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I just saw a question where someone clarified what OP is asking in the Staging Ground then approved the post to publish it on the main site, and I thought it's kind of strange that they would make drastic changes themselves instead of giving OP feedback on the Staging Ground, but whatever. What I'm more confused about is that the post on the main site doesn't show that OP's words have been changed – in fact, isn't that required by the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license? IANAL, but the license does say "You must ... indicate if changes were made."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but OP submits content to the Staging Ground under the CC license, meaning the system needs to indicate if anyone besides OP has modified the content. Now that I think about it, the system needs to "give appropriate credit" to the editors too, since they submit their edits under the CC license.

I looked around but the most relevant thing I found was this from Yaakov Ellis (added bold):

The Staging Ground is designed to have big differentiations from the public site in order to foster an environment with lower stakes, where Reviewers will feel less of an urgency to respond (with downvotes, comments, and edits) in manners that can at times add pressure upon new users. As such, neither revision history records nor comments from Staging Ground questions will be transferred to the newly published questions. The only indicator that posts originated in the Staging Ground will be a PostHistory entry relating the newly published post back to the original Staging Ground post, which will only be visible in the Timeline to Reviewers.

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    The timeline has a link to the Staging Ground post but I have no idea whether that would be considered sufficient in any way. I think people talked about that concern in the past but not in a distinct question. Commented Nov 5, 2024 at 18:03
  • Somewhat related: Why do published questions from the staging ground have a different ID? Commented Nov 5, 2024 at 18:07
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    Isn't the staging ground version still around, containing the edit history? Commented Nov 5, 2024 at 18:59
  • @wjandrea "it also happens for example with a migration, the only difference is that this is within the same site" | It seems like this would be an issue with migrated questions as well. If it was, I'm sure someone would have pointed it out by now... Commented Nov 5, 2024 at 18:59
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    @Pres Yes but it's not publicly accessible, plus there's no "edited" indicator on the post. Commented Nov 5, 2024 at 19:37
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    @ipod Migrated posts have a prominent "Migrated" link on them that goes to the previous revision history. That seems fine to me even if they don't have an "edited" indicator. (example: on SO, from SF) Commented Nov 5, 2024 at 19:49
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    Edited Staging Grounds post have 'edited' link under them just like on the main site, at least for someone with my rep. Maybe the easy button is just to open up the Staging Ground post to everyone once the question has been published to the main site. Commented Nov 5, 2024 at 20:13
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    I'm not sure it's that much of a license issue, but more one of just good-form and common-sense. Unless there has been significant developments on the "crystal ball" front, then it is a bit presumptive for someone to assume they know what the other person's thoughts were. Mind-reading just isn't a thing is primarily speculative at best. A wholesale rewrite of the question by the reviewer just seem inappropriate. The bigger issue is how do you automate catching that type of edit. I suspect it's possible in some hamming-distance ranking or the like. Good food for thought. Commented Nov 6, 2024 at 6:05
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    I have seen OP being asked why did they do something, but that something was added by an editor in the staging ground. It isn't immediately apparent, that the published post was edited by someone else. If it was edited in SG, the "edited" link should link to the revisions in SG, until an edit is made on the main site. Commented Nov 6, 2024 at 7:48
  • @DavidC.Rankin "I'm not sure it's that much of a license issue..." Yes and No. Legally it might be a licensing issue and if this is true, then it is such an issue regardless of what people think about it. On the other hand, SO never gave any legal advice, so we are on ourselves, to find out what the legal requirements really mean. At least in the data dumps all authors (all(!) editors whose edits aren't rolled back) of a post must be named, otherwise it's a violation of the data dump license. Commented Nov 7, 2024 at 7:30
  • @dan_1st not sure, but someone told me that they cannot access the link to SG from the questions history, so it might be necessary to have certain amount of rep to access the link Commented Nov 7, 2024 at 10:21
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    @463035818_is_not_an_ai Yes, the actual SG post should only be accessible to the author and people with SG review privilegs (500 rep) but I think the information of the post coming from the SG should be accessible to all people AFAIK. Commented Nov 7, 2024 at 12:21
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    @dan1st yes thats what I understood. I just wanted to point out that not everybody who can read the question can access the full history. I doubt that is sufficient. Commented Nov 7, 2024 at 12:32

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Yes it does. I'm not a lawyer but it seems clear enough to me that legally there is no difference if an edit happened during the staging ground phase or the main site presence phase. That is a logical division for how we work on content, but for the legal aspects of the creation of derivative works it's all just the same, therefore it should be treated the same.

It's probably an oversight when implementing the staging ground and should be corrected to have the full author information in some way.

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