2009/3/15 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com:
I think the practice of using summary lines for attribution has from the start been viewed as a temporary solution, only to be used until we figure out a better way to handle content such as translations from other language projects.
I think if we do go towards creating an easy link which contains a list of editors culled from history with no duplicates, it might include a method of externally adding attributions into that plain text form, for just such translations and imported content from other sites, where the content may even have a large list of authors itself.
That would be great, if it can be made to work.
When and if that eventually materializes (next year in Jerusalem; yearning for Zion; by and by, lord; when the lion shall lie down with the lamb - insert your own religious affiliations allusion to the eternal return here) naturally the summaries should be purged and the attributions temporarily lodged there given their proper place. I could even imagine some semi-automated method that would while stripping off the summaries, simultaneously scrape off the urls and wikilinks in them and for good measure append them to the list of editors.
Unfortunately there is no standard way of writing attribution edit summaries, so automation is going to be difficult. Semi-automation, as you say, might be possible for those summaries that include links (a person would need to determine if they are attributions, but that's easy enough - a couple of seconds a summary with a decent number of people helping out could get it done is a reasonable amount of time), but what about content taken from offline sources? Probably extremely rare, but can we risk failing to correctly attribute even one or two sources?