View source for Alleged and collective identity

''The following was contributed by [[anonymous trolls]] in 2004.  Feel free to keep editing it.''

'''Alleged and collective identity''' problems can complicate [[attribution]].  Not everyone will [[claim identity]] clearly and verifiably.  

Present licenses including the [[GFDL]] and [[CC-by]] (and its relatives) deal very poorly with the issue of allegations of authorship by anonymous, pseudonymous or co-operating parties.  They don't even deal well with collectives or other common constructs, e.g. [[rights collective]]s which represent classes of creators in a [[rights market]].  This is a serious long-term problem that plagues the [[GFDL corpus]] in particular and makes [[GFDL corpus access provider]]s less likely to ever become large, well-funded, public institutions.

There are various solutions advanced, in order of frequency:
# trust a small clique of administrators to use such means as [[IP address]] association to decide "who wrote what" and to publish that on some archived medium like a [[mailing list]] - thereafter treating those beliefs as true regardless of their potential flaws and liabilities.  ''This has been instituted at [[Wikipedia]] and all other [[Wikimedia]] [[web service]]s.''
# ban anonymous, pseudonymous, and proxying users entirely - force everyone to declare they wrote text themselves and are submitting it under their own name - the "[[use real names]] rule".  ''This has been instituted at Meatball Wiki and on many [[political blog]]s.''
# require some kind of [[faction]]al identification of edits so that people of similar ideological or political beliefs are examining writings to determine if they are part of more widely held beliefs or not, and to take collective forms of responsibility for their publication and control of [[trolls]].  ''This is being instituted at [[OurAnswer]] and [[Consumerium]].''

Each approach has its disadvantages.  1, obviously, relies on too few people in too concentrated a position of power - if they decide to advance absurd ideas as a smear campaign or propaganda effort, there is little anyone else can do to counter it, without direct access to the same systems data.  2, just as obviously, excludes the obviously large number of participants who prefer or require anonymous contribution as an option.  While 3 is somewhat complex and requires any so-called "[[troll]]" or "dissident" or "controversial" edits to be reviewed by people who hold identifiably similar views and can say reliably whether they are idiosyncratic, typical or otherwise something that is "original" or just derivative.

[[category:identity]]