Re: Draft Blog Post on Attribution

Hi, Julee-

On 1/24/13 9:22 AM, Julee wrote:
> What if someone donates a one-off article from their website or blog? How
> do they get attribution? J

Great question.

TL;DR:
In the case of individual submissions, they are available from the 
submission logs (page history), which links to the contributor's profile 
page, from which they can link to their own blog or website.


Ramble:
We don't yet have a mechanism for noting small numbers of articles from 
external sources (like personal blogs). Ultimately, we would like to 
have a way for someone to note their own original source, and expose 
that a little more clearly, maybe in a sidebar.

But there is a usability and tracking cost to noting 3rd-party 
submissions; we don't want to overwhelm our users with too much 
meta-data about the content.

The chief reason we add 3rd-party source attribution to the page is that 
MediaWiki doesn't quite have the right source-tracking mechanism for 
us... ideally, for each submission, you could note a 3rd-party source 
document, and it would just be folded into the page history, and exposed 
when someone looks specifically for the attribution.

In fact, the main reason we started doing that is related to our 
license; MDN is only available under CC-BY-SA, which is different (and 
somewhat incompatible) to our site-wide license of CC-BY, so any 
material under that license needed to be called out. Once we started 
exposing that, we needed to be fair in how we treated all of our 
mass-submissions.

The list of those large-scale contributors is not static, nor dependent 
upon being a steward. If SitePoint or HTML Dog (both very good sites 
with a lot of good information) wanted to donate their material under 
the appropriate license, we would be happy to add them.

Regards-
-Doug

Received on Thursday, 24 January 2013 15:12:19 UTC