Tei wrote:
I know, I wrote the second one.
It will be normal for a wiki page to have 80 authors
(thats a fact).
If you want to chose only 3, you have to ignoring some authors for
some subjective bias, like... strlen(concat(modifications)) ,
COUNT(edits),... o using WikiGenes (I guest, wikigenes work almost
like that "Blame" feature of a CVS system). I feel like you will be
lying to support some external limitation :/
Metrics like number of edits, or difference in size, etc, are trivial and useless.
The metric that makes most sense to me is "number of words contributed to the
current version". To get that number, you have to track text contributed by each
edit across all following edits, considering reverts, moving paragraphs, etc --
like blame, but a bit more advanced even. This is a complex task -- and it's
exactly what WikiTrust does. Which is why I'm writing about it.
Who is the author of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Thousand_and_One_Nights&& ?
Maybe you sould ask for a exception on the GFDL, make so the authors
of GFDL make a new version of the license that support how a wiki
work, to avoid report 3 authors for a text that (by fact) has 80
authors.
This is not an option for PediaPress, which is a service that lets users pick a
set of pages from Wikibooks (and soon also Wikipedia) and make a print version
from that. You can of course always list all authors, but even then, you may
want to rank them by the amount they contributed. And if you are able to do
that, the GFDL allows you to only name the top 5, wich makes thinkgs a bit less
confusing, especially in print.
Anyway, you seem to miss the point. I'm not looking for ways to track
authorship, I already know the solution. I want to discuss the technical aspects
of implementing it on Wikimedia servers.
-- daniel