C. Scott Ananian wrote:
>(As a brief plug: I would like to make
>WP feel more like an active community of *people* and less like a
>sterile collection of pages authored by some invisible cabal; from
>some previous threads about the "last edit" banner on mobile I'm sure
>there are some who prefer the anonymous font of knowledge look. But
>ultimately for real-time collaboration to be useful, a prospective
>editor needs to find someone to collaborate with...)
"Anonymous font of knowledge" isn't so bad. But there are other, larger
issues here that I'm not sure you're giving enough weight to.
We often don't want to attach ownership to content. It creates a lot of
problems when people do this on a wiki and I would argue that content
ownership is antithetical to the wiki model.
With something like the mobile site strapline, you're putting authorship
information at the top of the article's view mode. Putting your name at
the top of something is a fundamental and elementary means of indicating
ownership of something (cf. any school assignment or research paper).
(Trying to explain to a celebrity or other personality why they can't edit
the article about themselves, when it has their name on the article, is
another facet to the problem of ownership and explaining ownership.)
Knowing the last modified timestamp can be useful, but the implementation
is weak. It's currently trivial for the last modified date to be
manipulated by a page protection or simple vandalism and a subsequent
reversion. This leads to an article that hasn't really been edited in
three years saying "last edited 1 day ago", which is disingenuous and
misleading.
Knowing the last contributor can be useful, but it opens up an attack
vector which people have already been exploiting using vandalistic
usernames. It's also pretty weak to see "last edited by [some random bot
doing the job that MediaWiki fails to do such as category renaming]".
While the information displayed is often technically accurate, you start
to see diminishing value of the signal. The metadata starts to seem more
like noise.
And, yes, I talk to lots of editors every month and anecdotally many of
them would prefer not to have their usernames plastered at the top of
articles. I'm not sure this is unreasonable.
MZMcBride