We're heavily using the MediaWiki API in our opensource project mwlib (http://code.pediapress.com/ ), so first of all: Thanks to you all for implementing this functionality to MediaWiki!
Maybe you're following the discussion initiated by Erik Möller on Foundation-l about appropriate attribution. As there is yet a consesus to be found, we plan to include all authors (minus minor edits, minus bots) after each article in documents (PDFs, ODFs) rendered from article collections.
Currently we're using an API query with prop=revisions, requesting rvprop=user|ids|flags. Afterwards we're filtering out minor edits, anonymous/IP edits and bot edits (via regular expression on username and comment) and combine edits by the same author. To retrieve the data for all revisions for heavily edited articles (e.g. [[en:Physics]]), this requires lots of API requests with rvlimit=500.
Is there a way (or a plan to implement one) to retrieve the list of unique contributors for a given article (from a given revision down to the first one)? Ideally this would accept parameters for the mentioned filtering. I guess inside of MediaWiki code this can be handled very efficiently (using appropriate database queries) and would eliminate the need to transfer lots of redundant data over the socket.
-- Johannes Beigel