Sj said:
It would be wonderful and appropriate to list contributors at the bottom of each page.
Might be better if this was a "Special:". Unless I see Marvin Minsky's name in the list of contributors to an article to AI, or whatever, the names of the contributors aren't going to help a lot, and I really can't see fripperies like that persuading tenured professors, published authors and so on, who aren't already interested in the concept, to contribute their bits. Having said that, the reason I got interested in Wikipedia was that I was looking up the firearms researcher John Lott. As it happened, a person on an IP number that corresponded to the institute that employs John Lott started to vandalize the John Lott article. An editor subsequently reported on [[WP:ViP]] that the person identified himself as John Lott. Now that was quite a fascinating introduction to the immediacy of Wikipedia and to the organic, self-repairing nature of the system. I was hooked.
It was also nice to see that one or two people I knew from Usenet had found their way here.