Re: Authorship credit

Obligatory disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, I just like to stay on top 
of the GFDL.

On 23 Mar 2004 at 21:12, troy01 wrote:
> According to the wikipedia explanation, In the
> reprint I should give credit to at least five of the
> original authors.

Yes, section 4B is the relevant one. You need to give this credit on the "Title Page", 
which is defined in the GFDL as:

>>> The "Title Page" means, for a printed book, the title page itself, plus such following
>>> pages as are needed to hold, legibly, the material this License requires to appear in
>>>  the title page.

Note that for your textbook, this will just be a *single* notice, so you need to credit five 
authors *in total*, not five authors *per article*. 

> The question is how to obtain
> information on the authorship of this and other
> wikipedia articles.

Three options, in order of complexity:

Option one: consider that Wikipedia editors have implicitly waived section 4B, by 
contributing to Wikipedia, given that Wikipedia (as you've noticed) doesn't comply with 
section 4B in the first place.

Option two: consider the editors of all the Wikipedia articles in question to be a single 
entity, called "Wikipedia contributors" of "Association of Wikipedians". Thus, on the Title 
Page you would somewhere have the text "adapted from material by Wikipedia 
contributors".

Option three: pick five users who've edited the articles in question, and credit them - by 
username if necessary, by real name if you can. So you have the text "adapted from 
material by Dysprosia, [..], and other Wikipedia contributors". Try to pick folks who've 
contributed the most to the articles in question, I'd say.

> as a matter of principle, I do not believe that the choice
> of which five authors should be mine to make.

Well, it is yours to make, according to the GFDL, as long as you select "principal 
authors". However, if you feel that the third option would be unfair, I encourage you to 
select the first or second options.

> Given that it is so hard to conform to the copyright procedures
> in the current situation, could I have leave to simply acknowledge the
> source of the article(s) in my reprints?

Well, we can't grant you leave, because we aren't the copyright owners: the copyright 
owners are random folks whose names we don't even know. However, I don't think the 
first two options sketched out above would be too onerous.

I've heard other suggesting that some form of legal insurance might be a sensible 
precaution in this situation.

-Martin "IANAL" Harper