It's silly because it's arbitrary and only applies to the lowest quality articles - start and stub. I have a query running on the Toolserver which I hope to process into a percentage of articles that have 5 or less authors. But we already know that the large majority of articles are stubs, and somewhat fewer start. We also know that the quality of these articles is related to their popularity, and that an article of lower popularity is less likely to be quoted, by definition.
If you are willing to accept that a URL is sufficient, then there is no reason to ever show the authors - it's only to accomodate the fact that the CC-BY-SA contains a clause which isn't really relevant to the projects. Better to change the CC-BY-SA or the attribution requirements than kludge this 5 authors or less statement in there, which just makes it harder to use the content. That is against the aims of the project, so I do consider the whole 5 authors or less thing silly.
The point is that listing the authors is a silly clause.
You have not proven your point.
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