[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[Milos Rancic]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 6:57 PM, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Yes, it would be good to have such tool as the first step. It would be
useful to have it even during this discussion to get a figure about
what do we demand from authors who would write books based on
Wikipedia.

So, as I hope that you are interested in making that 0:-) may you give
numbers for, let's say, countries [1] of the world and species Felidae
[2].

And, of course, we need lists of contributors:
1. Every contributor [let's say, without bots, while it may be
disputable, too] with an account and with immediately not reverted
edits. -- as the largest group of authors.
2-n. Other ideas which you mentioned.

It would be, also, good to have an approximation of the sizes of the
books based on full article size (without templates and images).

[1] - Let's say, this list lists them inside fo the table:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_outlying_territories_by_area
[2] - This template is good enough:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Felidae_nav