I guess some people have a rosier view of human nature than I do. I can easily foresee a practically unlimited number of conflicts over credit. I can easily see a dozen major news articles based on who it is revealed wrote a particular article. What if it turns out that 40% of the George W. Bush article was written by an Australian 12 year old? (Not at all unlikely). How will that increase the trust in Wikipedia of the general population?
How would you deal with the fact that a large portion of the content on Wikipedia was contributed not just under a pseudonymous nickname but by a nameless IP address? I'm afraid that manually written credits in the content of an article is just not ever likely to happen. There are far too many problems for it to ever get beyond an intellectual debate on a mailing list.
If you are really into the idea of credit, investigate something similar to David Gerard's suggestion.
Nathan
On Jan 24, 2008 4:29 PM, Ian A Holton poeloq@gmail.com wrote:
How about a separate author tab, similar to the revision one? All authors of non-minor marked edits could be named, possibly in the form of a "tag-cloud" where weight is given to the amount of edits and bytes added.
Ian [[User:Poeloq]]
On Thu, 2008-01-24 at 21:22 +0000, Thomas Dalton wrote:
On 24/01/2008, Shmuel Weidberg ezrawax@gmail.com wrote:
On Jan 24, 2008 4:08 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
It doesn't need to happen often for it to be a problem. Even if 99.9% of articles never have a problem, that still leaves over 2000 articles that we'll have to fight over.
I really don't think it's a problem. There are plenty of resources. There will always be people who will be happy to adjudicate cases like this. I think questions about authorship will come up less often than requests for article deletion. And many of those debates are even more stupid than the ones that would come up about article attribution.
Are you sure there will be people willing to adjudicate? I certainly wouldn't want to be the one to tell someone their contribution isn't worthy of credit. There are plenty of people willing to adjudicate content disputes, sure, but this isn't about content, it's about people, and that changes things.
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