today's the day.

Just noticed this whilst attempting to edit.

The new attribution requirements are now in plain English, which is a good thing, but they are also incredibly lax.

Frankly I could care less whether re-users of WP content properly attribute me as the primary author of (say) Felix Pedro, but I am concerned about what impact this may eventually have on the general practice of maintaining intact page-histories to the best of our ability come merge, redirect, or high water.

There are a few articles from which entire months have disappeared from the edit history for whatever reason. I'd prefer not to see this done willy-nilly on the basis that objections to pulling this crap are now (or will eventually be) considered just a residual artifact of the old-fogey GFDL-compliance culture.

I see nothing in the licensing update about "Information for deleters/oversighters/etc." so I'm curious whether the implications of this would be interpreted differently by someone more legalistic and less cynical than myself.

Regards.

My understanding is that the obligation to maintain the contributors chain remains. Are you saying my understanding was wrong?

No, but I'd like some basis upon which to believe this is true and will remain so, that this will still be considered an obligation rather than a convenient best-case scenario. The rules are being rewritten as we speak, so it will be interesting to see what actually does remain.

Rereviewing it certainly appears that we're no longer requiring our names appear in the history...

Hah. This is comical. Some articles have hundreds of authors.
Some articles have hopelessly shredded edit histories.

If they don't add exceptions to their license to cover Wiki-screw-ups and
the impossibility of finding all the authors of a piece, they'll be inviting
ugly and epic copyright-infringement lawsuits many years from now......

No damages = no recovery = no lawyer = no lawsuit.

I'm more interested in the part where we assign our URI to be the URI of the article, as opposed to my own personal contributions page...

Similarly if some other site has copied an article from WP, how does this url/uri/whatever satisfy attribution requirements in the event that WP deletes the article (or moves it do a different title and deletes the redirect, or sets up a disambiguation page at the old title, etc.)?

The path from reading the re-used content to determining who actually wrote it would become more convoluted, or even untraceable.

It's not really about money anyway. I'm not a lawyer (just a cynic) but I'd personally expect any litigation stemming from violations of a free license to be an ego-driven financial loss on the plaintiff's part.

What I care more about are situations where the content copied is problematic in other respects, but one can no longer readily and accurately determine which WP user originally posted it, or even pull up a short-list of suspects.

Eventually somebody gets left holding the bag, whether it is the one who made the edit directly after the one that was oversighted, or the one who pasted a couple paragraphs from one WP article to another without checking the sources, or the one who was just reverting to a previous version, or the admin who re-posts a deleted article (rather than un-deleting it) because the new-order arbcom decisions and RFA subculture have led him or her to the manifestly fucked up conclusion that plagiarism is always less serious than reverting bad deletions.

The scenarios are endless, best to hope you're nowhere near one.

There are actually a few dozen different ways to create a misleading diff view, misconstrue a straightforward one, or trick someone into making an edit that just looks bad. Some are more transparent than others (though not to the untrained eyes of the mainstream press) while others are elaborate and may require advanced access levels, booby-trap exploits, or some other ivy league voodoo. Then after another twenty-thousand edits have gone down, down, down, nobody remembers for sure what the truth was.

Charlotte "Grievous Angel" Webb

Copyright infringement = injunctive relief

Nothing has changed. As before, editing Wikipedia does not make you an author, and you gain no attribution rights by editing.