2009/3/20 geni <[email protected]>: > Your suggestion that wikipedia:copyrights has any baring on what > people have agreed to have done with their work simply doesn't hold > water.
Well, I'm glad that we've cleared up that CC-BY-SA and link-back credit aren't irreconcilable after all. Now we're apparently moving on to the new topic: Do site-wide terms of use matter when determining what a license means in practice? I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this argument: Of course a site-wide policy page linked to from every page has relevance when determining the terms of use/re-use. But even a literal and unreasonably narrow focus on the GFDL doesn't support rigorous author attribution: 1) Authors contributed acknowledging that they are licensing their edits under the GFDL; 2) The GFDL has an "at least five principal authors" requirement to give credit on the page title; 3) Wikipedia does not give credit on the page title; 4) The act of repeatedly contributing to Wikipedia under the GFDL can be argued to constitute the release from attribution which the GFDL allows for. The change tracking history section has nothing to do with attribution, as I've noted before. That's evident because the GFDL explicitly places reasonable limitations on the extent of author credit, to prevent the kinds of excessive bylines that we've been talking about. It's also evident because a GFDL document can be created without a page history while still giving author credit. In the context of a wiki, change histories were clearly not designed for purposes of author credit, as they are an incredibly annoying tool when you actually want to use them for this purpose. I'm not making this argument: I am saying that we have established, through historical practice, policy and debate, that crediting re-users via link or URL is a minimally acceptable baseline. What is and isn't acceptable is defined through more than the license. But the experience of contributing under a literal reading of the license alone doesn't support a claim to require stronger author attribution than what we're proposing, or even any author attribution at all. -- 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
