RE: External Sources of Copy

Microsoft contributed a substantial amount of text to Web Platform Docs on the understanding that the attribution would at the page level.

You can take content word for word from the text that Microsoft and other contributors explicitly offered to WPD. (Harvesting new material from MSDN, MSN, HTML5 Rocks, etc. is another discussion)  The whole point of WPD is to have a community mash up content from multiple sources, keep it up to date, and add value with code samples, implementation reports, etc.  That will inevitably change the original content to the point where it would be burdensome on the community to track where each nugget of information came from.


Michael Champion
Sr. Program Manager
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation

________________________________
From: Sarah Forst <sarah.plowright@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2013 8:19 AM
To: public-webplatform@w3.org
Subject: External Sources of Copy

Hi -

Apologies for all of the questions, but I had some concerns about content reuse on the page I'm editing: http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/css/properties/clear which I signed up for last web platform wednesday but discovered someone else had already filled out the content.

A large portion of the content from: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/clear, and I think some of the other content is from Microsoft.

It's my understanding that since web platform is associated with the w3c, reusing content from there is okay, but it seems somewhat dubious to me to take content word for word from mozilla and microsoft. There is an attribution at the bottom:

"This article contains content originally from external sources.

Portions of this content come from the Mozilla Developer Network [cc-by-sa-small-wpd.svg] <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/> : Article<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/clear>

Portions of this content come from the Microsoft Developer Network: Windows Internet Explorer API reference Article<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh828809%28v=vs.85%29.aspx>"

But to me, attributions like that should only be used for quoted sections, not the majority of a documents copy. What is the policy on this for web platform?

Thanks,
Sarah