[Foundation-l] Attribution survey and licensing next steps
The author attribution survey is now closed. We have 1017 complete responses. I've posted results of the attribution data in the following report: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:Attribution_Survey_Results.pdf I've posted the raw data of the attribution survey here: Respondents from English Wikipedia: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:Attsurvey-en.ods Respondents from German Wikipedia: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:Attsurvey-de.ods Respondents from miscellaneous languages and projects: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:Attsurvey-misc.ods (The survey was linked via the WikimediaNotifier bot, so we got quite a bit of nicely dispersed traffic.) As the report shows, and as I indicated in my prior e-mail, there is wide support for simple attribution models, and fairly strong and visible opposition to full author attribution (as well as complete absence of any attribution). Full author attribution is the second least popular option, at 32.82%. Many comments pointed out the tension between free content and attribution, such as: * "While the whole point of Wikipedia is to provide access to information freely and easily, a balance must be struck between recognising authors' contributions and the constraints on utilising the information." (User's preferred attribution model is link to the article.) * "Giving credit to all authors is ridiculous! I think the 'Wikipedia Community' is sufficient credit, this project is not about personal gratification, its about community collaboration." * "Full list of authors is terribly impractical." * "Including the full list of authors on a 'NOT online' resource would be a waste of resources, i.e. paper and ink, most of the time. But even for online use, who would read the version history? On the other hand, a link can't do much harm..." * "Establishing which editors to credit would cause enormous disagreement" * "Although requiring credit may sound noncontroversial, it actually is a pretty big can of worms in contexts of (a) editing wikipedia-sourced content into rather different things (for example, the way that some wikipedia articles grew out of 1911 Britannica articles), (b) what if the wikimedia foundation has some kind of meltdown and it is necessary to fork the project. Therefore my recommendation is to not think in terms of 'requirements' but suggested practices." Some users commented on the fact that Wikipedia is primarily written by people under pseudonyms, and that being suddenly visibly attributed would actually come as a surprise: * "If any version of credit-sharing citing editors is made policy, all editors should be given notice and allowed to change their monikers to their choice. In my case, I choose a moniker I liked when I thought the community would remain anonymous forever. If my contributions went into print or were used similarly I would like to use my actual name." Community credit proved a quite popular option, second only to a direct link to the article. Many people viewed it as a simple method to credit their contribution both online and offline. (At least one user suggested linking to detailed histories online, and crediting the community collectively offline.) A few users felt very strongly about always giving author credit. The strongest example I found: "I won't accept nothing less than what I chosed above, and I'm ready to leave my sysop status and other wmf-related roles if WMF will underestimate the meaning of GFDL to our projects. GFDL is what we would have chosen if asked 8 years ago, and is what we will stand up for." Some users also pointed out that our options were constrained by the requirements set forth in the GFDL. I'd love to see deeper analysis of the survey. I want to restate my original intent in running it: it's intended to be a feeler survey, to get a rough impression of what attribution models are widely considered acceptable by contributors to our projects, and which ones aren't. It served this purpose, and I have no intent in running additional surveys; we're on an aggressive timeline and have to move forward. It's also not intended to dictate a solution. My preliminary conclusion is that a simple, manageable attribution model, while causing some short-term disruption, will widely be considered not only acceptable, but preferable to complex attribution models, in support of our mission to disseminate free information. That being said, we probably still have to find a compromise, as well as language that appropriate deals with single-author multimedia contributions. I imagine that if we a) have a more prominent "list of authors / list of people who contributed to this revision" credit link on article pages; b) require that a link must be given, and that the preferred linking format is to the revision that is being copied, c) explicitly state in our attribution terms that for images, sounds and videos that aren't the result of extensive collaboration, credit must be given to the cr
Re: [Foundation-l] Academic article review
Pharos wrote: > My experience has been that, although certainly there is room for > expansion in scientific articles on specialty topics, Wikipedia > already has much better coverage of science than any print > encyclopedias, and most basic scientific subjects are treated fairly > completely. > > In contrast, Wikipedia's coverage of the humanities is often inferior > to the better print encyclopedias, and even with very basic subjects. > This is perhaps because the humanities lend themselves less to easy > summary, as there is usually a great variety of scholarly opinion on > basic subjects, unlike in science. > I don't think that's actually true. I think some areas, like evolution that you mentioned, are covered reasonably well, because there are enough Wikipedians who have an interest in and reasonably decent knowledge of the field to write a good article, and perhaps more importantly to fend off non-good contributions or edits to the article. In many areas of science this is not true. Oddly for a computer encyclopedia, our computer science articles are largely quite poor, except in "pop computing" types of articles like discussions of the Linux kernel or tech companies, which are decent. My personal area of professional expertise is artificial intelligence, and our articles on *that* subject are so bad that I'm embarrassed to try to introduce academics in my field to Wikipedia, since I know they'll probably look those articles up first and be turned off by the AI-kookiness that pervades them. I think if the humanities on average are worse than the sciences on average, it's mostly down to who we have as contributors versus don't. Of course, complex fields with a variety of scholarly opinion are harder to cover, but we cover them fairly well where we have a lot of dedicated contributors with detailed knowledge of all those opinions, and badly in areas where we don't, or where they're outnumbered by people who don't really know what they're talking about. -Mark ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
2009/3/6 Mike Linksvayer : > Yes. > > Mike (not the CC counsel but just spoke to her) And what was the exact wording of the question asked and what was the line of reasoning? -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] BBC News on BLP vandalism
2009/3/6 Cary Bass : >> That's interesting. We should try and get some more up-to-date >> stats on that - it would be useful for Wikimedia UK to have stats >> like that to throw around in negotiations, etc., to show how >> important we are. > > For that matter, just look at the contributors to this list alone :-) Yes, I've noticed a disproportionate number of Brits on this list, but I'm not sure foundation-l is representative of the community as a whole! ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] BBC News on BLP vandalism
Thomas Dalton wrote: > 2009/3/6 David Gerard : >> 2009/3/6 Thomas Dalton : >>> 2009/3/6 Gerard Meijssen : When the English Wikipedia is the only Wikipedia with BLP issues, I completely agree. >>> It's the only Wikipedia where BLP issues significantly affect >>> UK politicians, which are the subject of the article. >> >> Note that en:wp is more British than might be expected - >> according to a 2007 statistics run (by Greg Maxwell?), 50% of >> edits on en:wp are from the US and 25% are from the UK, even >> though the population ratio is 5:1. So UK residents edit 2.5x as >> much as US residents per capita. (I use this stat to correct UK >> journalists who think of Wikipedia as an American thing.) > > That's interesting. We should try and get some more up-to-date > stats on that - it would be useful for Wikimedia UK to have stats > like that to throw around in negotiations, etc., to show how > important we are. For that matter, just look at the contributors to this list alone :-) Cary ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Attribution survey, first results
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 4:19 AM, Thomas Dalton wrote: > 2009/3/4 Erik Moeller : >> 2009/3/3 Thomas Dalton : >>> Excellent. Getting some idea of community opinion is very important. >>> However, has anyone carried out my suggestion of consulting with the >>> CC lawyers? >> >> We've been in repeated conversations with CC about the possible >> attribution models. CC counsel has commented specifically that >> attribution-by-URL is a permissible attribution model that is >> consistent with the language and intent of CC-BY*. > > And that explicitly included offline reuse? If so, it looks like we're > ready to present a final proposal for the community to vote on. Even > with such a small sample size, those numbers are pretty conclusive. Yes. Mike (not the CC counsel but just spoke to her) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] BBC News on BLP vandalism
2009/3/6 David Gerard : > 2009/3/6 Thomas Dalton : >> 2009/3/6 Gerard Meijssen : > >>> When the English Wikipedia is the only Wikipedia with BLP issues, I >>> completely agree. > >> It's the only Wikipedia where BLP issues significantly affect UK >> politicians, which are the subject of the article. > > > Note that en:wp is more British than might be expected - according to > a 2007 statistics run (by Greg Maxwell?), 50% of edits on en:wp are > from the US and 25% are from the UK, even though the population ratio > is 5:1. So UK residents edit 2.5x as much as US residents per capita. > (I use this stat to correct UK journalists who think of Wikipedia as > an American thing.) That's interesting. We should try and get some more up-to-date stats on that - it would be useful for Wikimedia UK to have stats like that to throw around in negotiations, etc., to show how important we are. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] BBC News on BLP vandalism
2009/3/6 Thomas Dalton : > 2009/3/6 Gerard Meijssen : >> When the English Wikipedia is the only Wikipedia with BLP issues, I >> completely agree. > It's the only Wikipedia where BLP issues significantly affect UK > politicians, which are the subject of the article. Note that en:wp is more British than might be expected - according to a 2007 statistics run (by Greg Maxwell?), 50% of edits on en:wp are from the US and 25% are from the UK, even though the population ratio is 5:1. So UK residents edit 2.5x as much as US residents per capita. (I use this stat to correct UK journalists who think of Wikipedia as an American thing.) - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] BBC News on BLP vandalism
2009/3/6 Gerard Meijssen : > Hoi, > When the English Wikipedia is the only Wikipedia with BLP issues, I > completely agree. It's the only Wikipedia where BLP issues significantly affect UK politicians, which are the subject of the article. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] BBC News on BLP vandalism
Hoi, When the English Wikipedia is the only Wikipedia with BLP issues, I completely agree. Thanks, GerardM 2009/3/6 Thomas Dalton > 2009/3/6 David Gerard : > > Politicians get quite annoyed at this stuff. In my experience they > > mostly take a certain level of rubbish in their stride, but that > > doesn't mean we shouldn't work to improve the situation. > > > > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7921985.stm > > This article has now been posted by three different people to three > different mailing lists! The thread on wikien-l is the longest - I > suggest people discuss it there. > > ___ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] BBC News on BLP vandalism
2009/3/6 David Gerard : > Politicians get quite annoyed at this stuff. In my experience they > mostly take a certain level of rubbish in their stride, but that > doesn't mean we shouldn't work to improve the situation. > > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7921985.stm This article has now been posted by three different people to three different mailing lists! The thread on wikien-l is the longest - I suggest people discuss it there. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] BBC News on BLP vandalism
Politicians get quite annoyed at this stuff. In my experience they mostly take a certain level of rubbish in their stride, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't work to improve the situation. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7921985.stm - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] new project proposal wikipol
A Wikipol is an political program. It is a collection of wiki-pages that describe the actual stands of (webbased) political parties. The members of the e-party can develop and update these wiki-pages by amendments. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipol Jos Janssen ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
