Hi! > I agree this is misconception that a copyright license make any direct > change to data reliability. But attribution requirement does somewhat > indirectly have an impact on it, as it legally enforce traceability.
While true, I don't think it's of much practical use if traceability is what you are seriously interested in. Imagine Wikidata were CC-BY, so each piece of data you use from Wikidata now has to be marked as "coming from Wikidata.Org". What have you gained? Wikidata is huge, and this mark doesn't even tell you which item it is from, while being completely satisfactory legally. Even more useless it is for actually ensuring the data is correct or tracing its provenance to primary sources - you'd still have to find the item and check the references manually (or automatically, maybe) as you could do for CC0. CC-BY license would not have added very much on Wikidata side. All this is while, of course, even with CC0 nothing prevents you from importing Wikidata data in such a way that each piece of data still carries the mark "coming from Wikidata". While it is not a legal requirement with CC0, nothing in CC0 prevents that from happening. If your provenance needs are matched by this, there's nothing preventing you from doing this, and legal requirements of CC-BY do not improve it for you in any way - they just would force people that *do not* need to do it still do it. > That is I strongly disagree with the following assertion: "a license > that requires BY sucks so hard for data [because] attribution > requirements grow very quickly". To my mind it is equivalent to say that I think this assertion (that attribution requirements grow) is factually true. Each data piece from CC-BY data set needs to carry attribution. If your data needs require to combine several data sets, each of them needs to carry attribution. This attribution should be carried through all data processing pipelines. You may be OK with this growth, but as I just explained above, these requirements, while being onerous for people that don't need tracing each piece of data, are still unsatisfactory in many cases for those that do. So having CC-BY would be both onerous and useless. > we will throw away traceability because it is subjectively judged too > large a burden, without providing any start of evidence that it indeed > can't be managed, at least with Wikimedia current ressources. It's not Wikimedia that will be shouldering the burden, it's every user of Wikimedia data sets. -- Stas Malyshev smalys...@wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikidata mailing list Wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata
