Re: [Wikipedia-l] since we are on legal matters ...

From: "Anthere" <anthere6-/[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2003 1:19 PM
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] since we are on legal matters ...

<..snip..>

> So my question is : if none of us has the right to
> attribute to himself the credit of something written
> by someone else, what happen to all the major amount
> of text that is regularly clipped from one article,
> and moved to another page by someone who is not the
> original author of the text ? How does the licence
> handle that ? If the moved text contains legal issues,
> who is said liable, the lost original author, or the
> one who took the responsability of the move and who is
> consequently the owner of the edit?

This is a very good point. I have brought it up before. Really,
if you move text from one page (or from one language version
to another) as part of the move you should analyze the text
and determine who the five major contributors are and list them
in the summary box. How to determine who the five major 
contributors are?  Should it be via the amount of text each
contributes? Or the number of ideas?  How to count ideas?
Perhaps an alternative is to state where the page comes from
that way someone should be able to work back and find out
who made the contribution.

> And is commenting in the comment box that we are not
> the original author of the edit not enough to insure
> legal rights of authorship are respected ? What are we
> supposed to do when moving someone else work ? Is
> commenting enough ? Or not ? Should we leave a message
> in the talk page ?

I think that the comment box is there to provide this kind of
information. My opinion is that when moving or copying someone's
work that should be enough as long as the chain can be followed
either way from the page moved from to the page moved to. That
leaves an "audit trail" that cannot be altered or "hidden" in the talk
page or article page history. Putting it in the summary box makes
it transparent to other editors and potential downstream users.
Otherwise how could the author find where their work went and
how can the due dilligence researcher trace back the chain of
title to the original author?

Otherwise every work that comes from another page will have to
have a separate notice at the end of the article as has been done
in a few places. I would argue that this is not absolutely necessary
if the work is clearly commented on in the summary box on the
edit page.

Alex756