On Jan 24, 2008 4:42 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Of course there is no way to know for certain what the results are going to be, until it is tried. I think it should be tried. We should decide that for the next week all new articles should have authors on them. We could set up a proposed guideline that explains how it is going to work, and see what the results are.
After a week we could evaluate it. If it works out, then we could start gradually crediting other articles, in a way similar to how footnotes have been introduced into articles.
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?
I don't see this as a problem at all. If the twelve year old did an excellent job, then good for him, and people will think that he is a little genius. If he did a lousy job, then it wouldn't have stayed and he wouldn't have gotten any attribution.
As far as Wikipedia's reputation, I don't think it could suffer. Nobody is likely to use it less because it was written by twelve year olds. In any case, Wikipedia already has a solid reputation.
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 think that we can credit unknown contributors as anonymous if there are no better ideas.
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.
I haven't seen any problems here that cannot be addressed. I think the only thing it has going against it, is inertia.
Regards, Ezra