On 12/23/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 12/23/06, Katie the Obscure
<nihthraefn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Several people have mentioned (in this thread)
crediting authors of a
page on the page itself. Wikia has/had an attribution feature which is
somewhat similar (see
http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Attribution ).
This incarnation probably wouldn't work for Wikipedia, but if it
appears useful, perhaps someone can submit a feature request/argue it
to death in the Village Pump until all our eyes are bleeding.
Two problems:
1) it presents some performance challenges on pages with longer histories
What kind of challenges? Just cache the results periodically - then
you only have to look up the modifications made since the last cache.
The only real challenge is a political one, not many people have
permission to make the changes to the software and database to support
it.
2) It's a terrific vandalism tool which is, I
believe, why wikia turned it off.
Considering the ability to "remove_credits", I don't see why it's
any
better of a vandalism tool than any other. Care to elaborate?
(according to
http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Attribution, it was
removed for performance reasons)
It also, like page history, does a poor job of fairly
representing attribution.
It's a start, and it's much better than the page history. In addition
to "remove_credits", there should be a way to "add_credits". Then
you've got all the advantages of a manually edited list, plus the
additional advantage that it's automatically populated with a good
default.
Anthony