FeReAttribution
From UoWiki
After working on some texts at the uo wiki, I certainly don't believe any of them were written by a single author - even if I myself sat down and typed each word - taking dictation only from my thoughts and fingers. The UoClaimer as a document explains the freedom from single viewpoints that partial anonymity provides (the anonymity is always partial because of the IP address tracking and chasing possibilities provided by this wiki software).
Cory Doctorow calls himself a 'creative typist' on his business card, which is a good half-way house between authorship and the activity undertaken when writing to mailing lists - or wikis - always a conversation out of step.
I was treading both sides of the line - anonymity on the Uo wiki, authorship implicit when publishing texts on my website, I was bored with academic writing and decided that this kind of admission of how flexible and fuzzy any notation of authorship is when what is actually happening to the text is less like authoring and more like synthesis.
A good friend pointed out to me the problems of this approach - distributing strongly authored text (text that uses the first person, or expresses viewpoints in a punchy or opinionated way) without attributing authorship is problematic in a context like the uo - because it seems to be representing the views of the uo, an unnamed 'group' rather than an individual working in the uo as a framework.
This made sense to me. In the past, the uo has been somewhat over-identified with individuals because that's how people have come to it - through me, or through others, who then seem to 'represent' the institution in some way. This makes no sense - one of the uo slogans 'everybody speaks in the voice of the uo' only works if individuals are identified, and able to express themselves as themselves, and as the uo. The voice has a source. Sometimes the source is shared - which is where faculty groupings start to make sense. Sometimes the source is singular, in which case attribution becomes important so that response is a possibiity.
This is not to say that pseudonyms or selective anonymity isn't important and useful - but tightly authored punditry - such as that in many of the texts in the Uo Economic Observatory shouldn't be mistaken as an institutional position statement.
I'm happy to use my name for these texts - apart from anything else, it means that I can accrue reputation (positive or negative) from working on them, which is both thematically and organisationally consistent with many of the texts written in the Observatory so far. It also means I can be challenged on the contents of the texts.
So this is still an experiment - where material is strongly authored, I'm going to attribute what I do to myself, unless the material is group authored in which case I'll use faculty attribution as best I can. If others want attribution to texts or ideas of theirs that I've synthesised in 'my' text, they're welcome to add it. I'm also very curious about different possible approaches to this issue. If anyone has other suggestions, I'm very keen to hear them.
- - SaulAlbert, 1/4/2005
- - UncleFester 13.04.05
