[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[Andre Engels]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 4:29 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:

> Of course, we may tell to such authors to make a research for every
> single page and to find which contributions are still inside of the
> article and which are not. So, instead of working on the matter,
> author would have to analyze contributions for more than year (I am
> not sure that I am able to make analysis of the article about France
> in one working day; even if I assume a number of [existing and
> non-existing] tools for that).
>
> It is, simply, not reasonable; as well as it is not toward our goal to
> spread free knowledge.
>
> However, I really agree with you that all significant contributors
> should be attributed.

Although it would not solve the problem for your hypothetical writer,
I think for the general case it would be good for us to _provide_ this
information with the article - either on the article page, or on the
history page, or maybe somewhere else (but I would prefer the first,
or if that doesn't work, the second). The information could be created
automatically from the history file, and a kind of bot could slowly go
over the articles to update it, giving each user's contribution to a
page a number, stored in the database. When a page (or history page)
is then shown, all users with either more than X contribution, or more
than Y% of the total contribution, or among the Z (5) largest
contributors would be shown (with a quick-and-dirty version of the
algorithm to get a 'maximum' contribution for those who contributed to
the page after the last time the information was updated). It might
not be that much use to your writer, who still would have 200 lists of
10 or 20 names to deal with (still, 4000 names, many of them
duplicates is much more manageable than 20.000 of them), but for more
reasonable cases where whole pages or large portions of pages are
used, it could give a good indication of which names to include and
not to include.


-- 
André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com