On Jan 24, 2008 3:32 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
I can understand of course that the ideal of credit is appealing. David's idea of automatically generated contribution statistics under a "Show credit" template is a good idea, its basically an editor summary of the article. As far as actually listing editors in the text of the article for credit - I think that it is difficult and contentious to the point of being not worth the effort. If the process is subjective, it will be yet another meta-distraction from the goal - which is content, not credit.
I like the idea of a manually edited summary better than an automatically generated one. I think some of the decisions about who should be credited cannot be automated accurately.
I think that crediting people in public motivates them to write better articles and to put more effort into them. I also think that it is morally important to give credit where credit is due, and even though it is possible to find out who did what, it is not the same as actually giving credit.
There are other things that can be considered distractions, such as footnotes, that were at one time not part of policy and now are.
Also, as much as there is an ideal of NPOV on Wikipedia, it, as all ideals is impossible to realize. As such the author of the content is also part of the content.
It would also do much to improve the image of Wikipedia. If there are people who are responsible for the content, as opposed to an anonymous blob, then there will be more trust, and also more awareness of where content is coming from.
Perhaps if simple and objective criteria were proposed, an idea similar to "Show credits" could be workable and useful, although the almost universal use of pseudonyms sort of takes the meaning out of public credit (as opposed to a similar show credit box on the talk page, perhaps).
I think that many people would be prepared to use something closer to their real names if they were going to be credited within the articles. I really think that the credit should be as much part of the article as the footnotes are. Articles should have authors, not anonymous blobs.
Regards, Ezra