2009/1/11 Anthony <[email protected]>: > Granted, including full change histories is overkill
Thanks for acknowledging this. The GFDL (including prior versions) deals with author names for three different purposes: * author credit on the title page; * author copyright in the copyright notices; * author names for tracking modifications in the history section. For its author credit provisions, the GFDL includes specific permission to limit credit to the five principal authors. It is evident that this permission exists precisely to avoid an eternally inflating byline. Even then, it was clear that the covers of software manuals did not have infinite space. In the context of Wikipedia, authors do not receive credit alongside the page title as suggested for software manuals. Indeed, the closest there is in Wikipedia to the byline suggested in the GFDL is a link to the document history close to the page title. In the context of Wikipedia, authors are not named as part of the copyright notice. Wikipedia contributors have therefore interpreted the GFDL in the context of Wikipedia to allow for principal author attribution, with a link to the history as a reasonable alternative. There is a legitimate argument that, under a literal reading of the GFDL, any re-user _also_ has to include a full copy of the change history. The fact that author credit and change history are combined in the context of Wikipedia is irrelevant, as they are covered by separate provisions in the GFDL. Wikipedia contributors, including you above, widely agree that a requirement to include full change histories is "overkill" and would make re-use extremely cumbersome if not completely infeasible for heavily edited articles. No contributor has ever attempted to enforce this provision of the GFDL, and it seems quite likely that such an attempt would be rejected by a court on grounds of established guidelines, practices and expectations, including site-wide copyright terms such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights , which contributors agree to when making edits. The FSF agrees that this requirement is not in the spirit of the license when dealing with heavily edited documents, or at least it does not disagree, for it has not insisted on switching to a license which preserves this onerous change tracking requirement. Instead, for massive multi-author collaborations, it has given permission to use a license, CC-BY-SA, which only requires to indicate that modifications have been made (section 3.b), not to include a full record of such modifications. What we are left with, then, is to come up with attribution guidelines in the context of CC-BY-SA which are consistent with reasonable expectations and established practices for author credit per the GFDL. Given its clear reference to five principal authors for author credit, and given established practices to link to the page history (or even the article, as per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights ), the proposed attribution-by-URL in certain circumstances is a fully legally and ethically acceptable way to meet this need. This does not close the door to improvements to attribution guidelines and practices, including software changes, but such improvements are a separate issue from the license update itself. That update, as I've expressed before, is motivated by many factors, chiefly including compatibility and - in summary - the overall complexity of the license for re-users. The change history inclusion requirement is only one element of that complexity. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
