Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:
geni wrote:
On 1/22/07, Jeffrey V. Merkey jmerkey@wolfmountaingroup.com wrote:
Under the GFDL you give consent to relicense your changes. This means whomever is the last editor of an article is the "Author", not the whole chain of editors to that point since subsequent editors are simply relicening your content when they add their own edits. By editing and saving the article, the final editor is the author in this sense.
Please re-read the GFDL: 4.
B List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors, if it has fewer than five), unless they release you from this requirement.
I do not release you from this requirement.
Then Wikipedia in its dumps must IDENTIFY AT LEAST FIVE AUTHORS AUTHORS since I have no crystal ball as to who wrote what. In this case, Wikimedia is violating the GFDL by failing to publish authors along with content.
At least in theory, all MediaWiki content pages have a "diff" function that would be able to identify in some way the authorship of each and every word of every article. I'm not saying this is a computationally trivial task (far from it), but the raw information needed to calculate that is provided in the MediaWiki databases. IMHO this is a far better metric to identify who the "five principle authors" of a given page might be, at least going off of word count as a metric. This would remove edits by blatant vandals and other cruft, as well as administrative actions such as adding and removing AfD/VfD notes and other cleanup tags.
Another alternative, and easier to do computationally, is to count page edits.
BTW, as a general note for Wikipedia, the "static version" of Wikipedia pages does list in plain text all of the contributors to each page. See for example:
http://static.wikipedia.org/wikipedia/en/index.html
Which lists every author who has touched this page, including in this particular case our fearless leader/founder Jimbo, and several regulars to this mailing list. I actually like how this is done from an asthetic viewpoint, but it would be difficult to display this information on a dynamic/editable page.
From a technical viewpoint, compiling this list of authors is hardly an easy task if you are trying to republish the content, but the required information is there if you are willing to go through the effort.