[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[phoebe ayers]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> If I counted well, article about France has between 8.000 and 9.000
>> edits up to this moment. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that
>> this article will have 100 distinctive and significant authors -- if
>> not now -- then in 5 or 10 years.
>>
>> I am reading now a B5 format book with ~40x70=2800 characters per page.
>>
>> One name has, let's say, 15 characters (btw, I am sure that we will
>> demand listing the names if they are available, not just user names;
>> as I said before, some kind of user boxes may be used for that). 100
>> names would consume 1500 characters (let's say, 1400, a half of the
>> page).
>
>
> Half of a page for the list of authors of France.  Now, I just checked, and
> a printed copy of the article on France takes up about 25 pages.  So
> attribution takes up about 2% overhead, if indeed there are 100 authors like
> you say.

And *I* just checked that, and there are in fact 4077 authors (2100 IP
addresses) for [[France]] on en:wp currently, according to
http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl. This whole argument
is off by an order of magnitude if you assume that only 1 in 4 authors
is significant. And how do you tell precisely which of these 4000
authors is, in fact, significant?

-- phoebe