Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 3/23/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
And what happens if the next edit merges some content back in from the reverted text?
This case falls under "not perfect but as close as can be". It's essentially the same problem as someone pasting content from another article, or from another source entirely. Even your diff-based scheme, while nifty indeed, doesn't solve that. In general, nothing can.
Well actually it does... because I proposed only classifying articles which are completely disconnected from the main sub-graph as non-contributors. The revert+remerge will either end up in the entropy flow shortest path (if the removed text is smaller than the preserved text), or as a little stub hanging off the main history flow pathway should the diff to the reverted version be smaller.
Sorry, I meant that your solution _only_ handles the case where the pasted-in content comes from a previously reverted version of the same article. It doesn't handle the (probably even more common) similar cases where the content comes from another article or from an off-wiki source.
So both of our methods will miss some contributors. Yours will miss slightly less than mine, at a cost of significantly more processing. But neither is perfect, and no automatic method _can_ be perfect in this regard, unless perhaps we were to somehow extend your entropy flow analysis to the entire whole of human expression, including spoken word and other ephemera.
"Who first came up with this?" is a Hard Problem(TM).