Difference between revisions of "Community Portal"

Community Portal (edit)

Revision as of 21:13, 20 June 2012

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→‎About removing bylines on mainspace articles: yeah, let's do that

Anonymous user

imported>DragoonWraith

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 :I am in favor of removing the byline and the byline notice. We could add a note to the respective talk page mentioning the original author and thank him/her for the contribution.
 :We must consider, also, that, being that old, many are pretty much deprecated (e.g. [[Linked List Tutorial]] and [[Activation Functions]]) while others are full of broken links (e.g. [[3ds Max: Tileset]])
-[[User:QQuix|QQuix]] 19:08, 20 June 2012 (EDT)
+:[[User:QQuix|QQuix]] 19:08, 20 June 2012 (EDT)
+:::OK, a few points to consider, mostly historical in nature.
+:::# "Courtesy is expected" does not mean and was not intended to mean "don't touch it" &ndash; it means literally that you should respect the original author if he or she can be found. I wrote that tag originally, so I would know. In fact, we were ''hoping'' that the line would, itself, ''encourage'' authors to edit the article, since it explicitly said that they could even though it was bylined. Bylines, prior to the warning being added to the page, struck many as claiming ownership, which is not (and never has been) allowed on this Wiki.
+:::# While I agree that authors have had a very long time to respond, the fact of the matter is that there was never a systematic attempt to contact them, and as a result, there may be authors who have not been ignoring the notice for five years &ndash; they have been ''unaware'' of it for five years. Which is not the same thing, and moreover copyright definitely does not expire in five years even if you ignore it. While the authors ''do not'' have copyright on their contributions here, they may have contributed ''believing that they did'' due to a lack of clarity here at the time. The original decision with respect to bylines was that we would give those contributors the benefit of a "courtesy copyright" insofar as they could choose to remove the page in its entirety if they did not agree with the new enforcement of the rules. Note that contributors do not generally have the right to remove their work once submitted to the Wiki.
+:::# We have long had a policy (sadly undocumented, most likely) of removing bylines when they are no longer accurate, i.e. that one author is not the only significant contributor to a page because later editors have (courteously) updated and improved upon it. Since this is ''exactly'' what we want people to do, it makes sense in that case to remove the byline.
+:::# Deprecated or simply poor articles should be deleted or rewritten, no matter who wrote them originally or what name they may have appended to them. In such cases, a rewrite would certainly qualify for byline removal under the third point (such a rewrite is sufficient but definitely not necessary for byline removal).
+:::# Dev_akm's FAQ was originally made an exception to all of the rules regarding article ownership. As a mirror of the forum thread, it actually ''was'' "his" as opposed to being a publicly-editable page. There was a brief attempt to mirror more threads in a similar fashion, which would have had similar rules, but that (as far as I am aware) never went beyond my playing with some stylesheets and templates.
+:::OK, all that done with, I'd generally say that I'm not sure that the original decision was the right one (even though I agreed with it at the time). The fact of the matter is, authors never had any rights to what they submitted to this Wiki. While the Wiki tolerated the ''appearance'' of people taking ownership of articles (i.e. bylines), no attempt to actually exercise that ownership would have been permitted (though, to my knowledge, no such attempt was ever made, though I recall at least one contributor who stated he would have attempted it if someone had tried to edit "his" articles).
+:::The submission page has always said
+::::Please note that all contributions to The Elder Scrolls Construction Set Wiki may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here.<br/>
+You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see [[Project:Red_link|CSwiki:Copyrights]] for details). '''Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!'''<br/>
+<small>(Note the red link on CSwiki:Copyrights for the source of the original problem. This was rectified at the same time these decisions were made, which is why I faked the red link in the quote &ndash; the project namespace wasn't "CSwiki" either it was some ungodly long string.)</small>
+:::In all honesty, there was never a good reason to expect that bylines were OK or that articles could be owned &ndash; it simply happened that some people did it and no one stopped them, and it became something that some contributors took for granted and never read the warning in the submission window.
+:::But it's been five years, and that's an awful lot of courtesy to extend to people who were effectively breaking the rules, for all they were most likely unaware and also were contributing to the Wiki.
+:::So, in short, I am '''in favor''' of removing the bylines and the warnings and being done with this whole fiasco.
+:::[[User:DragoonWraith|<span style="font-family: Oblivion; size=2;">D</span>ragoon <span style="font-family: Oblivion; size=2;">W</span>raith]] [[User_talk:DragoonWraith|<span style="font-family: Oblivion; size=2;">TALK</span>]] 21:13, 20 June 2012 (EDT)