In theory the idea that public credit should be given for good work is nice - it is simply unworkable for Wikipedia. What is public credit? What is good work? Who gets credit, in which order? Can you change the credits over time? Who decides?
I can see a hundred ArbCom cases rising from this issue, and I don't see how it is nearly worth the trouble given that all of our existing contributors have agreed to have their work published under the existing standards of attribution.
On Jan 24, 2008 2:43 PM, Shmuel Weidberg ezrawax@gmail.com wrote:
On Jan 24, 2008 2:07 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
so the only true attribution for the current state of an article at any particular time is to the "Wikipedia community" not "Editor So And So, Who Wrote Two Paragraphs 5 Years Ago."
You would certainly have to work out who deserves to be credited and whether somebody still deserves to be credited after what he originally wrote was substantially changed, but that does not mean that those who deserve to be credited should not be credited.
Many times it will obvious who deserves credit. I am not proposing an automated system for credit, although it might me be possible to make one. I am proposing a policy change that would require a section at the end of any good article that credits the significant authors of the article in a way similar to that of footnotes and references. If there are contentious issues about who should be credited that would be worked out on the talk page just like other contentious issues are.
Regards, Ezra
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