Re: Draft Blog Post on Attribution

Great post. But in the external attribution doc
(http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/Property:External_Attribution_Source),
we essentially telling folks here that the first four contributions won't
get attributed.

How should we tell editors to handle attribution before they come from an
canonical source?

Thanks.

Julee
----------------------------
julee@adobe.com
@adobejulee





-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org>
Organization: W3C
Date: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 1:53 PM
To: Chris Mills <cmills@w3.org>
Cc: Alex Komoroske <komoroske@google.com>, Eliot Graff
<Eliot.Graff@microsoft.com>, "public-webplatform@w3.org"
<public-webplatform@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Draft Blog Post on Attribution
Resent-From: <public-webplatform@w3.org>
Resent-Date: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 1:54 PM

>Hi, folks-
>
>Revised from feedback. Please let me know what you think:
>
>====
>
>==Credit Where Credit is Due: Content Attribution and Community==
>
>One of Web Platform Docs' core tenets is attribution. Attribution is as
>central to our mission as our founding principles, the 3 Pillars of
>Pragmatism, Inclusion, and Consensus. A recent minor snafu on our
>project resulted in some of the attribution being inadvertently removed;
>it was quickly replaced, but as part of the community discussion, we
>reemphasized the reasons for attribution, so we thought we'd share that
>here.
>
>So, just what is attribution? In our case, it is keeping track of who
>has contributed what, and sharing that information with our users. Web
>Platform Docs tracks attribution in two key ways: for content
>submissions by individuals, we log every edit by user name; for content
>contributed in bulk by organizations, or transferred over from another
>project like MDN, we explicitly set the original source.
>
>As an open collaborative project, attribution is critical from a legal,
>practical, and motivational perspective.
>
>On the legal side, our license is CC-BY, or Creative Commons
>Attribution. When users agree to the site license, we all agree to honor
>this. Failing to provide attribution, or removing past attribution, is a
>violation of the letter and spirit of this license. Note that there are
>a couple of exceptions to this:
>
>     documents that only state facts, and not interpretation, are not
>protected by copyright, and are thus outside the bounds of licensing .
>But this line can be gray... a compilation of facts is protected by
>copyright if the selection and arrangement of the material is original.
>Thus, if the contribution is based on another source, it's safer to
>provide and preserve attribution;
>     if all the original material from a particular source has been
>excised from the article, attribution for that source can optionally be
>removed; in practice, however, we are only using this to deliberately
>simplify the license the article is available under, e.g., if the
>original content was under CC-BY-SA (Attribution and Share Alike), we
>might remove all the old material so the replacement article can be
>reused under CC-BY. Even so, we may choose to keep the original
>attribution.
>
>On the practical side, attribution is used for fame and blame. Fame is
>praising the original contributor for their content, so people know who
>to credit and thank when they are reading, learning from, or reusing the
>content; it also helps us to think about who to ask to do future work.
>Blame is the flip-side of the same coin... it helps users (and reusers)
>to evaluate any possible bias on the part of the original contributor,
>as well as identifying vandals or trolls or just those whose work needs
>some improvement. We are a friendly community that aims to value any
>positive contribution, even that of those who are not quite hitting the
>mark; in such cases we will help contributors to improve. Provenance is
>a powerful and versatile tool.
>
>On the motivational side, we are lucky enough to have many primary bulk
>content contributors (such as Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Opera),
>and we hope to have large numbers of community contributors over time.
>Part of what motivates those contributors ­in addition to altruistic
>desires to contribute effectively to the web community, to aid others in
>learning, and to help the web to evolve­ is the aforementioned
>well-deserved fame... remove that attribution, and you undermine
>motivation, and the project suffers. Even people who don't want
>notoriety per se still have a sense of fairness, and may be discouraged
>if their contributions are not afforded equal treatment. This even
>affects people who are potential contributors... they see how
>contributions and attributions are handled, and that may affect their
>decision on whether they will start contributing.
>
>It's worth stating that attribution itself is not enough, of course; the
>creator of the content must be willing to contribute it to Web Platform
>Docs. Even in the case where licenses are compatible, for example a site
>that uses CC-BY, we want to extend the courtesy to that source of asking
>to use their material, so we maintain our reputation as a good citizen
>of the web documentation ecosystem. If the source material isn't
>available under a compatible license, naturally we would need to seek an
>agreement with the source to reuse it under our license.
>
>So, we encourage all of our contributors to always get permission and
>give credit when adding content, and only to remove existing attribution
>after community discussion. And we invite our users to feel free to
>reuse our content with confidence, knowing just where the material came
>from.
>

Received on Wednesday, 23 January 2013 23:10:50 UTC