Encyc talk:License
Add topicThanks for all your support, and rest assured that I'll continue to make sharing with Wikipedia a top priority in our license decisions. Emperor 02:38, 18 July 2009 (UTC)
attribution
[edit source]How much attribution is required when porting an article from wikipedia, or a non-WMF wiki?
Please see Talk:Rosetta Stone#attribution
Early in the wikipedia's history the WMF paid for the opinion of lawyers who specialized inintellectual property rights. As I understand it, they concluded that a simple list of everyone who edited that article was all that was required.
The late wikialpha did not copy every page, but it had a bot every contributor could use, that would copy a wikipedia article into a special namespace. When it did that it would copy the text of the wikipedia article's revision history -- but with no links. However, that bot stopped working, about five years before wikialpha died from persistent Denial of Service attacks.
Another non-WMF wiki I tried copied every article, as of a certain date, had a note somewhere on their copy of that page, telling readers they could find the original wikipedia contributors on the corresponding wikipedia page. I suggested this was insufficient, as the attribution chain would be lost for every article where the original wikipedia article had been deleted.
I've ported many articles I started elsewhere. But, if other people made substantive edits to those articles I copy up until the last revision for which I am the sole author of its intellectual content. And then I try to remember to leave a #Provenance section on the talk page, saying no external attribution is required. I've also copied one or two dozen articles I thought were good that were deleted from the Citizendium, that were written by other people. I name those people on the talk page, when I do so.
Today I came across the Rosetta Stone article. And I copied the names of all the wikipedia contributors who edited it. I wrote a small awk program, to help me.
- I'd like to know what other people think. Is this a good idea? How often do people port wikipedia articles here, anyhow?
- In my opinion it is unnecessary to list editors who merely deleted stuff. It can mean giving attribution to vandals and SPAs.
- In my opinion it is unnecessary to offer attribution to editors whose edits don't pass de minimis. Edits that merely corrected errors to spelling, punctuation, capitalization, do not require attribution. Merely copying and pasting passages from one place to another in an article? I don't think this requires attribution either. Nor do I think substituting synonyms, or minor changes in word order, require attribution.
- In my opinion it is unnecessary to offer attribution to edits that add references. Adding references can be a lot of work. But the SCOTUS rejected the idea that hard work earned a copyright in Feist v Rural. It concluded simple lists of facts did not earn a copyright. IMO references are just simple lists of facts.
- In my opinion it is unnecessary to offer attribution to edits to an article's other metadata.
- In my opinion only edits that make a substantive change to an article's intellectual content, what it actual says, require attribution.
If other people are unconcerned about articles that were ported here, from the wikipedia, that don't list the wikipedia contributors, I won't worry about them. I plan to continue to list the wikipedia contributors when I port intellectual content from there to here, on the talk page. If other people think that attribution should be made in a different way, please let me know.
Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 08:00, 31 December 2025 (UTC)
- I think it's a good idea to list the previous contributors. It keeps with the spirit of wikis to acknowledge others. I like the way you've been doing it, and agree that Rosetta Stone maybe did the bare minimum.
- A link is probably enough to get a reader to the info they need, considering that Wikipedia has been stable for 25 years and is not going anywhere.
- For small articles, the export/import process preserves everything. But Rosetta stone is not small.
- I think expanding on small articles is probably a better route to go, because Google really hates duplicate content, and it takes too long to pare down very large articles. Most of the Rosetta Stone article could probably be blanked and no readers would miss it.
- That's some neat code you wrote. I probably would have used the api but for more than 500 contributions it gets unwieldy. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&titles=Rosetta_Stone&rvprop=user&format=json&rvlimit=500