2009/2/2 phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com:
Which is fine if you're reprinting the whole article, but what if you're just reprinting the lede, or some other section of an article? Should a reuser still be required to reprint 2 pages of credits for a paragraph of article? That seems onerous. Note that just reprinting a *section* of an article is how many print reuse cases have worked to date (the German encyclopedia and our CafePress bumperstickers come to mind), and this case is not something that we've discussed much so far.
Very few articles require a page's worth of credit. Remember even the German has an average of 23.65 edits per page and the midpoint is likely much lower.
And having just actually done this, with a real book and a real publisher, in "How Wikipedia Works," I can attest that it's a non-trivial amount of work to get author lists for articles -- removing duplication, IPs, formatting, etc is all a good deal of work -- and I like to think I understand how histories work. It would be a much bigger task for someone who didn't understand histories or the license.
It is true we need an extension built into mediawiki to handle at least part of this.
The Wikiblame tool, if it were made widely accessible and prominently integrated into the site, seems like a promising solution. In the meantime, I think we ought to consider what "proper credit" is for just reusing a part of an article, versus the whole thing.
-- phoebe
Legally you are required to credit every author who's work that section is a derivative of.