Robert Rohde wrote:
And Wikipedia's methodology for "honoring" authorship under the GFDL is also something of a stretch.
To quote the GFDL:
"List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors, if it has fewer than five), ..."
where
"For works in formats which do not have any title page as such, 'Title Page' means the text near the most prominent appearance of the work's title, preceding the beginning of the body of the text."
Taken at face value, I'd say the default format envisioned for the GFDL is that a list of authors should appear adjacent to article's title (rather than an edit history placed on a seperate page).
Another way of reading that is to take the Main Page as the title page. The five listed authors could then be the five editors (other than bots) who have the highest number of edits. :-)
Ec