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