Oliver Pereira wrote:
What gives you the impression that more than a handful of people want this? As far as I'm aware, most people like to be credited for what they do. What exactly is wrong with the idea of crediting people for what they do, anyway?
Aside from the problem of having to credit people with offensive user names, that is, which is really only a minor point at the moment, because there are few of them around.
It's quite possible I'm wrong on that point; I should've qualified it. It was a guess based on some previous discussion both here and on the village pump. The main problem I see with crediting individual authors is that it greatly dilutes credit. Someone could publish an encyclopedia that's 1/4 other content and 3/4 Wikipedia content, and as long as they credited five random authors for each article, they could publish it without ever mentioning Wikipedia, instead only mentioning "User:145.223.22.5" and "User:Saddam Hussein" and so on as authors. If they wished to purposely deny credit as much as possible, they could even go through and prefer to list IP addresses rather than user accounts where possible, since the GFDL lets them list any five authors of their choosing.
-Mark