we are discussing how licensing and
> attribution might work. Obviously, any attempt to faithfully apply
> the GFDL as currently constructed will be more cumbersome. But we
> can't possibly get a better GFDL in the future unless we are willing
> to discuss what we might want from it.
>

I am happy to have intelligent people read what you
have written, and don't feel any need to add to that.

You are free to make personal allowances as an editor
which other editors might not be willing to do. That is
your personal choice. But that only speaks to you, not
to editors at large.

I won't discuss what I might want from the GFDL, purely
because I don't like blue sky fantasies. Wikipedia isn't
going to get permission from RMS to be pragmatic
about what to allow the texts attribution be. Funnily
enough RMS's criterions aren't even IMO founded in
sensible ethical anchors. But that is completely by the by.

I categorigally refuse to engage in that game. And to
underline it more emphatically, I would most strongly
oppose any move to give prominence to the freedomdefined
site in our negotiations with the relevant interest groups,
as being representative of wikimedias interests.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen



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Robert Rohde wrote:
> Let me make a radical suggestion. One that, for the moment, ignores
> all those overbearing legal questions.
>
> Why not assume that the appropriate amount of attribution for a
> Wikipedia article is essentially the amount that it has now?
>
> When you look at a Wikipedia article there is no list of authors
> (principal or otherwise). There is simply a link to "history", a
> statement at the bottom of the page saying that the content is under
> the GFDL, and a link to the GFDL. On the Wikipedia page itself, that
> is essentially the full extent of the licensing and attribution.
>
> I assume that practically all Wikipedia contributors are comfortable
> with recieving this very low level of attribution for Wikipedia
> articles.
>
I might add that the attribution requirement of the GFDL talks about
listing at least five principal authors, "unless they release you from
this requirement." A fairly straightforward argument can be made that
existing and accepted practice on Wikipedia, and for that matter on
nearly all wikis, amounts to releasing subsequent distributors from this
requirement. If the authors can make this implicit release, then you
have to look at whatever attribution is customary in a given context,
along with any moral rights issues.

Which is why I never get particularly worked up with people's concerns
about attribution. As Mike Godwin pointed out, we do seek to maintain
attribution in our own way, and most people are willing to accept and
work with that.

--Michael Snow


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On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 10:44 PM, Michael Snow <wikipedia@verizon.net> wrote:
> I might add that the attribution requirement of the GFDL talks about
> listing at least five principal authors, "unless they release you from
> this requirement." A fairly straightforward argument can be made that
> existing and accepted practice on Wikipedia, and for that matter on
> nearly all wikis, amounts to releasing subsequent distributors from this
> requirement. If the authors can make this implicit release, then you
> have to look at whatever attribution is customary in a given context,
> along with any moral rights issues.

Although no matter how well that argument holds for text written
directly into Wikipedia, Wikipedia has a non-trivial amount of freely
licensed text copied from elsewhere, and a large amount of images from
elsewhere.

So the "well they must have known because thats how we obviously do
it" clearly does not hold in many cases.

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Michael Snow wrote:
> Robert Rohde wrote:
>
>> Let me make a radical suggestion. One that, for the moment, ignores
>> all those overbearing legal questions.
>>
>> Why not assume that the appropriate amount of attribution for a
>> Wikipedia article is essentially the amount that it has now?
>>
>> When you look at a Wikipedia article there is no list of authors
>> (principal or otherwise). There is simply a link to "history", a
>> statement at the bottom of the page saying that the content is under
>> the GFDL, and a link to the GFDL. On the Wikipedia page itself, that
>> is essentially the full extent of the licensing and attribution.
>>
>> I assume that practically all Wikipedia contributors are comfortable
>> with recieving this very low level of attribution for Wikipedia
>> articles.
>>
>>
> I might add that the attribution requirement of the GFDL talks about
> listing at least five principal authors, "unless they release you from
> this requirement." A fairly straightforward argument can be made that
> existing and accepted practice on Wikipedia, and for that matter on
> nearly all wikis, amounts to releasing subsequent distributors from this
> requirement. If the authors can make this implicit release, then you
> have to look at whatever attribution is customary in a given context,
> along with any moral rights issues.
>
> Which is why I never get particularly worked up with people's concerns
> about attribution. As Mike Godwin pointed out, we do seek to maintain
> attribution in our own way, and most people are willing to accept and
> work with that.
>
> --Michael Snow
>
>
>

I think this is very close to precisely right. We do make a good
faith effort at expansive attribution, which is the important bit.

And we do it because it is right, not because it is required
by the GFDL. And as long as we do "the right thing" by our
contributors, it is accurate to say that any moral rights based
lawsuits while unfortunate, would both be perceived to be
a nuisance effort, and easily defensible in law (and really
it would serve no purpose to hash out how such cases should
be handled, suffice it to say that our moral and legal standing
would be firm).

It is is a point of insignificant import, that it is not quite true
that current practice that is accepted on wikipedia is to elide
attribution but for exceptional circumstances, such as may
apply to lost histories due to early disk crashes.

While for instance translations from other language wikipedias
currently only link to the original language article in somewhat
diverse form, in principle the concept behind this has been
that this is something which will be repaired in the future, once
we figure out how to properly attribute edits made in a different
language.

I cannot really thing of any other instances from which one might
make a case for it being "accepted practice" to consider editors
having released their edits without an expectation to a good
faith effort at crediting them for their work.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen


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On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 10:44 PM, Michael Snow <wikipedia@verizon.net>wrote:

> I might add that the attribution requirement of the GFDL talks about
> listing at least five principal authors, "unless they release you from
> this requirement." A fairly straightforward argument can be made that
> existing and accepted practice on Wikipedia, and for that matter on
> nearly all wikis, amounts to releasing subsequent distributors from this
> requirement.


For the title page, sure. But the basic practice on Wikipedia is to list
the username of every single edit in the page history.

As for online sources, I think there are a lot of people upset about the
practices of these "subsequent distributors", but for the most part it's
just not worth it to sue them. I suppose it'd be enlightening to send a
DMCA takedown notice to a few of the big names, but even that takes quite a
bit of effort, and for online sources it's fairly pointless. I might have
done it myself by now, except that I changed my username to the generic
"Anthony", in part because for a lot of the articles I've contributed to I
actually would prefer *not* to be associated as an author. Of course, I've
also largely stopped contributing.

For dead-tree distributors, this is mostly untested waters. Personally I
would be extremely upset if I made significant contributions (say two
paragraphs or more) to a Wikipedia article which was copied into a book, and
I was not attributed in the book. Printing a URL absolutely doesn't cut it,
in my opinion, when it comes to a printed book. Pheobe and company may have
gotten advice from Eben Moglen saying that this was A-OK, but quite frankly
I think he was both ethically and legally wrong. I don't think you can draw
any conclusions that this practice is an accepted one. There just aren't
that many dead-tree distributors doing this. As far as I know I haven't
made significant contributions to that book, though. So that's someone
else's fight to fight.

I do feel like I need to speak up here, though, because the suggestion that
I have waived my right to attribution is an absolutely false one.
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To Anthony and Jussi-ville,

Why do you want attribution of work you have done on Wikipedia
articles to be acknowledged more prominently in dead tree media than
it is online?

That's the sense I get from you when you say that referencing an
online publication of the history is not okay. If one looks at the
Wikipedia publication, in general one has to choose to seek out the
edit history and (in many cases) put effort into parsing through it
before they would even notice that you had contributed significantly
to the article. You seem to be suggesting that in the case of dead
tree media you have an expectation that attribution be made
clearer/easier to access than it is online. Is that a correct
understanding of your view point? And if so why?

Personally, it feels antithetical to the principles of free content
and frankly a bit unethical to demand that reusers give a more
prominent acknowledgment to contributers than one receives from the
primary publication, i.e. Wikipedia.

-Robert Rohde


On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 4:30 AM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 10:44 PM, Michael Snow <wikipedia@verizon.net>wrote:
>
>> I might add that the attribution requirement of the GFDL talks about
>> listing at least five principal authors, "unless they release you from
>> this requirement." A fairly straightforward argument can be made that
>> existing and accepted practice on Wikipedia, and for that matter on
>> nearly all wikis, amounts to releasing subsequent distributors from this
>> requirement.
>
>
> For the title page, sure. But the basic practice on Wikipedia is to list
> the username of every single edit in the page history.
>
> As for online sources, I think there are a lot of people upset about the
> practices of these "subsequent distributors", but for the most part it's
> just not worth it to sue them. I suppose it'd be enlightening to send a
> DMCA takedown notice to a few of the big names, but even that takes quite a
> bit of effort, and for online sources it's fairly pointless. I might have
> done it myself by now, except that I changed my username to the generic
> "Anthony", in part because for a lot of the articles I've contributed to I
> actually would prefer *not* to be associated as an author. Of course, I've
> also largely stopped contributing.
>
> For dead-tree distributors, this is mostly untested waters. Personally I
> would be extremely upset if I made significant contributions (say two
> paragraphs or more) to a Wikipedia article which was copied into a book, and
> I was not attributed in the book. Printing a URL absolutely doesn't cut it,
> in my opinion, when it comes to a printed book. Pheobe and company may have
> gotten advice from Eben Moglen saying that this was A-OK, but quite frankly
> I think he was both ethically and legally wrong. I don't think you can draw
> any conclusions that this practice is an accepted one. There just aren't
> that many dead-tree distributors doing this. As far as I know I haven't
> made significant contributions to that book, though. So that's someone
> else's fight to fight.
>
> I do feel like I need to speak up here, though, because the suggestion that
> I have waived my right to attribution is an absolutely false one.
> _______________________________________________
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> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

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On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 9:43 AM, Robert Rohde <rarohde@gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> Why do you want attribution of work you have done on Wikipedia
> articles to be acknowledged more prominently in dead tree media than
> it is online?
[snip]

I'm not stating my opinion on Anthony's position at this time, but I
do not think he is asking for additional attribution.

On Wikipedia attribution is "on the next page", it's just over on the
history tab. This is analogous to including attribution at the tail
of a dead-tree article, or perhaps in a separate authors index. It is
exactly analogous to providing attribution is a location which is
certainly not immediately accessible to the reader, and which is
potentially completely inaccessible. (For practical reasons it may
not be possible to provide an equivalent, as dead-tree is not an
equivalent medium, but this fact doesn't make a URL the equivalent or
even the nearest fit)

I expect this discrepancy to become more obvious as tools like
automatic text attribution make it easier to ignore vandalism,
copy-editing, and removed changes in the article history. Addressing
this concern well is important even if your position isn't the same as
Anthony's.

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Robert Rohde wrote:
> To Anthony and Jussi-ville,
>
> Why do you want attribution of work you have done on Wikipedia
> articles to be acknowledged more prominently in dead tree media than
> it is online?
>
> That's the sense I get from you when you say that referencing an
> online publication of the history is not okay.

Surprisingly enough, I cannot speak for Anthony. For myself
I would in fact probably like to soften my stance a mite. A
link to a web page, if it is specific enough (such as the
history of the article), may well be a - not ideal / but will do
in a pinch - solution.

What has weakened my opposition to this approach, is that
I thought of software distributions which only provide
source on demand, and are considered compliant with
a non-expansive interpretation of open source.

Perhaps there is a good argument for not trying to be more
catholic than the pope.

> If one looks at the
> Wikipedia publication, in general one has to choose to seek out the
> edit history and (in many cases) put effort into parsing through it
> before they would even notice that you had contributed significantly
> to the article. You seem to be suggesting that in the case of dead
> tree media you have an expectation that attribution be made
> clearer/easier to access than it is online. Is that a correct
> understanding of your view point? And if so why?
>

Having said what I did above, there is one valid argument
that would favor providing clearer attribution in a fixed
medium publication of wikipedia content, than is on the
editable site. That is that ostensibly (yes, I do realize it
is in part a fiction) wikipedia is "merely" a work in progress,
and not to be used as a finished reference work. A scratch pad
as it was originally termed, for Nupedia.

But though I find this argument very persuasive, it is clearly
an ethical/editorial one, and not a legal one.
> Personally, it feels antithetical to the principles of free content
> and frankly a bit unethical to demand that reusers give a more
> prominent acknowledgment to contributers than one receives from the
> primary publication, i.e. Wikipedia.
>

Well, like I said, that is assuming wikipedia is a publication
rather than a website for the collaborative editing of
content that can be used by others for fashioning finished
publications.

Do remember that wikipedia relies on the distinction of not
being a publisher, for that legal protection under that
clause that I forget the number of... 230 or something
of some statute or law or another.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen



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On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 10:26 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
<cimonavaro@gmail.com> wrote:
> For myself
> I would in fact probably like to soften my stance a mite. A
> link to a web page, if it is specific enough (such as the
> history of the article), may well be a - not ideal / but will do
> in a pinch - solution.
>
> What has weakened my opposition to this approach, is that
> I thought of software distributions which only provide
> source on demand, and are considered compliant with
> a non-expansive interpretation of open source.

Thats my perspective for history information, as well as access to the
preferred form for editing, they are 'source code', I'd even drawn the
same parallel to software.

GPLv3 even relaxes the requirement for distributors to provide future
access to source in some cases (verbatim reproductions; though I'd
expect different rules in a free content license). A parallel
structure, along with really strong and permissive excerpting rules,
would create great justice in a future free content license.

I also hold the same view for attribution, *but only* in cases where
the most correct attribution is either too complex for reasonable
reproduction in some media (sometimes true for Wikipedia text), or not
easily available (always true for Wikipedia text as things stand
today).

A good practice, perhaps one worth codifying in a future free content
license, might be to be make it clear that the URL is not the author
with an attribution like: "Multiple Authors
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/somearticle)". This method makes it
clear that the complete attribution was omitted for brevity, and not
as a claim that "Wikipedia" wrote the article (an outrageous claim in
some cases, especially for works which originated in other compatibly
licensed locations).

For something like the reproduction of a isolated common photograph
with a single author, a failure to directly make available the name of
the author would be surprising and inconsistant with common practice
as well as unnecessary. So it shouldn't be done there. (Nor should it
be done for the frequent case of Wikipedia articles with single
effective authors, but we currently have no way of easily identifying
them and I do not think it's reasonable to place that burden on the
reusers - I think this is a burden that should be shifted somewhat
towards authors⋯ If you don not make your attribution clear, don't
expect other people to name you.).
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Probably you should focus more on whats according to present law than
what someone wants to believe they can do. It is interesting to see what
the Norwegian law says on this matter instead of trying to fight against
the law.

Åndsverksloven § 3. Opphavsmannen har krav på å bli navngitt slik som
god skikk tilsier, så vel på eksemplar av åndsverket som når det gjøres
tilgjengelig for almenheten.

"The creator of the work has a right to be attributed according to good
practice, as well on each copy of the work as when it is made available
for the general public."

Later it says
Sin rett efter første og annet ledd kan opphavsmannen ikke fraskrive
seg, med mindre den bruk av verket som det gjelder, er avgrenset efter
art og omfang.

"The rights after first and second paragraphs can the author not
release, unless the work in question is limited in nature and scope."

Proper attribution i Norwegian law can be said to be covered in a
reference to the correct page on Wikipedia. To attribute Wikipedia as
such are probably not completely correct, even if it is done customary
in newspapers in Norway. It is although the common thing to do - it has
become according to good practice, and it is done likewise on other
similar publications. A legal alternate is to credit the principal
authors or some publication that has the same article.

The law says you should be attributed on each copy of the work, still if
the copy is limited in nature and scope you can drop the attribution.
Now, is a printed copy of a single article from Wikipedia limited in
such a way? My guess is that it is and a reference to Wikipedia is
sufficient. On a printed copy of the whole Wikipedia a reference to
Wikipedias crediting system is probably sufficient. That is, the printed
copy (the book) is limited to Wikipedia so the crediting system on
Wikipedia is used to solve the attribution for this "limited nature and
scope".

Its the necessity to identify a publication which creates some of the
problems, that is, pointing the reader to "Wikipedia". It would be an
option if for example FSF or CC had some kind of identifier for each
work licensed with their license. Then that could be used the same way
as an ISBN number. That would make it possible to credit authors and
identify the work through the number, for example "(Desperados, Emanuel;
''Norway'', GFDL 0123456789)". Note that this is an identifier for some
broker system, not an identification of the first publisher. It is not
necessary to attribute the publisher, it it only necessary to attribute
the author. Still something like "(Wikipedia/Norway)" is sufficient if
there is a description of how attribution works on Wikipedia, and again
"(Wikipedia)" is probably not sufficient.

If someone outside Wikipedia reuses an article from Wikipedia then they
probably has to credit the persons involved at that point, or give some
kind of pointer to the correct version on Wikipedia. Probably they
should describe what this kind of crediting means. They could choose to
make a history page of their own, but then that page should described
similarly.

Now if they don't want to credit Wikipedia, that is they don't want
Wikipedia to attribute the authors, then they has to attribute at least
the principal authors.

In a printed "The complete Wikipedia" i believe that an identifier that
says "rev 1234567890" on each article is a sufficient attribution if the
meaning of this is described somewhere easy to find, and it is described
what this means when it comes to attribution of authors.

What I would like to have, is a special page that generated a list of
probable principal authors, a list of major authors and a list of other
authors. If there could be a single list sorted on importance of
contributions it would be nice, as this opens for more judgment from the
reader. If principal authors can be detected they should go in the
footer on the article pages, but only if they choose to supply their
full name, because this is to important for a lot of persons. This has
become very visible in Norway as an old paper-based lexicon has taken up
the fight against Wikipedia. If someone does not provide their full name
(it is in the database but not used for the moment) it should be taken
as a grant to not use the name in the footer but only list their user
name on the special page.

Such a special page should be able to generate such lists for previous
versions, not only for the present version. Ie, The complete Wikipedia's
article for Norway (revision 1234567890) is identified as
"Special:Attribution/Norway,1234567890". Likewise
"Special:Attribution/Norway" is the present version. This should also be
linked in the footer together with any identified principal authors.
Note that those numbers are our internal revisions, not some kind of
ISBN-equivalent.

A full credit of an _article_ on Wikipedia would be
"Wikipedia/Norway/1234567890", a sufficient credit would be
"Wikipedia/Norway", and probably an insufficient one would be
"Wikipedia", given that there is a description of how the attribution
works on Wikipedia and given that the use of the article(s) are limited
in nature and scope.

I'm not sure how this works given the GFDL license, but it seems to be
within the legal boundaries for me. The overall solution is pretty much
as today but with an added focus on attribution of principal authors.

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On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 9:51 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 9:43 AM, Robert Rohde <rarohde@gmail.com> wrote:
> [snip]
> > Why do you want attribution of work you have done on Wikipedia
> > articles to be acknowledged more prominently in dead tree media than
> > it is online?
> [snip]
>
> I'm not stating my opinion on Anthony's position at this time, but I
> do not think he is asking for additional attribution.
>
> On Wikipedia attribution is "on the next page", it's just over on the
> history tab. This is analogous to including attribution at the tail
> of a dead-tree article, or perhaps in a separate authors index. It is
> exactly analogous to providing attribution is a location which is
> certainly not immediately accessible to the reader, and which is
> potentially completely inaccessible. (For practical reasons it may
> not be possible to provide an equivalent, as dead-tree is not an
> equivalent medium, but this fact doesn't make a URL the equivalent or
> even the nearest fit)
>

Well, first of all, I never said that linking is perfectly fine with me.
Depending on how the link is handled, I have various degrees of
disappointment. Ideally, I think online media should directly provide a
list of authors. Linking to someone else's copy of a list of authors would
be next best (assuming the link remains valid and provides the list of
authors at the time of the copy). Linking to the Wikipedia history page is
significantly worse, but right about where I'd draw the line ethically.
Linking to the Wikipedia article itself is over that line.

Printing a URL which someone can use to get the list of authors if they can
manage to get a computer, get internet access, type in, etc., is not at all
acceptable, for the reasons given by Gregory above. It's also not
accessible because URLs go dead, and they go dead much faster than paper
disintegrates. I don't think Wikipedia will be around 20 years from now,
but printed copies of Wikipedia probably will be. A mirror which relies on
a link to provide attribution takes the risk that the link will go down, and
when that happens they have the responsibility to provide a new link or to
provide the attribution directly. Dead-tree publishers aren't going to
recall all the books they've printed when a url goes down.

I'd be willing to set a threshold on who gets direct attribution. I haven't
thought about it enough to say for sure, but somewhere around 50 words is
probably an acceptable threshold. That's not all that much dead-tree space
to deal with. Worst case scenario, if everyone wrote exactly 50 words and
had a two-word-long-attribution, we're talking about around 4% overhead. Of
course, the tools aren't widespread to calculate that sort of thing, if
they're available at all. But if that's what the rules say, then I'm sure
they will be developed. And in the mean time, publishers can choose to
print all names instead of calculating which names to include.

Anthony
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On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 4:30 AM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 10:44 PM, Michael Snow <wikipedia@verizon.net>wrote:
>
>> I might add that the attribution requirement of the GFDL talks about
>> listing at least five principal authors, "unless they release you from
>> this requirement." A fairly straightforward argument can be made that
>> existing and accepted practice on Wikipedia, and for that matter on
>> nearly all wikis, amounts to releasing subsequent distributors from this
>> requirement.
>
>
> For the title page, sure. But the basic practice on Wikipedia is to list
> the username of every single edit in the page history.
>
> As for online sources, I think there are a lot of people upset about the
> practices of these "subsequent distributors", but for the most part it's
> just not worth it to sue them. I suppose it'd be enlightening to send a
> DMCA takedown notice to a few of the big names, but even that takes quite a
> bit of effort, and for online sources it's fairly pointless. I might have
> done it myself by now, except that I changed my username to the generic
> "Anthony", in part because for a lot of the articles I've contributed to I
> actually would prefer *not* to be associated as an author. Of course, I've
> also largely stopped contributing.
>
> For dead-tree distributors, this is mostly untested waters. Personally I
> would be extremely upset if I made significant contributions (say two
> paragraphs or more) to a Wikipedia article which was copied into a book, and
> I was not attributed in the book. Printing a URL absolutely doesn't cut it,
> in my opinion, when it comes to a printed book. Pheobe and company may have
> gotten advice from Eben Moglen saying that this was A-OK, but quite frankly
> I think he was both ethically and legally wrong. I don't think you can draw
> any conclusions that this practice is an accepted one.

Just a few points:
1) there *isn't* really an accepted practice, which is why we're
having this discussion. There just haven't been that many test cases
-- there have been very few attempts to reprint Wikipedia content in
large scale in print, rather than on another website where standard
practice has been to link back to Wikipedia.

2) For HWW, I think everything we used from Wikipedia would qualify
under fair use anyway -- we quoted few pages verbatim or at length, so
hopefully we're good for you and anyone else who disagrees on that
score.

3) For our book particularly -- if you can't get to a computer and
type in a URL, it's a pretty useless piece of dead-tree anyway, since
it's all about how to use Wikipedia online :P Of course that won't be
true for article collection reprints.

4) When you say "significant contributions", that's the sticking
point for me. What's significant? A first draft of an article that
people then change completely? One paragraph? Two? What about adding
paragraphs that are subsequently removed and are not present at the
time of quoting the article? Adding some references? Any major edit?
Repeated vandalism reversal over time? It seems to me that this is
such a loose concept that might be interpreted so differently by
various editors that the reprinter is pretty much stuck with an
all-or-nothing approach -- either you print all the editors in tiny
type, which actually obscures the major contributors to an article, or
you use some sort of metric or value judgment in picking out
significant contributors, which seems like will always be wrong in
some way.

-- phoebe

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On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 11:48 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki@gmail.com>wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 4:30 AM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
> > For dead-tree distributors, this is mostly untested waters. Personally I
> > would be extremely upset if I made significant contributions (say two
> > paragraphs or more) to a Wikipedia article which was copied into a book,
> and
> > I was not attributed in the book. Printing a URL absolutely doesn't cut
> it,
> > in my opinion, when it comes to a printed book. Pheobe and company may
> have
> > gotten advice from Eben Moglen saying that this was A-OK, but quite
> frankly
> > I think he was both ethically and legally wrong. I don't think you can
> draw
> > any conclusions that this practice is an accepted one.
>
> Just a few points:
> 1) there *isn't* really an accepted practice, which is why we're
> having this discussion.
>

Absolutely agreed.

2) For HWW, I think everything we used from Wikipedia would qualify
> under fair use anyway -- we quoted few pages verbatim or at length, so
> hopefully we're good for you and anyone else who disagrees on that
> score.
>

Well, my one statement was qualified with an "if", "if I made significant
contributions". My other statement was regarding Eben Moglen, who you said
"felt that as long as our metric was consistent and we linked back to the
history on Wikipedia, citing all the authors of every article in our print
version was not necessary". Maybe he made this comment knowing that the
amount quoted was insignificant, in which case I withdraw my statement.

But at the same time, "fair use" may be an excuse for copying, but it isn't
an excuse for lack of attribution.

3) For our book particularly -- if you can't get to a computer and
> type in a URL, it's a pretty useless piece of dead-tree anyway, since
> it's all about how to use Wikipedia online :P Of course that won't be
> true for article collection reprints.
>

I don't buy that as an excuse.

4) When you say "significant contributions", that's the sticking
> point for me. What's significant? A first draft of an article that
> people then change completely? One paragraph? Two?


That's a grey area obviously, but I suggested maybe two paragraphs.


> What about adding
> paragraphs that are subsequently removed and are not present at the
> time of quoting the article? Adding some references? Any major edit?
> Repeated vandalism reversal over time?


Anything removed shouldn't count. Adding references probably lacks the
creative expression necessary for copyright protection.


> It seems to me that this is
> such a loose concept that might be interpreted so differently by
> various editors that the reprinter is pretty much stuck with an
> all-or-nothing approach -- either you print all the editors in tiny
> type, which actually obscures the major contributors to an article, or
> you use some sort of metric or value judgment in picking out
> significant contributors, which seems like will always be wrong in
> some way.


Life (especially with regard to the law and ethics) works that way some
times. But just because it's difficult for you to determine exactly where
the line is, that doesn't excuse you from clearly crossing it.

Try applying your excuse that it's all or nothing to a few other situations
and you'll see how ridiculous it is. Should I drink myself into oblivion
because I can't quantify exactly how many beers is too many?
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On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 9:10 AM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 11:48 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki@gmail.com>wrote:

<snip, including some sarcasm that was lost on the replier. Moving on!>

>> It seems to me that this is
>> such a loose concept that might be interpreted so differently by
>> various editors that the reprinter is pretty much stuck with an
>> all-or-nothing approach -- either you print all the editors in tiny
>> type, which actually obscures the major contributors to an article, or
>> you use some sort of metric or value judgment in picking out
>> significant contributors, which seems like will always be wrong in
>> some way.
>
>
> Life (especially with regard to the law and ethics) works that way some
> times. But just because it's difficult for you to determine exactly where
> the line is, that doesn't excuse you from clearly crossing it.

Actually... my all or nothing phrasing seems to have muddied the
waters. It seems to me the options are, when reprinting a Wikipedia
article in a book:

1. cite everybody who ever touched the article
2. cite some of the people who touched the article
3. provide a link back to a comprehensive list of everyone who ever
touched the article, which also has the benefits of handy diffs so you
can see who added what, etc.

Option 1) has the advantage that there are no questions and no
judgment that need be applied to the list by the reprinters -- here's
all the authors, plain and simple. It has the disadvantages that it is
technically difficult to get (there's no clean way currently to get a
de-duped history dump for a particular article, hopefully this will
change in the future), difficult to work with (we're talking thousands
of names for big articles), and arguably obscures the major
contributors (check out one of the Wikitravel readers for a great
example of this -- in a history section with a long list of all
authors, a la Bertelsmann, "Mike" is cited, then the next name on the
list is "Mike_sucks." Hmm, I wonder who made more constructive
contributions?)

Option 2) has the advantage that you actually (hopefully) highlight
the primary contributors to a piece. It has the disadvantage that it's
incredibly difficult to figure out a metric for who the primary
contributors actually are, and then once you've done that technically
producing the list is also hard (to nearly impossible for an average
person without the ability to write history-mining scripts or go
through the whole thing by hand, if you use a value-laded judgment
like "x quantity of significant writing).

Option 3) has the advantage that it's simple, easy to apply
consistently and you don't have to worry about getting all the authors
listed -- it's already done for you. It's also much more practical for
short applications, e.g. reprinting an article in a magazine. It has
the disadvantage that according to some contributors (and perhaps, the
current license) it doesn't give full and proper attribution to their
work.

There may be other problems and advantages that I haven't thought of
yet. I'll leave other people to hash out the moral, ethical, and legal
advantages of each approach. But these are the practical
considerations faced by a reprinter of content. It's also important to
remember, I think, that if we are trying, in general, to make
reprinting and reuse not just possible but smooth and easy that adds a
consideration to the problem. For my part, I think we need to think
carefully about this problem and come up with a good solution for the
sake of free content distribution in general -- producing content that
can be reused is a fundamental part of Wikimedia's mission, so let's
do it right.

-- phoebe

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On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 8:37 AM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 9:51 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 9:43 AM, Robert Rohde <rarohde@gmail.com> wrote:
>> [snip]
>> > Why do you want attribution of work you have done on Wikipedia
>> > articles to be acknowledged more prominently in dead tree media than
>> > it is online?
>> [snip]
>>
>> I'm not stating my opinion on Anthony's position at this time, but I
>> do not think he is asking for additional attribution.
>>
>> On Wikipedia attribution is "on the next page", it's just over on the
>> history tab. This is analogous to including attribution at the tail
>> of a dead-tree article, or perhaps in a separate authors index. It is
>> exactly analogous to providing attribution is a location which is
>> certainly not immediately accessible to the reader, and which is
>> potentially completely inaccessible. (For practical reasons it may
>> not be possible to provide an equivalent, as dead-tree is not an
>> equivalent medium, but this fact doesn't make a URL the equivalent or
>> even the nearest fit)
>>
>
> Well, first of all, I never said that linking is perfectly fine with me.
> Depending on how the link is handled, I have various degrees of
> disappointment. Ideally, I think online media should directly provide a
> list of authors. Linking to someone else's copy of a list of authors would
> be next best (assuming the link remains valid and provides the list of
> authors at the time of the copy). Linking to the Wikipedia history page is
> significantly worse, but right about where I'd draw the line ethically.
> Linking to the Wikipedia article itself is over that line.
<snip>

As I suggested before, though less directly, unless Wikipedia directly
provides a quotable list of authors, I don't see any reason to expect
that other publishers should be prepared or required to create one.
They could copy the entire history, though many people acknowledge
that this goes over to the absurd for very long articles. Arguably
providing a list of "principal" authors is a technically solvable
problem for Wikipedia with appropriate tools, though as Phoebe notes
there are serious questions about how one defines significant
authorship given the fluid nature of wikitext and the different
varieties of editing Wikipedians do.

For the long articles:

"Multiple Authors. 'Earth' retrieved from Wikipedia on Jan 1, 2008.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth"

is about the level of acknowledgment that I would expect to see currently.

There are several problems with that. I would say there should also
be (at least) a revision id, a reference to the history page, and
statements about free content. But unless we can agree on the
structure we want to see in acknowledgments from reusers, then I don't
expect them to do much better than the above.

Part of agreeing on a structure for reusers could be agreeing on a
framework for who should be listed as authors, but until we have a
standardized way of providing that information in a useful form, I am
mostly surprised when publishers bother to list any authors with a
specific acknowledgment at all. The more direct point is that the
free content movement should not be expecting other people to solve
the authorship problem if we ourselves are unable to do so.

So I welcome the discussion of where to draw lines on authorship, if
you really think it is possible to do so. However, I personally am
rather skeptical about the ability to have a practical set of rules
for defining an author list in a way that would actually satisfy the
majority of people in the majority of cases.

-Robert Rohde

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2008/10/21 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro@gmail.com>:

> And to
> underline it more emphatically, I would most strongly
> oppose any move to give prominence to the freedomdefined
> site in our negotiations with the relevant interest groups,
> as being representative of wikimedias interests.


Which, as I noted, is fine for you personally, but claiming it's not
representative of Wikimedia's interests is simply factually incorrect,
given the board resolution stating that it's precisely that.


- d.

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2008/10/22 Michael Snow <wikipedia@verizon.net>:

> I might add that the attribution requirement of the GFDL talks about
> listing at least five principal authors, "unless they release you from
> this requirement." A fairly straightforward argument can be made that
> existing and accepted practice on Wikipedia, and for that matter on
> nearly all wikis, amounts to releasing subsequent distributors from this
> requirement. If the authors can make this implicit release, then you
> have to look at whatever attribution is customary in a given context,
> along with any moral rights issues.


In any case, this discussion has already reached the stage of counting
angels dancing on the heads of pins and assuming that law is as
brittle as computer code. It just ain't so.

The threat model we're taking about is: what does a reuser say if
taken to court by an insane and obsessive author? Would a judge
consider the reuser's actions reasonable, given accepted behaviour
regarding said licence to date? That sort of squishy, arguable, grey
area thing.


- d.

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Sorry, you place the board of WM Foundation whereby they are responsible
for all users on Wikimedias projects.

John

David Gerard skrev:
> 2008/10/21 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro@gmail.com>:
>
>> And to
>> underline it more emphatically, I would most strongly
>> oppose any move to give prominence to the freedomdefined
>> site in our negotiations with the relevant interest groups,
>> as being representative of wikimedias interests.
>
>
> Which, as I noted, is fine for you personally, but claiming it's not
> representative of Wikimedia's interests is simply factually incorrect,
> given the board resolution stating that it's precisely that.
>
>
> - d.
>
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> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
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>

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2008/10/22 John at Darkstar <vacuum@jeb.no>:

> Sorry, you place the board of WM Foundation whereby they are responsible
> for all users on Wikimedias projects.


That's like saying a community can decide to repudiate the GFDL on
their project. They can, but it won't be a Wikimedia project much
longer.

[*] apart from Wikinews of course.


- d.

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No, its not the same. WM Foundation represent the community in some
aspects, but they are not responsible for the users in the community.

John

David Gerard skrev:
> 2008/10/22 John at Darkstar <vacuum@jeb.no>:
>
>> Sorry, you place the board of WM Foundation whereby they are responsible
>> for all users on Wikimedias projects.
>
>
> That's like saying a community can decide to repudiate the GFDL on
> their project. They can, but it won't be a Wikimedia project much
> longer.
>
> [*] apart from Wikinews of course.
>
>
> - d.
>
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> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

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2008/10/22 John at Darkstar <vacuum@jeb.no>:

> No, its not the same. WM Foundation represent the community in some
> aspects, but they are not responsible for the users in the community.


Then I'm completely unclear on what you mean, and/or you're completely
unclear on what I mean.


- d.

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Anthony wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 11:48 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki@gmail.com>wrote
>> It seems to me that this is
>> such a loose concept that might be interpreted so differently by
>> various editors that the reprinter is pretty much stuck with an
>> all-or-nothing approach -- either you print all the editors in tiny
>> type, which actually obscures the major contributors to an article, or
>> you use some sort of metric or value judgment in picking out
>> significant contributors, which seems like will always be wrong in
>> some way.
>>
> Life (especially with regard to the law and ethics) works that way some
> times. But just because it's difficult for you to determine exactly where
> the line is, that doesn't excuse you from clearly crossing it.
>
>
That's a self-contradictory statement. If you can't determine exactly
where the line is there is nothing clear about having crossed it.

Ec

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phoebe ayers wrote:
> 1. cite everybody who ever touched the article
> 2. cite some of the people who touched the article
> 3. provide a link back to a comprehensive list of everyone who ever
> touched the article, which also has the benefits of handy diffs so you
> can see who added what, etc.
>
...
> There may be other problems and advantages that I haven't thought of
> yet. I'll leave other people to hash out the moral, ethical, and legal
> advantages of each approach. But these are the practical
> considerations faced by a reprinter of content. It's also important to
> remember, I think, that if we are trying, in general, to make
> reprinting and reuse not just possible but smooth and easy that adds a
> consideration to the problem. For my part, I think we need to think
> carefully about this problem and come up with a good solution for the
> sake of free content distribution in general -- producing content that
> can be reused is a fundamental part of Wikimedia's mission, so let's
> do it right.
It all comes down to the risk tolerance of the person doing the
printing. I would be satisfied with including a printed link to the
relevant Wikipedia history page. This would satisfy what I believe to be
my ethical responsibilities in the matter.

When you bring it down to basics you arrive at the core issue, producing
re-usable content. On the way there we get diverted by trying to have
the language just right, but each elaboration of language brings new
vulnerabilities to the fundamental principle. People seem to read laws
in a way that puts them at maximum disadvantage. In an attempt to abide
by the literal word of the law (which includes private rules) they
imagine circumstances that can only remind us of the boys in the George
Carlin skit trying to befuddle the aging priest with hypothetical sins.
We tie ourselves in knots trying to find legal countermeasures to
aspects of the law whose interpretation is tenuous at best.

Maybe it just takes a plain language statement of what we believe.

Ec

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David Gerard wrote:
> 2008/10/22 Michael Snow <wikipedia@verizon.net>:
>
>> I might add that the attribution requirement of the GFDL talks about
>> listing at least five principal authors, "unless they release you from
>> this requirement." A fairly straightforward argument can be made that
>> existing and accepted practice on Wikipedia, and for that matter on
>> nearly all wikis, amounts to releasing subsequent distributors from this
>> requirement. If the authors can make this implicit release, then you
>> have to look at whatever attribution is customary in a given context,
>> along with any moral rights issues.
>>
> In any case, this discussion has already reached the stage of counting
> angels dancing on the heads of pins and assuming that law is as
> brittle as computer code. It just ain't so.
>
> The threat model we're taking about is: what does a reuser say if
> taken to court by an insane and obsessive author? Would a judge
> consider the reuser's actions reasonable, given accepted behaviour
> regarding said licence to date? That sort of squishy, arguable, grey
> area thing.

There is no inoculation to prevent insanity and obsession. Whatever
model is chosen can provide opportunities for the litigious. Thus if we
go with the five principal authors, what's to prevent number six from
arguing that he should be in the top five.

In the general case I think that any reuser who exercises a modicum of
good faith and due diligence will likely be safe Accepted behaviour
will also be influenced by past practice including the chronic failure
of rights owners (not WMF) to protect their own rights

Ec

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On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 12:46 AM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge@telus.net> wrote:

> Anthony wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 11:48 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki@gmail.com
> >wrote
> >> It seems to me that this is
> >> such a loose concept that might be interpreted so differently by
> >> various editors that the reprinter is pretty much stuck with an
> >> all-or-nothing approach -- either you print all the editors in tiny
> >> type, which actually obscures the major contributors to an article, or
> >> you use some sort of metric or value judgment in picking out
> >> significant contributors, which seems like will always be wrong in
> >> some way.
> >>
> > Life (especially with regard to the law and ethics) works that way some
> > times. But just because it's difficult for you to determine exactly
> where
> > the line is, that doesn't excuse you from clearly crossing it.
> >
> >
> That's a self-contradictory statement. If you can't determine exactly
> where the line is there is nothing clear about having crossed it.


Sure there is. There's clearly right, there's clearly wrong, and then
there's a grey area in-between. You know the line is in the grey area, but
you're not sure exactly where.
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On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 2:39 AM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge@telus.net> wrote:

> David Gerard wrote:
> > 2008/10/22 Michael Snow <wikipedia@verizon.net>:
> >
> >> I might add that the attribution requirement of the GFDL talks about
> >> listing at least five principal authors, "unless they release you from
> >> this requirement." A fairly straightforward argument can be made that
> >> existing and accepted practice on Wikipedia, and for that matter on
> >> nearly all wikis, amounts to releasing subsequent distributors from this
> >> requirement. If the authors can make this implicit release, then you
> >> have to look at whatever attribution is customary in a given context,
> >> along with any moral rights issues.
> >>
> > In any case, this discussion has already reached the stage of counting
> > angels dancing on the heads of pins and assuming that law is as
> > brittle as computer code. It just ain't so.
> >
> > The threat model we're taking about is: what does a reuser say if
> > taken to court by an insane and obsessive author? Would a judge
> > consider the reuser's actions reasonable, given accepted behaviour
> > regarding said licence to date? That sort of squishy, arguable, grey
> > area thing.
>
> There is no inoculation to prevent insanity and obsession. Whatever
> model is chosen can provide opportunities for the litigious. Thus if we
> go with the five principal authors, what's to prevent number six from
> arguing that he should be in the top five.
>

> In the general case I think that any reuser who exercises a modicum of
> good faith and due diligence will likely be safe Accepted behaviour
> will also be influenced by past practice including the chronic failure
> of rights owners (not WMF) to protect their own rights


Going with "the five principal authors" is a terrible idea both from the
standpoint of avoiding litigation and from the standpoint of protecting the
right to attribution. Of course, the GFDL doesn't mention "the five
principal authors", it mentions "five of the principal authors", which may
seem like a small difference in English language, but it represents an
enormous difference in terms of meaning. Of course, this phrasing is even
worse from the standpoint of protecting the right to attribution, because it
means essentially that no one writing an article with six principal authors
has a right to attribution. But really, setting a limit to the number of
principal authors is meaningless anyway, because *anyone can modify the text
without permission*, so even if you work your ass off and produce a 10,000
word text, all a reuser has to do is take 5 other 10,001 word texts, append
it to the end, and now you get no attribution at all.

Of course, the phrase "five of the principal authors" only occurs in the
GFDL when talking about the title page. This whole section should probably
be eliminated, because it offers no protection to authors and only invites
litigation - maybe it could be turned into a strong suggestion.
Fortunately, there is at least an argument that all authors need to be
included in the section entitled History. Of course, there's still the
problem, which is fairly specific to wikis, of how to define "all authors".
I'd say here that the most expansive view of this would be all logged-in
authors who have contributed more than a de minimus amount of copyrightable
expression to the final end-product. That's a real-life definition, which
maximizes the protection of the right to attribution, but perhaps invites
litigation. Even then I'm not so sure. I think most judges would handle a
borderline case of this nature and award nominal damages if any. Of course,
the drop-off-the-cliff clause of the GFDL that any violation of it results
in an immediate revocation of the license needs to be removed.

Maybe that definition is too expansive for Wikipedia, but I'm not going to
say this for sure until I see some hard numbers on it. What is the ratio of
characters of attribution to characters of text if we include the names of
any logged-in non-reverted authors?

Only attributing "the five principal authors" is utterly unacceptable. Only
attributing "five of the principal authors" is utterly unacceptable. Any
attribution clause which doesn't ensure the attribution of *all* significant
contributors, is unacceptable. Within that framework I think there are a
lot of reasonable solutions.

Anthony
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On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 1:58 PM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
> has a right to attribution. But really, setting a limit to the number of
> principal authors is meaningless anyway, because *anyone can modify the text
> without permission*, so even if you work your ass off and produce a 10,000
> word text, all a reuser has to do is take 5 other 10,001 word texts, append
> it to the end, and now you get no attribution at all.
> ...
> Only attributing "the five principal authors" is utterly unacceptable. Only
> attributing "five of the principal authors" is utterly unacceptable. Any
> attribution clause which doesn't ensure the attribution of *all* significant
> contributors, is unacceptable. Within that framework I think there are a
> lot of reasonable solutions.

I was reading this thread (more or less) carefully and I was wondering
how it is possible that the direction of the discussion was toward
attribution only five persons for the whole Wikipedia (or to some part
of it, no matter). So, thanks for mentioning this.

I just may imagine an ironic smile of one my friend, a copyright
lawyer from Serbia, with the question: Would it pass at the court? :)
At least in Serbia, it would be treated as a typical example of trying
to make a fraud based on a weird interpretation of a license (or
whichever legal document) or "false contracts" (something in the
sense: "See, I killed him because we signed a contract that I may kill
him!").

However, I really think that we would come into a dead end if we
insist that every ~300 pages book has to print 100 (or 1000) more
pages of contributors. It is not a questionable issue, it is just a
matter of time: it is, maybe, true even today, it could be no true for
the next 5 years, but it will become our reality for sure.

So, some way for solving this problem has to be find. I mentioned in
my first post of this thread that some kind of "hard copy links", like
web links to the history of the page on Wikipedia, may be used instead
of writing all names inside of the book. Maybe it should be defined
that if the list of authors is longer than 10% of the book size, for
the rest of them, book has to refer to the (mentioned) bibliography.

And this is something which license has to solve. After solving that
issue inside of the license, we would have to convince continental
legal systems that such kind of solution is reasonable.

And, of course, I am sure that others have some other ideas how to
address this problem.

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On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:

> However, I really think that we would come into a dead end if we
> insist that every ~300 pages book has to print 100 (or 1000) more
> pages of contributors. It is not a questionable issue, it is just a
> matter of time: it is, maybe, true even today, it could be no true for
> the next 5 years, but it will become our reality for sure.
>

No, it really isn't possible. For a 300 page book to require 100 pages of
authors, each author could only have contributed 3 times as many characters
as their user name. Unless you're going to count vandals or
vandal-reverters as authors, it just isn't going to happen.

Anthony
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On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 3:35 PM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> However, I really think that we would come into a dead end if we
>> insist that every ~300 pages book has to print 100 (or 1000) more
>> pages of contributors. It is not a questionable issue, it is just a
>> matter of time: it is, maybe, true even today, it could be no true for
>> the next 5 years, but it will become our reality for sure.
>
> No, it really isn't possible. For a 300 page book to require 100 pages of
> authors, each author could only have contributed 3 times as many characters
> as their user name. Unless you're going to count vandals or
> vandal-reverters as authors, it just isn't going to happen.

Imagine that someone is making a 300 pages book about countries in the
world, based on Wikipedia articles. All basic Wikipedia articles about
countries have (~200) have, of course, much more than 300 pages. It
may have even 2000 pages. But, someone wants to use Wikipedia articles
to make a shorter book about the issue. Author of the book would use,
probably, introductions, as well as some other parts of the articles.
So, the author is not able even to try to count who contributed to the
introduction, but he has to count on article as a whole.

If I counted well, article about France has between 8.000 and 9.000
edits up to this moment. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that
this article will have 100 distinctive and significant authors -- if
not now -- then in 5 or 10 years.

I am reading now a B5 format book with ~40x70=2800 characters per page.

One name has, let's say, 15 characters (btw, I am sure that we will
demand listing the names if they are available, not just user names;
as I said before, some kind of user boxes may be used for that). 100
names would consume 1500 characters (let's say, 1400, a half of the
page). 200 articles about countries with 100 distinctive names per
article means that the list will be 100 pages long. Even 50 is a lot
(if we assume that not all articles about countries would have such
number of contributors, like article about France would have).

And, numbers will just be raising.

Of course, we may tell to such authors to make a research for every
single page and to find which contributions are still inside of the
article and which are not. So, instead of working on the matter,
author would have to analyze contributions for more than year (I am
not sure that I am able to make analysis of the article about France
in one working day; even if I assume a number of [existing and
non-existing] tools for that).

It is, simply, not reasonable; as well as it is not toward our goal to
spread free knowledge.

However, I really agree with you that all significant contributors
should be attributed.

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On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 4:29 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:

> Of course, we may tell to such authors to make a research for every
> single page and to find which contributions are still inside of the
> article and which are not. So, instead of working on the matter,
> author would have to analyze contributions for more than year (I am
> not sure that I am able to make analysis of the article about France
> in one working day; even if I assume a number of [existing and
> non-existing] tools for that).
>
> It is, simply, not reasonable; as well as it is not toward our goal to
> spread free knowledge.
>
> However, I really agree with you that all significant contributors
> should be attributed.

Although it would not solve the problem for your hypothetical writer,
I think for the general case it would be good for us to _provide_ this
information with the article - either on the article page, or on the
history page, or maybe somewhere else (but I would prefer the first,
or if that doesn't work, the second). The information could be created
automatically from the history file, and a kind of bot could slowly go
over the articles to update it, giving each user's contribution to a
page a number, stored in the database. When a page (or history page)
is then shown, all users with either more than X contribution, or more
than Y% of the total contribution, or among the Z (5) largest
contributors would be shown (with a quick-and-dirty version of the
algorithm to get a 'maximum' contribution for those who contributed to
the page after the last time the information was updated). It might
not be that much use to your writer, who still would have 200 lists of
10 or 20 names to deal with (still, 4000 names, many of them
duplicates is much more manageable than 20.000 of them), but for more
reasonable cases where whole pages or large portions of pages are
used, it could give a good indication of which names to include and
not to include.


--
André Engels, andreengels@gmail.com
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On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 6:57 PM, Andre Engels <andreengels@gmail.com> wrote:
> Although it would not solve the problem for your hypothetical writer,
> I think for the general case it would be good for us to _provide_ this
> information with the article - either on the article page, or on the
> history page, or maybe somewhere else (but I would prefer the first,
> or if that doesn't work, the second). The information could be created
> automatically from the history file, and a kind of bot could slowly go
> over the articles to update it, giving each user's contribution to a
> page a number, stored in the database. When a page (or history page)
> is then shown, all users with either more than X contribution, or more
> than Y% of the total contribution, or among the Z (5) largest
> contributors would be shown (with a quick-and-dirty version of the
> algorithm to get a 'maximum' contribution for those who contributed to
> the page after the last time the information was updated). It might
> not be that much use to your writer, who still would have 200 lists of
> 10 or 20 names to deal with (still, 4000 names, many of them
> duplicates is much more manageable than 20.000 of them), but for more
> reasonable cases where whole pages or large portions of pages are
> used, it could give a good indication of which names to include and
> not to include.

Yes, it would be good to have such tool as the first step. It would be
useful to have it even during this discussion to get a figure about
what do we demand from authors who would write books based on
Wikipedia.

So, as I hope that you are interested in making that 0:-) may you give
numbers for, let's say, countries [1] of the world and species Felidae
[2].

And, of course, we need lists of contributors:
1. Every contributor [let's say, without bots, while it may be
disputable, too] with an account and with immediately not reverted
edits. -- as the largest group of authors.
2-n. Other ideas which you mentioned.

It would be, also, good to have an approximation of the sizes of the
books based on full article size (without templates and images).

[1] - Let's say, this list lists them inside fo the table:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_outlying_territories_by_area
[2] - This template is good enough:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Felidae_nav

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On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:15 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:
> And, of course, we need lists of contributors:
> 1. Every contributor [.let's say, without bots, while it may be
> disputable, too] with an account and with immediately not reverted
> edits. -- as the largest group of authors.

"with immediately not reverted edits" -> with more than immediately
not reverted edits

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On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:45 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:15 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:
>> And, of course, we need lists of contributors:
>> 1. Every contributor [.let's say, without bots, while it may be
>> disputable, too] with an account and with immediately not reverted
>> edits. -- as the largest group of authors.
>
> "with immediately not reverted edits" -> with more than immediately
> not reverted edits

Ah, I realized now that the first construction was good :)

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On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:

> If I counted well, article about France has between 8.000 and 9.000
> edits up to this moment. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that
> this article will have 100 distinctive and significant authors -- if
> not now -- then in 5 or 10 years.
>
> I am reading now a B5 format book with ~40x70=2800 characters per page.
>
> One name has, let's say, 15 characters (btw, I am sure that we will
> demand listing the names if they are available, not just user names;
> as I said before, some kind of user boxes may be used for that). 100
> names would consume 1500 characters (let's say, 1400, a half of the
> page).


Half of a page for the list of authors of France. Now, I just checked, and
a printed copy of the article on France takes up about 25 pages. So
attribution takes up about 2% overhead, if indeed there are 100 authors like
you say.


> 200 articles about countries with 100 distinctive names per
> article means that the list will be 100 pages long.


200 articles the size of [[France]], which would be a 5000 page book. I
take it this is going to be split into volumes.

I'm sorry, your numbers are pulled too wildly from the air to be useful. A
300 page book about 200 countries? You're better off rewriting everything
"ab initio" than copying from Wikipedia for that. The work to cull down the
information into that small of a format is going to far outweigh the savings
from plagiarizing the content anyway.
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2008/10/23 Ray Saintonge <saintonge@telus.net>:
> David Gerard wrote:

>> The threat model we're taking about is: what does a reuser say if
>> taken to court by an insane and obsessive author? Would a judge
>> consider the reuser's actions reasonable, given accepted behaviour
>> regarding said licence to date? That sort of squishy, arguable, grey
>> area thing.

> There is no inoculation to prevent insanity and obsession. Whatever
> model is chosen can provide opportunities for the litigious. Thus if we
> go with the five principal authors, what's to prevent number six from
> arguing that he should be in the top five.


Precisely - would the reuser's behaviour and demonstrable good faith
and actions in accordance with common practice be sufficient for the
judge to say "haha no" and throw the case out, possibly awarding costs
against the plaintiff? If "yes" then all is well.


- d.

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On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> If I counted well, article about France has between 8.000 and 9.000
>> edits up to this moment. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that
>> this article will have 100 distinctive and significant authors -- if
>> not now -- then in 5 or 10 years.
>>
>> I am reading now a B5 format book with ~40x70=2800 characters per page.
>>
>> One name has, let's say, 15 characters (btw, I am sure that we will
>> demand listing the names if they are available, not just user names;
>> as I said before, some kind of user boxes may be used for that). 100
>> names would consume 1500 characters (let's say, 1400, a half of the
>> page).
>
>
> Half of a page for the list of authors of France. Now, I just checked, and
> a printed copy of the article on France takes up about 25 pages. So
> attribution takes up about 2% overhead, if indeed there are 100 authors like
> you say.

And *I* just checked that, and there are in fact 4077 authors (2100 IP
addresses) for [[France]] on en:wp currently, according to
http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl. This whole argument
is off by an order of magnitude if you assume that only 1 in 4 authors
is significant. And how do you tell precisely which of these 4000
authors is, in fact, significant?

-- phoebe

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On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 3:37 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> If I counted well, article about France has between 8.000 and 9.000
>>> edits up to this moment. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that
>>> this article will have 100 distinctive and significant authors -- if
>>> not now -- then in 5 or 10 years.
>>>
>>> I am reading now a B5 format book with ~40x70=2800 characters per page.
>>>
>>> One name has, let's say, 15 characters (btw, I am sure that we will
>>> demand listing the names if they are available, not just user names;
>>> as I said before, some kind of user boxes may be used for that). 100
>>> names would consume 1500 characters (let's say, 1400, a half of the
>>> page).
>>
>>
>> Half of a page for the list of authors of France. Now, I just checked, and
>> a printed copy of the article on France takes up about 25 pages. So
>> attribution takes up about 2% overhead, if indeed there are 100 authors like
>> you say.
>
> And *I* just checked that, and there are in fact 4077 authors (2100 IP
> addresses) for [[France]] on en:wp currently, according to
> http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl. This whole argument
> is off by an order of magnitude if you assume that only 1 in 4 authors
> is significant. And how do you tell precisely which of these 4000
> authors is, in fact, significant?

To follow up, that's 2.5 pages of non-duplicated names, when you run
them together in 10pt font.
-- phoebe

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On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 4:06 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 3:37 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> If I counted well, article about France has between 8.000 and 9.000
>>>> edits up to this moment. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that
>>>> this article will have 100 distinctive and significant authors -- if
>>>> not now -- then in 5 or 10 years.
>>>>
>>>> I am reading now a B5 format book with ~40x70=2800 characters per page.
>>>>
>>>> One name has, let's say, 15 characters (btw, I am sure that we will
>>>> demand listing the names if they are available, not just user names;
>>>> as I said before, some kind of user boxes may be used for that). 100
>>>> names would consume 1500 characters (let's say, 1400, a half of the
>>>> page).
>>>
>>>
>>> Half of a page for the list of authors of France. Now, I just checked, and
>>> a printed copy of the article on France takes up about 25 pages. So
>>> attribution takes up about 2% overhead, if indeed there are 100 authors like
>>> you say.
>>
>> And *I* just checked that, and there are in fact 4077 authors (2100 IP
>> addresses) for [[France]] on en:wp currently, according to
>> http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl. This whole argument
>> is off by an order of magnitude if you assume that only 1 in 4 authors
>> is significant. And how do you tell precisely which of these 4000
>> authors is, in fact, significant?
>
> To follow up, that's 2.5 pages of non-duplicated names, when you run
> them together in 10pt font.
> -- phoebe

Whoops! I made a mistake. The 2.5 pages is only the first 1000 authors
(I got the list from
http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl, again). So the
whole list of authors would be between 9-10 pages for the 25-page
article.

Pity the person who wants to reprint [[George W. Bush]] from en:wp...
it has 13228 authors (6366 IP addresses!) Sure, most of them are
vandalism, but I haven't seen any tool to pull out significant
revisions. Does anyone know of such a tool or script?

--phoebe

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On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 6:37 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> If I counted well, article about France has between 8.000 and 9.000
> >> edits up to this moment. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that
> >> this article will have 100 distinctive and significant authors -- if
> >> not now -- then in 5 or 10 years.
> >>
> >> I am reading now a B5 format book with ~40x70=2800 characters per page.
> >>
> >> One name has, let's say, 15 characters (btw, I am sure that we will
> >> demand listing the names if they are available, not just user names;
> >> as I said before, some kind of user boxes may be used for that). 100
> >> names would consume 1500 characters (let's say, 1400, a half of the
> >> page).
> >
> >
> > Half of a page for the list of authors of France. Now, I just checked,
> and
> > a printed copy of the article on France takes up about 25 pages. So
> > attribution takes up about 2% overhead, if indeed there are 100 authors
> like
> > you say.
>
> And *I* just checked that, and there are in fact 4077 authors (2100 IP
> addresses) for [[France]] on en:wp currently, according to
> http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl. This whole argument
> is off by an order of magnitude if you assume that only 1 in 4 authors
> is significant.


Seems like a poor assumption, considering more than half of the authors are
essentially anonymous. I'd bet that less than 250 of those authors are
significant.


> And how do you tell precisely which of these 4000
> authors is, in fact, significant?


Precisely? You'd have to go through each edit one by one.

Anthony
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On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:15 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, it would be good to have such tool as the first step. It would be
> useful to have it even during this discussion to get a figure about
> what do we demand from authors who would write books based on
> Wikipedia.
>
> So, as I hope that you are interested in making that 0:-) may you give
> numbers for, let's say, countries [1] of the world and species Felidae
> [2].

I have already made one once (my goal being to compare a few different
algorithms to see which one most corresponds to people's ideas of who
actually is the author), but it seems to have gotten lost in a
computer crash or something like that.

> And, of course, we need lists of contributors:
> 1. Every contributor [.let's say, without bots, while it may be
> disputable, too] with an account and with immediately not reverted
> edits. -- as the largest group of authors.
> 2-n. Other ideas which you mentioned.

Regarding the bots, my idea would be to exclude not by being a bot,
but by only looking at the actual text and images on the page. Much
bot work would then be excluded because changing interwiki or changing
the target of an internal link would not be counted.


--
André Engels, andreengels@gmail.com
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David Gerard wrote:
> 2008/10/23 Ray Saintonge:
>
>> David Gerard wrote:
>>
>>> The threat model we're taking about is: what does a reuser say if
>>> taken to court by an insane and obsessive author? Would a judge
>>> consider the reuser's actions reasonable, given accepted behaviour
>>> regarding said licence to date? That sort of squishy, arguable, grey
>>> area thing.
>>>
>> There is no inoculation to prevent insanity and obsession. Whatever
>> model is chosen can provide opportunities for the litigious. Thus if we
>> go with the five principal authors, what's to prevent number six from
>> arguing that he should be in the top five.
>>
> Precisely - would the reuser's behaviour and demonstrable good faith
> and actions in accordance with common practice be sufficient for the
> judge to say "haha no" and throw the case out, possibly awarding costs
> against the plaintiff? If "yes" then all is well.
That course of action presupposes that there is someone foolish enough
to take the thing to court in the first place, and that that person has
the resources to mount a credible case That credible case must include
an estimate of monetary damage.

I would love it if we could find such a fool. That would give us a
decision to wave under the noses of the paraniacs.

Ec

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On Thursday 23 October 2008 22:22:26 Anthony wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:
> > If I counted well, article about France has between 8.000 and 9.000
> > edits up to this moment. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that
> > this article will have 100 distinctive and significant authors -- if
> > not now -- then in 5 or 10 years.
> >
> > I am reading now a B5 format book with ~40x70=2800 characters per page.
> >
> > One name has, let's say, 15 characters (btw, I am sure that we will
> > demand listing the names if they are available, not just user names;
> > as I said before, some kind of user boxes may be used for that). 100
> > names would consume 1500 characters (let's say, 1400, a half of the
> > page).
>
> Half of a page for the list of authors of France. Now, I just checked, and
> a printed copy of the article on France takes up about 25 pages. So
> attribution takes up about 2% overhead, if indeed there are 100 authors
> like you say.
>
> > 200 articles about countries with 100 distinctive names per
> > article means that the list will be 100 pages long.
>
> 200 articles the size of [[France]], which would be a 5000 page book. I
> take it this is going to be split into volumes.
>
> I'm sorry, your numbers are pulled too wildly from the air to be useful. A
> 300 page book about 200 countries? You're better off rewriting everything
> "ab initio" than copying from Wikipedia for that. The work to cull down
> the information into that small of a format is going to far outweigh the
> savings from plagiarizing the content anyway.

He's referring to possibility to create a book that would have only the
introduction from each article, yet it would have to list all authors
(because you can't determine who was writing in the introduction and who
wasn't).

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On Friday 24 October 2008 01:19:20 phoebe ayers wrote:
> Pity the person who wants to reprint [[George W. Bush]] from en:wp...
> it has 13228 authors (6366 IP addresses!) Sure, most of them are
> vandalism, but I haven't seen any tool to pull out significant
> revisions. Does anyone know of such a tool or script?

On Wikitech-l we just had thread WikiTrust and authorship that discussed how
such a tool could be made. It is doable.

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On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 7:40 PM, Anthony <wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
>> And *I* just checked that, and there are in fact 4077 authors (2100 IP
>> addresses) for [[France]] on en:wp currently, according to
>> http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl. This whole argument
>> is off by an order of magnitude if you assume that only 1 in 4 authors
>> is significant.
>
>
> Seems like a poor assumption, considering more than half of the authors are
> essentially anonymous. I'd bet that less than 250 of those authors are
> significant.

I'd be surprised if it were even that many. Significant at some point
in time, yes, but for any particular version?

More importantly: You've picked a extreme corner case. Extreme corner
cases shouldn't be neglected completely, but they are bad places to
start policy discussions. The overwhelming majority of WP articles are
very few authors and even fairly few accounts who have edited them.

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On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 1:18 PM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk@eunet.yu> wrote:
> On Friday 24 October 2008 01:19:20 phoebe ayers wrote:
>> Pity the person who wants to reprint [[George W. Bush]] from en:wp...
>> it has 13228 authors (6366 IP addresses!) Sure, most of them are
>> vandalism, but I haven't seen any tool to pull out significant
>> revisions. Does anyone know of such a tool or script?
>
> On Wikitech-l we just had thread WikiTrust and authorship that discussed how
> such a tool could be made. It is doable.

For copyright attribution purposes? Show me.

Most greedy "auto-attributing" code I've seen has a tendency to
incorrectly attribute text in cases of simple re-ordering. It's
reasonable enough for measuring the text churn rate in articles, and
it may be good enough as a starting point for attribution, but if
their is no way to correct it when it's wrong then it probably can't
be used for that purpose. (Also, consider the case where half of an
article is copy and paste moved from another article.) Not that it
shouldn't be done, but I don't expect it could replace other past
proposal such as adding a second 'talk' page entitled "Credits".

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2008/10/24 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>:
> More importantly: You've picked a extreme corner case. Extreme corner
> cases shouldn't be neglected completely, but they are bad places to
> start policy discussions.

Please do take into account that the most popular and "interesting"
articles are also often the most likely to have a very large history,
though. So if you're compiling a collection that's not focused on
fringe subjects, you're likely to hit some articles that have very
many authors.
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 2:47 PM, Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 2008/10/24 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>:
>> More importantly: You've picked a extreme corner case. Extreme corner
>> cases shouldn't be neglected completely, but they are bad places to
>> start policy discussions.
>
> Please do take into account that the most popular and "interesting"
> articles are also often the most likely to have a very large history,
> though. So if you're compiling a collection that's not focused on
> fringe subjects, you're likely to hit some articles that have very
> many authors.

That is a fair point.

Though you could still find more representative article than GWB, even
among popular articles: at least at one point in time it had the
longest revision history of any article. It's also unusually long, and
atypically popular. It's probably a worst case, or close to it, in
terms of both possible and actual author count.

I don't know that "fringe" is really the right word either. There are
many subject areas which are not at all fringe, things which get whole
sections in libraries, where none of the articles are massively
multi-authored. So I'd probably reverse the sense of your point: If
you're working on anything on a popular media subject you'll certainly
come across some articles with long lists of authors.

The end result of both outlooks is, I suppose, the same but I think
the notion that most (or all) Wikipedia articles are massively
multi-authored is fairly widespread, and thats not a correct position
on an article by article basis most of the time (while it's quite true
for Wikipedia as a whole), so I like to take the opportunity to point
that out.

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On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 12:10 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 2:47 PM, Erik Moeller <erik@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> 2008/10/24 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>:
>>> More importantly: You've picked a extreme corner case. Extreme corner
>>> cases shouldn't be neglected completely, but they are bad places to
>>> start policy discussions.
>>
>> Please do take into account that the most popular and "interesting"
>> articles are also often the most likely to have a very large history,
>> though. So if you're compiling a collection that's not focused on
>> fringe subjects, you're likely to hit some articles that have very
>> many authors.
>
> That is a fair point.
>
> Though you could still find more representative article than GWB, even
> among popular articles: at least at one point in time it had the
> longest revision history of any article. It's also unusually long, and
> atypically popular. It's probably a worst case, or close to it, in
> terms of both possible and actual author count.

The original example was [[France]], with 4077 authors, which is still
9-10 pages of authors in 10pt type. And I don't think [[France]] is a
corner case for reprinting at all -- I would hope that it and its
fellow country articles would get included in any typical educational
compilation, atlas, children's encyclopedia, etc. based on Wikipedia
content that got put out.

Yes, [[George Bush]] is atypical, but the chances of someone wanting
to reprint it -- again, for any educational compilation with
biographies it seems like a fair choice -- seem pretty high. I think
any attribution rule that gets made has to take these cases as well as
"more typical" 10-author articles into account.

-- phoebe

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On Friday 24 October 2008 20:44:31 Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 1:18 PM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk@eunet.yu> wrote:
> > On Friday 24 October 2008 01:19:20 phoebe ayers wrote:
> >> Pity the person who wants to reprint [[George W. Bush]] from en:wp...
> >> it has 13228 authors (6366 IP addresses!) Sure, most of them are
> >> vandalism, but I haven't seen any tool to pull out significant
> >> revisions. Does anyone know of such a tool or script?
> >
> > On Wikitech-l we just had thread WikiTrust and authorship that discussed
> > how such a tool could be made. It is doable.
>
> For copyright attribution purposes? Show me.
>
> Most greedy "auto-attributing" code I've seen has a tendency to
> incorrectly attribute text in cases of simple re-ordering. It's

That isn't the biggest of our concerns: it is acceptable that we have
occasional false positive (person who didn't make significant edits is listed
among the authors) rather than false negative (person who did make
significant edits is not listed among the authors).

A suggestion by Tei is simple and promising: simply make a list of all the
words in each version, sort it alphabetically, and make a diff. Number of
changed lines is number of changed words. Edits that changed only a few words
are not significant for our purpose.

> be used for that purpose. (Also, consider the case where half of an
> article is copy and paste moved from another article.) Not that it

And even that could be mostly identifiable, though it would use a lot of
resources. Fortunately, it happens relatively rarely.

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On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 1:15 PM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk@eunet.yu> wrote:

> On Thursday 23 October 2008 22:22:26 Anthony wrote:
> > I'm sorry, your numbers are pulled too wildly from the air to be useful.
> A
> > 300 page book about 200 countries? You're better off rewriting
> everything
> > "ab initio" than copying from Wikipedia for that. The work to cull down
> > the information into that small of a format is going to far outweigh the
> > savings from plagiarizing the content anyway.
>
> He's referring to possibility to create a book that would have only the
> introduction from each article, yet it would have to list all authors
> (because you can't determine who was writing in the introduction and who
> wasn't).
>

Sometimes, sadly, it's not possible to get something for nothing. Is it
really part of the mission of the Foundation to allow publishers to create
such books? Would such a book even be worth more than the paper it's
printed on? It seems like one of those books I can get for $0.10 at the
thrift store, or $2.00 at the bargain bin section of a bookstore.

Then again, this whole thread seems to be leading to the conclusion that
Wikipedia and the right to attribution are incompatible. If that's truly
the case, the only fair thing to do is to start over from scratch under
terms that make it clear to all contributors that they have no right to
attribution. I honestly hope it isn't the case, and that I'm just missing
something.

Anthony
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