[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 1:18 PM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu> wrote:
> On Friday 24 October 2008 01:19:20 phoebe ayers wrote:
>> Pity the person who wants to reprint [[George W. Bush]] from en:wp...
>> it has 13228 authors (6366 IP addresses!) Sure, most of them are
>> vandalism, but I haven't seen any tool to pull out significant
>> revisions. Does anyone know of such a tool or script?
>
> On Wikitech-l we just had thread WikiTrust and authorship that discussed how
> such a tool could be made. It is doable.

For copyright attribution purposes?  Show me.

Most greedy "auto-attributing" code I've seen has a tendency to
incorrectly attribute text in cases of simple re-ordering.  It's
reasonable enough for measuring the text churn rate in articles, and
it may be good enough as a starting point for attribution, but if
their is no way to correct it when it's wrong then it probably can't
be used for that purpose. (Also, consider the case where half of an
article is copy and paste moved from another article.)  Not that it
shouldn't be done, but I don't expect it could replace other past
proposal such as adding a second 'talk' page entitled "Credits".