Fastfission wrote:
-- it also does not help this that many of those which are "most important" for encyclopedia are also the ones with the most edits. Though I wonder -- if an edit is reverted, does the editor still have the ability to claim authorship? I can see different answers to that, none of which I'm completely satisfied.
If an editor has not written any part of the current article, they don't really have a claim to authorship of that article. (The licensing issue is actually one of the better reasons for mass-reverting trolls' edits. With the improved revision deletion coming, it becomes somewhat easier to handle these things, too...) "Not written any part" shouldn't be taken too literally, however- just replacing someone's words inline doesn't automatically make their claim go away.
If you look in depth at the history of a lot of our very-heavily-edited articles, after a while they start actually going downhill in quality, losing consistency and readability. Other times, we find a copyvio in the history somewhere. This leads to someone starting a clean rewrite at a /Temp page, which then replaces the old version. This method could productively be used with articles with improperly licensed contributions as well, and if done on the cruftiest articles, can improve overall quality.
Of course, before replacing content, we should go to everyone we can still find who has live contributions in the database and get them to do the CC-template-thing (and also the {{WikimediaTextLicensing}} template, if possible) (see [[en:User:Jake Nelson]] for mine, for example).
Changing the submit text for present and future contribs seems easy and solid to me- changing it for past ones, I'd hold off on until it's made clear with people...
-- Jake Nelson [[en:User:Jake Nelson]]