[Foundation-l] WikiGadugi Wikipedia Rating???

[Robert Scott Horning]

Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:

>geni wrote:
>
>>On 1/22/07, Jeffrey V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
>> 
>>
>>>Under the GFDL you give consent to relicense your changes. This means
>>>whomever is the last editor of an article is the "Author", not the
>>>whole chain of editors to that point since subsequent editors are simply
>>>relicening your content when they add their own edits. By editing and
>>>saving the article, the final editor is the author in this sense.
>>>      
>>>
>>Please re-read the GFDL:
>>4.
>>
>>B List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities
>>responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified
>>Version, together with at least five of the principal authors of the
>>Document (all of its principal authors, if it has fewer than five),
>>unless they release you from this requirement.
>>
>>I do not release you from this requirement.
>>    
>>
>
>Then Wikipedia in its dumps must IDENTIFY AT LEAST FIVE AUTHORS AUTHORS 
>since I have no crystal ball as to who wrote what.
>In this case, Wikimedia is violating the GFDL by failing to publish 
>authors along with content.
>  
>
At least in theory, all MediaWiki content pages have a "diff" function 
that would be able to identify in some way the authorship of each and 
every word of every article.  I'm not saying this is a computationally 
trivial task (far from it), but the raw information needed to calculate 
that is provided in the MediaWiki databases.  IMHO this is a far better 
metric to identify who the "five principle authors" of a given page 
might be, at least going off of word count as a metric.  This would 
remove edits by blatant vandals and other cruft, as well as 
administrative actions such as adding and removing AfD/VfD notes and 
other cleanup tags.

Another alternative, and easier to do computationally, is to count page 
edits.

BTW, as a general note for Wikipedia, the "static version" of Wikipedia 
pages does list in plain text all of the contributors to each page.  See 
for example:

http://static.wikipedia.org/wikipedia/en/index.html

Which lists every author who has touched this page, including in this 
particular case our fearless leader/founder Jimbo, and several regulars 
to this mailing list.  I actually like how this is done from an asthetic 
viewpoint, but it would be difficult to display this information on a 
dynamic/editable page.

 From a technical viewpoint, compiling this list of authors is hardly an 
easy task if you are trying to republish the content, but the required 
information is there if you are willing to go through the effort.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning