Proposal:The third party authors
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- See also: Keep the contents legal
Summary
The Wikipedia should provide highly reliable, accurate, simple, unified and complete lists of its content′s authors.
Proposal
The lists of authors should contain not only lists of Wikipedia editors but also third party authors.
I propose to develop an interface or pages (similar to Talk pages we have now) for keeping lists of such authors which would supplement current history pages. These pages would be capable to store information about third party authors and original sources where the works are coming from. It would be very nice if such pages would be incorporated into history pages.
I also propose to begin to fill systematically these pages for each already created article whose the third party authors are not credited in this way. Each part created by the third party authors which was added to the articles in certain edits should be listed here.
(This is not about referencing the information in the articles but about authors′ rights to their own works!)
Motivation
Wikipedia contains a lot of pages which are legally taken from external sources. The other language versions of Wikipedia belong to these sources. Wikipedia actually breaks its own license - if not on a law level, certainly on a levels of this license′s spirit and relations between authors.
Our current policy is to credit authors inside Wikipedia articles. Authors of other language version which is translated are omitted very often, only link to original is provided. This may be fits to new Wikimedia policy presented this year but it is very dangerous because it produces content of unclear authorship and legal status - something what can spoil whole projects, including Wikipedia itself. This is also not fair to our own authors because they are credited only in history pages and cannot be credited directly in the articles. The unified system across all the Wikimedia projects would also significantly help because such pages could be easily processed by robots.
Let′s make Wikipedia the best credit giving information source in the world!
Key Questions
Do we find this problem so important to solve? Do we want to credit all the third party authors in the same manner? Can we create the "Authors pages" similar to the Talk pages? Can we incorporate these pages into history pages?
Potential Costs
- development of the third party authors pages
- revision of articles' authorship
- Many authorship problems which will not be possible to solve, will be found. Many articles will have to be rewritten or deleted.
References
Community Discussion
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