[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 2:47 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 2008/10/24 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>:
>> More importantly:  You've picked a extreme corner case. Extreme corner
>> cases shouldn't be neglected completely, but they are bad places to
>> start policy discussions.
>
> Please do take into account that the most popular and "interesting"
> articles are also often the most likely to have a very large history,
> though. So if you're compiling a collection that's not focused on
> fringe subjects, you're likely to hit some articles that have very
> many authors.

That is a fair point.

Though you could still find more representative article than GWB, even
among popular articles: at least at one point in time it had the
longest revision history of any article. It's also unusually long, and
atypically popular. It's probably a worst case, or close to it, in
terms of both possible and actual author count.

I don't know that "fringe" is really the right word either. There are
many subject areas which are not at all fringe, things which get whole
sections in libraries, where none of the articles are massively
multi-authored. So I'd probably reverse the sense of your point:  If
you're working on anything on a popular media subject you'll certainly
come across some articles with long lists of authors.

The end result of both outlooks is, I suppose, the same but I think
the notion that most (or all) Wikipedia articles are massively
multi-authored is fairly widespread, and thats not a correct position
on an article by article basis most of the time (while it's quite true
for Wikipedia as a whole), so I like to take the opportunity to point
that out.