Oliver Pereira wrote:
What gives you the impression that more than a handful
of people want
this? As far as I'm aware, most people like to be credited for what they
do. What exactly is wrong with the idea of crediting people for what they
do, anyway?
Aside from the problem of having to credit people with offensive user
names, that is, which is really only a minor point at the moment, because
there are few of them around.
It's quite possible I'm wrong on that point; I should've qualified it.
It was a guess based on some previous discussion both here and on the
village pump. The main problem I see with crediting individual authors
is that it greatly dilutes credit. Someone could publish an
encyclopedia that's 1/4 other content and 3/4 Wikipedia content, and as
long as they credited five random authors for each article, they could
publish it without ever mentioning Wikipedia, instead only mentioning
"User:145.223.22.5" and "User:Saddam Hussein" and so on as authors.
If
they wished to purposely deny credit as much as possible, they could
even go through and prefer to list IP addresses rather than user
accounts where possible, since the GFDL lets them list any five authors
of their choosing.
-Mark