> the archives are mostly useless as a knowledge base. This is false and you know it. Several of these questions *have* been debated here and with a few simple searches you could be well on your way to reading the discussions.
On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 7:35 AM, Tisza Gergő <[email protected]> wrote: > I found a few apparent legal problems while translating the license > update documents. Apologies if these have already been discussed to > death - I didn't follow earlier debates, and the archives are mostly > useless as a knowledge base. > > == revision not specified == > > The TOS says that reusers have to attribute the authors by linking to > the article. The problem is that such a link will actually point to a > different article after each edit (that is, the text and author list > will have been changed). If you find a text copied from Wikipedia on > the net, and there is no date information, it is very hard to find out > which version of the article it is (and thus who the authors are); if > the text is a derivative work from a Wikipedia article, then it's > practically impossible. > > Even if one argues that attributing bogus authors is not a problem as > long as the real ones all appear on the list, the author list can > change arbitrarily when the article is renamed or deleted and > rewritten. (Neither of which is apparent even if one looks at the page > history.) > > A few possible solutions to that: > - require reusers to permalink to the revision they used; change the > totally unhelpful error message that is shown when one follows a link > to a deleted version. (Probably not a very good idea as it messes up > caching. Also, bad usability: most of the people who click such a link > don't care about authors and original version one bit, and just want > to see/edit the current version of the article.) > - develop some syntax that shows the current version of the article, > but with a little message on top saying "you have followed a link from > a page reusing an older version of this article. You can see the most > recent version of the article; if you want to see the original click > here." (Maybe through some fragment id trick and javascript so it can > go through the cache?) We would still have to address links to deleted > versions. > - require reusers to give date/revision of the page along with the > url. Make some sort of search interface to find the text and/or author > set of an article based on that information. > > == CC version incompatibilities == > > Copyright policy now says "You may import any text from other sources > that is available under the CC-BY-SA license", which is incorrect for > to reasons. First, CC-BY-SA-1.0 (used, for example, by Wikitravel) is > not compatible with anything but itself (as they forgot to include the > ("or any later version" part). Second, different versions and > jurisdictions of CC are not quite compatible: for example if a wiki > has an article under CC-BY-SA-3.0-US, then uploading that to Wikipedia > (which will use CC-BY-SA-3.0 unported) is actually a breach of the > license. You could change the version or jurisdiction when you create > an adaptation (that is, you make changes significant enough to be > considered on of the authors), but not when you just redistribute the > work. (I doubt anything could be done about this beyond prodding CC to > release a saner version of their license soon.) > > == edit summary cannot contain links == > > The currently proposed editing policy says: > > "If you import text under the CC-BY-SA license, you must abide by the > terms of the license; specifically, you must, in a reasonable fashion, > credit the author(s). Where such credit is commonly given through page > histories (such as wiki-to-wiki copying), it is sufficient to give > attribution in the edit summary, which is recorded in the page > history, when importing the content." > > (which BTW should be rephrased more clearly - does it mean you can use > the edit summary if you import text from another wiki, but not when > you do it from any other web page?) > The problem is that the edit summary does not allow external links: > they will show as plain text, and it would be hard to argue that that > is reasonable to the medium. (This one is easy to fix: allow them, and > rely on rev_delete and capctha to stop edit summary spam instead.) > Furthermore, a long link does not necessarily fit into the summary > (which is 255 bytes long, and there are a number of web pages that use > ugly links with loads GET parameters that are longer than that), so > some sort of separate attribution log might be more reasonable. > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > [email protected] > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
