All CC licenses require users to attribute the creator of licensed material, unless the creator has waived that requirement, not supplied a name, or asked that her name be removed. Additionally, you must retain a copyright notice, a link to the license (or to the deed), a license notice, a notice about the disclaimer of warranties, and a URI if reasonable. For versions prior to 4.0, you must also provide the title of the work. (Though it is not a requirement in 4.0, it is still recommended if one is supplied.)
So maybe attribution is not quite optimal, and in particular, the creator and the title are missing.
The CC Wiki gives an example of an “ideal attribution”:
For answers imported from SE, the title of the work is a little hard to figure out, since answers don’t actually have any titles. Do you use the question title at time of import, perhaps with “this answer to” or something similar prepended, or do you just say “this answer”, or what?
Even on a question, the title doesn’t mean much for attribution since it can (in SE and in Codidact) be edited. Better to reference it by SE post ID #.
Huh. That’s true. That eliminates that possibility.
Another fair point—in fact, everything can be edited and even deleted, so it makes sense to give a timestamp (or a revision number).
I feel there’s good motivation to getting this right: Stack Exchange got it wrong. So it’s an opportunity to have something concrete in our favour.
Usernames still seem possible to add. And I feel looking at URLs is poor. So maybe…
“ABCD’s [question/answer] posted on [date]”
…would be an implementable improvement. (Perhaps even link to the specific revision?)
Also, when a post is edited, the result is a derivative work with multiple authors. And arguably, a Q&A isn’t just the question or answer as a stand-alone but a collective work in which the question-asker and answerers are collaborators.
Original authors are attributed on Writing: not in that message, but by the signature under the post. If you follow the link to the user’s profile, you’ll find a link back to their SE account until the account is claimed.
That’s a fair point too—I guess also the titles are at the top of the pages, and timestamps are included too. It seems it’s already as good as it can be.