On 10/1/06, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 10/2/06, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:
Some way of adding attribution on the history page (which isn't indexed by Google and therefore useless to spammers) may be a better solution than adding these to the article. It probably also makes more sense in terms of the GFDL if the history is all on the history page and not partly there, partly on the talk page, and partly on the article itself.
Perhaps, if it is only and very specifically used for contributions from external sources. A sort of "External History:" namespace whose contents are shown and linked to on top of the history might be workable. Right now I'm not sure the problem is prevalent enough to justify prioritizing such a change.
I see another potential use for this - and that is finding reference that
have been deleted. Unfortunately, new editors will remove <ref> tags. I hate going to an article, and not finding a reference that was there before - if I added it then it is not too difficult to find it in the history, but on some articles it is difficult to find the prior reference. If this feature could do two things: allow one to include a reference for GFDL material, and provide a list of links that have been used in the article (along with the linked text) - then that would be very helpful in identifying prior reference material.
I always thought this would not work because it would be something else to attract link-spammers - but if the link history page is not indexed, then that seems to mitigate potential negative effects.
Jim