Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Evan Prodromou <evan AT wikitravel.org>]

Jim Cheetham wrote:

> I had a quick review of their musings, and while interesting they missed 
> what for me is the biggest point about a wiki - the multiple authorship.

It's a fascinating issue and one close to my heart.

I tend to take a temporal model of Wiki authorship. That is, I think 
each version of a wiki page is a Work which is a Derivative Work of the 
previous version. This seems to simplify things a lot, especially 
compared to the spatial model (this is my paragraph, this is your 
sentence, this is his punctuation mark), or a joint authorship model 
(everyone works together to make a work).

> I can't see how to satisfy the Attribution of a document that has had 
> multiple authors, some anonymous, some pseudonymous, and some 
> identifiable/contactable.

We do this with MediaWiki. The wording goes something like, "Last edited 
by X, with contributions by Realname Person1 and Realname Person2, 
ThisWiki users Pseudo3 and Pseudo4, and anonymous users of ThisWiki."

> Perhaps the wiki back-end changelog maintains the attributions for me, 
> but not all wikis preserve the changelog when you backup/restore.
>
> Ideas welcome ...

Use a wiki engine that preserves back-end changelogs when you backup and 
restore. B-)

~ESP