On Thursday 22 January 2009 16:56:57 Sam Johnston wrote:
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 8:46 AM, Nikola Smolenski
<smolensk(a)eunet.yu> wrote:
We can develop tools that would identify
principal authors with
sufficient accuracy; and this list of authors is likely to be short
enough to be practically included in full.
I disagree with this assertion regarding automation and can think of many
situations both in which this does not hold true, giving false negatives
(e.g. single/initial uploads of large contributions, uploads using multiple
aliases, imports, IP numbers and not-logged-in contributions, etc.) and
false positives (e.g. minor edits not marked as such, spam/vandalism,
comprehensive rewrites, deletions, abuse/'attribution whoring', etc.).
I find your disagreement wrong, your lists of examples mostly meaningless, and
even a large percentage of false positives and false negatives preferrable to
no attribution at all.
masse. Oh, and I would place anyone who considers
their own interests
taking precedence over those of the community (both within Wikipedia and
the greater public) into the category of 'tool' too :)
If people feel they are not adequately credited for their contributions, they
are less likely to contribute. Proper attribution is a need of the community.
Wikipedia is a community and those who contribute to
it for egotistic
rather than altruistic reasons (even if the two are often closely related)
are deluding themselves given they were never promised anything, least of
all grandeur. What value do they really think they will get from a 2pt
credit with 5,000 other authors? If it is relevant to their field(s) of
endeavour then they can draw attention to their contribution themselves (as
I do) and if they don't like it then they ought to be off writing books or
knols or contributing to something other than a community wiki.
Great way to care about community interests, there. Sure to draw a lot of new
contributors.
"Requiring even 2 pages of attributions be
included after every article
inclusion is a non-free tax on content reuse, and a violation of our
author's expectations."
Luckily, that is not required.