On 12/8/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
Being able to change the author column would help, but I could still see problems. How would you avoid people crediting others for edits they didn't make or suggest?
It's not really that horrible to have a few spurious authorship lines here and there. I'd much rather have a few extra than a few missing. Anyway, you'd avoid it by reverting the edits which do so.
I don't say the system is magic, but I think it's a lot better than what we have now (and it'd be in addition to what we have now anyway).
Also, some people are inherently lazy and still won't proper attribute something even if there's an easy way to do so. Proof is in the fact people fail to listen to multiple clear instructions on both the help- and reference desk which are explained and should make sense.
Right. It's not perfect. Just better. At least if someone is lazy and doesn't attribute something and then someone else catches them, it can be fixed.
If we added a "references" field to the edit page, even if it was optional, the number of attributions would probably increase even more. The field would be unformatted, so someone could of course type "I just knew it" or "copied from some website" or even "poop" for their reference, but it'd be one more thing to look into if someone put their reference as "Wikipedia". Remember, one of the reasons academics and publishers are so tough on references is to avoid plagiarism. If someone can check your reference and see that the information you added is in that source, then there's much less of a chance you just copy-pasted it (to use the electronic version) from some other place.
Any idea on how to avoid such problems. Re-educating users would safe coders a lot of work, not to mention another scheduled downtime to upgrade databases like when the current id was being changed so diffs to the latest version could remain static.
Mgfm
Hmm, the way I see it it'd be a relatively simple feature, and wouldn't require any changes to the database. Just add a namespace called History, put a link to it next to Talk, and put some code in the software to automatically edit the History page whenever the article gets edited. The database wouldn't change at all.
Now, adding a references section would preferably add a column to a database table. Whether or not that would require scheduled downtime, I don't know. The last version of MySQL I used was pretty crappy when it comes to altering tables on the fly. There are ways to do it in MySQL, but it takes a little bit of thinking and good design. Scheduled downtime should be unacceptable on a site this big; unfortunately it isn't. (BTW, it's trivial to alter tables, on a live database, without downtime, in PostgreSQL. And I say this as someone who personally prefers MySQL, so it's not just advocacy.)
On 12/8/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 12/8/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm macgyvermagic@gmail.com wrote:
We have the same problem with merges. Some people don't seem to think it's neccesary to attribute material to the original article and author when merging something. I'm not even sure of a majority of them actually say it's a merge in the summary.
That really needs to change.
Mgm
It certainly won't change until there's a solution which actually makes sense, such as an editable history section like I suggested. Putting authorship information in the comment column, and not in the authorship column? I can see why people don't do that, it doesn't make any sense.
On 12/8/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 12/8/05, Jim trodel@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/8/05, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org wrote:
On 12/8/05, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote: > We may pretend it does not matter at all; but the truth is that most > authors are proud of their work. And it is hard to be striped of one's > authorship. If it were not true, we would not be so numerous to list > articles we wrote. > We should add an *editable* history section. Call it the history namespace. Put a link to it next to the link to the talk page. Automatically add a username to it when the user edits a page (at least if they are making a new edit for the year), and manually add a username to it when text is copied.
It seems to me that this could be resolved by properly referencing the source of the material in the summary. For example, copied from WP:AFC request per [[User:ip.add.res.s]]. And editors should be instructed when copying information from one article to another - to put the version of the source article just prior to the cut in the target article summary.
This would point them to the article before the cut and reference the authors that created the source article up until then.
This would work relatively OK if everyone did it correctly and consistently 100% of the time. Which is to say, we've already tried this, it doesn't work.
As for Ant's particular problem, one could suggest that she simply make some minor edit to the text, and thus her name will then show up as an author. But that's kind of a kludge, and someone looking at the actual diffs would get the wrong impression as to what she was the author of. It also doesn't address the GFDL requirement to include the title of the work (the title at the time it was edited), if a page is moved, and it makes the list of authors way too long and awkward (we don't need to list the same author more than once per year, in fact in my opinion there should only be one line in the history section per year, listing all the authors, unless the title changes or there is a merger from a different work in which case you'd want one line per title).
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