Well, with the release notes freshly trimmed for 1.14, it seems like a good time to bring this up. A while back, someone or other removed references in specific RELEASE-NOTES features to who submitted the patch to fix the feature. Brion reverted that, calling it bad form. The thing is, though, that's exactly the policy we follow for everyone who contributes to the project: there's no mention in the release notes. The only way you could find out who actually develops MediaWiki at present is by hunting through commit logs and trying to match up names with commit aliases somehow. Special:Version is very incomplete, and most of the people listed aren't currently active.
A lot of projects mention who contributed to specific versions, and I think it would be perfectly reasonable for us to do the same. I would suggest two sections of contributors: people who contributed code to the specific version, and people who contributed translations. Each one could be ordered alphabetically by last name, or some other criterion if people think of one. (Like putting Brion and Tim at top, and maybe putting regular committers above one-time patch submitters.) If someone contributes a patch via Bugzilla or whatever, they get added to the list like anyone who personally committed code, not inline with the feature they added.
What does everyone think?