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Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Admins and patrollers/Attribution repair mechanism

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Attribution repair mechanism

  • Problem: In Russian Wikipedia I've found that most translations made before translation tool introduction doesn't have enough attribution in their edit summaries (or doesn't have it at all), because local rules allowed talk page template instead of attribution in edit history. There is no technical mechanism for attribution repair in the Wikipedia. Dummy edits are not official repair mechanism but are the only way to mark an edit as translation in edits history. Dummy edits are useless in long histories because search for added text won't show dummy edits near real edits without attribution in their summaries. Also they might vary in form and format. If somebody want to find out the source of the edit without attribution he will find added text and might try to add dummy edit. If another user already fixed attribution, duplicates may appear.
  • Proposed solution: Administrators or patrollers need to have technical possibility to link one edit to another if edit summary have special tag inside it and a reference to the original edit using special:redirect/revision/XXXX link. Linked dummy edit summary should appear near real edit summary in the page history and other tools. Alternatively comments to edit summary may be more appropriate feature, but their usage must be limited to forbid chatting.
  • Who would benefit: It might help to repair many Wikipedia articles in legal terms and prevent from adding attribution multiple times. Also it may be useful in some other cases like fixing previous edit summary.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: D6194c-1cc (talk) 07:27, 28 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • For what is worth, English Wikipedia handles translation attributions with a template in the talk page: w:Template:Translated page, which can be added at any time, and usually includes links to exact revisions. MarioGom (talk) 15:44, 29 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    English wikipedia en:Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia declares that editor must provide either a list of authors or a hyperlink to the page in edit summary. Templates on the talk page add supplementary information. They don't provide legal mechanism for alternative attribution. D6194c-1cc (talk) 10:17, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Terms of Use in the paragraph 7b say: "Through hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the article to which you contributed (since each article has a history page that lists all authors and editors)" (m:Terms of Use/en). So our terms of use expect that information about all the authors will be available in the edit history. Talk page isn't related to the edit history nor to information about authors.
    Also paragraph 7c say: "You agree that, if you import text under a CC BY-SA license that requires attribution, you must credit the author(s) in a reasonable fashion. Where such credit is commonly given through page histories (such as Wikimedia-internal copying), it is sufficient to give attribution in the edit summary, which is recorded in the page history, when importing the text" (m:Terms of Use/en).
    So technically text copied from other page without attribution in edit summary is plagiarism (see en:Wikipedia:Plagiarism). Dummy edit helps to fix it, but they are useless in decades-long histories. D6194c-1cc (talk) 10:17, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Obviously it is an accepted practice that, in the absence of full attribution in edit summaries, templates in talk pages serve the same purpose. That template, indeed, contains cross-wiki links to exact revisions and history, which lists all authors and editors. Terms of use say that page histories are "commonly" used, not that they are the only way to do it. So far, I don't think there's a serious challenge to the idea that clear attribution in talk pages is crediting the authors in a reasonable fashion. If you really think that's not the case, this is probably a problem for WMF Legal team to clarify before jumping to implement any feature based on your interpretation. MarioGom (talk) 21:44, 31 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    In my understanding "commonly" means that attribution can be made in the face of the article as it is common with external CC BY-SA texts added to Wikipedia articles: en:Template:CCBYSASource. D6194c-1cc (talk) 14:26, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Because this wish relates to legal concerns with the Wikimedia Terms of Use, I checked in with the Wikimedia Foundation Legal team to clarify whether this is a pressing concern. They said it's probably not a required change under the ToU, and the risk is pretty low and will be even lower when we move to CC 4.0 soon. @D6194c-1cc: Are there other potential benefits to making this change? If so I would recommend rewording the wish to focus around those, rather than legal concerns. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 13:51, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Do you mean CC BY-SA 4.0 or CC 4.0 without BY-SA? Current Wikipedia authors licensed their texts under BY-SA, so its impossible to change the license of previously added content to a license without attribution. D6194c-1cc (talk) 15:37, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @D6194c-1cc CC BY-SA 4.0 - when I wrote CC 4.0 it was (confusing) shorthand. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 16:03, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    I have only legal concerns, so I'll leave it as is. I try to find best way to fix attribution of translations made long time ago. Currently I use something like this: ru:special:diff/128107741. D6194c-1cc (talk) 19:27, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @D6194c-1cc Because this change isn't required according to the WMF Legal team, I'm going to archive this wish. Thanks for making the suggestion and prompting us to look into this though! Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 11:08, 2 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Because the wish has been updated to focus on other potential benefits I've unarchived it. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 16:56, 3 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • @D6194c-1cc Admin can add tags to revisions. Tags like credited later on 1st revision and credited here on crediting revision can solve this lack of order, that's compatible with license terms. On fr-wiki, we also use templates in references header to credit authors (see fr:Aide:Crédit d'auteurs => fr:Modèle:Crédit d'auteurs). Hope it helps ru-wiki. --LD (talk) 03:49, 11 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    @LD Thanks for the reply. But when the user contributes to the Wikipedia, he adds a piece of text so that anyone who re-uses article text under the CC BY-SA license needs to know what changes were made to every piece of text. Article's history is responsible not only for authorship, but also for information about modification of every added piece of text.
    I started using this translated template to mark articles with insufficient attribution: :en:Template:Copying within Wikipedia. This template has the same purposes as fr:Modèle:Crédit d'auteurs, but I think it's more appropriate and calls to fix attribution. D6194c-1cc (talk) 13:33, 11 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is a tangent, but the concern I have is: Alice translates an article written by Bob at xxwiki. Carol deletes Bob's article from xxwiki. Now Alice's translation has a link to a page that no longer exists. It would be nice if Carol/xxwiki were aware that Alice had translated the article, so they could preserve the article history. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:08, 11 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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