User:Geo Swan/Sole author

Sole author

Consider this an essay, one person's opinion, and not an official policy

A key concept when using and porting intellectual content you first added to other projects, like the Wikipedia, is the idea of the sole author.

If you created the first draft of an article on the Wikipedia, or the Citizendium, you are the sole author of its intellectual content - ie what the article actually says.

If other Wikipedia contributors came along and added a new information, you will no longer be the sole author of its intellectual content. If you port that version over, you have to take steps to acknowledge the other contributors. Wikipedia material can be re-used, but there are conditions, because they released some but not all of their intellectual property rights. In particular, they retain the right to have their contributions acknowledged.

Studies have shown that only a minute fraction of the wikipedia's pool of contributors actually add new information. Well over 90 percent of edits are intended to perform some kind of maintenance, or quality control.

This means that, if you started an article, even though a lot of people may have edited it, since then, you might still be the sole author of its content. And that would mean you could port it here, without having to worry about a wikipedia attribution. Nevertheless, it would still be a good idea to leave a note, on the talk page, explicitly stating you think you were the sole author of the wikipedia version. Otherwise, someone might wonder, some day, if the article had been stolen.

What is all that maintenance that the other wikipedia contributors are doing, that isn't the addition of new content?

In my opinion, adding new references to an article, while quite valuable, does not require attribution. A US Supreme Court ruling, Feist v. Rural, established, under US law at least, that "facts" are not themselves copyrightable. Lists of facts are not copyrightable. The Feist v. Rural case was a law suit where a very small telephone company sued a slightly larger, but still small telephone company, for violating their copyright, when they simply copied whole sections of a telephone book they had published. Australian law is different, it does allow copyright, based on the "sweat of the brow" notion. Anyhow, in my opinion, a reference would be the same kind of non-copyrightable fact as an entry in a telephone book.

In my opinion simple corrections, like corrections to spelling, grammar, punctuation, captilization do not qualify for copyright protection. In most cases changing the word order in a sentence would not qualify for copyright protection.

If you did most of the work on a wikipedia article, and you would prefer to port it here, without attribution to the wikipedia, you could port the last version before anyone else contributed. I think you could port the last version where you were confident no one slse added new information.