Wikipedia:Attribution does not require blame
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 | This page in a nutshell: Attribution must be given to all contributors, but the licensing requirements do not include their precise edits. |
Wikipedia's licensing requires that attribution be given to all users involved in creating and altering the content of a page. Wikipedia's page history functionality lists all edits made to a page and all users who made these changes, but administrative deletion actions may remove or hide some of this information. A list of authors satisfies the attribution requirements without providing the specific contributions.
Glossary
[edit]- Attribution is the credit that a contributor receives, required by the Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use, section 7. Licensing of Content. It should not be confused with attribution of sources as covered by Wikipedia:Attribution.
- Blame is a user's precise contribution, the individual diff in the page history. The term is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Wikipedia:WikiBlame tool and the
git blamecommand.[1]
List of authors
[edit]The Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use, section 7.b.iii, specifies a list of authors as a valid attribution method:
Through a list of all authors (but please note that any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions).
Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia § List of authors clarifies its use in practice.
A list of authors does not include page content and cannot provide blame. Therefore, the licensing requirements do not include blame. In January 2022, via email with a Wikipedia administrator, Wikimedia Foundation Legal shared their perspective reaching the same conclusion.[2]
Attribution without full history
[edit]Page deletion
[edit]Deleted pages may be restored if their content is non-problematic and desired for reuse, but there are alternative methods described in Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia § Reusing deleted material. Since deleted revisions are not publicly visible, attribution is provided by a list of usernames. When such a list is a separate page, it is tagged with {{Attribution history}}, which includes it in Category:Pages used to preserve attribution.
Wikipedia:Selective deletion is a copyright cleanup technique that has been superseded by revision deletion. It involves deleting the page and restoring specific revisions, so it uses these attribution methods.
Revision deletion
[edit]When using Wikipedia:Revision deletion and deselecting the Delete editor's username or IP option, usernames are not deleted. They remain visible in the history, which still functions as a list of authors. This is the setting generally used, including with the RD1 copyright criterion.
Wikipedia:Revision deletion § Notes on use:
Username hiding (copyright attribution issues)
- Wikipedia's licenses require that accessible edits be linked to the user who performed them, so it is generally a problem to hide the username from a revision while leaving their edited changes to the page in public view.
- Cases where it is acceptable are:
- The revision contains no valid information copyrightable to the user who posted it (e.g. plagiarism, gibberish, vandalism, adding categories, no copyrightable change made to revision text, etc.); or
- All copyrightable changes have been reverted and the text of all intervening revisions has been hidden; or
- The user accidentally posted while being "logged out" and the aim is protection of privacy at the request of the user.
Wikipedia:Revision deletion § Changing visibility settings:
Hiding of a username or IP should only be used where that username or IP has a reason in and of itself to be hidden, such as accidentally editing logged out or an attack username. Hiding a username will remove the contribution completely from the user's contributions list (except from administrators, who will see a warning indicating it is invisible to users), rather than a crossed out entry for deleted edits without hidden username. This will cause issues with users trying to review actions taken on the user, as well as potential copyright violation risks.