[Foundation-l] History splitting (main namespace)

[David Goodman]

Perhaps we simply need to establish that a link to a WP article is a
GFDL reference, and let it go at that, without the complications. When
the rules get into the position of hampering the writing of the
encyclopedia ...

David

On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 1:58 AM, Charlotte Webb
<charlottethewebb at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 8:20 AM, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
>> Emanuele Casadio wrote:
>>
>>> This would be a great idea but, wait a minute... will this procedure
>>> be GFDL-compliant?
>>
>> When we renamed [[en:Angola/History]] to [[en:History of Angola]]
>> (after it was decided that subpages was a bad idea), we copied the
>> text, because back then there was no way to rename a page. In the
>> revision history, it looks as if I (user:LA2) created this page on
>> February 25, 2002, but I probably only contributed the initial
>> line.  The oldest versions from 2001 can be found in the revision
>> history of [[Angola/History]], but this was never documented.
>
> We're not discussing the same thing here.
>
> Emanuele is talking about intentionally "archiving" the old edit
> history of an article (to avoid reaching 5,000 revisions at the same
> title).
>
> You are talking about creating a new article with information cut from
> the "==History==" section of the main article (to avoid letting it
> grow too big to load)
>
> Either of these could be considered GFDL-compliant by Wikipedia
> standards as long as the page titles and link syntax are standardized
> enough to be machine-readable (so at the current time, no).
>
> If I wish to mirror the [[History of Angola]] article and credit all
> editors who may have directly or indirectly contributed to the current
> content of this article it would be easy to scrape the edit history of
> [[History of Angola]] and the upload log for each image in the
> article. But it would be much harder to get a list of users who have
> edited the [[Angola#History]] section. Even if they have never edited
> [[History of Angola]] they may have contributed material which was
> cut-n-pasted from the former to the latter.
>
> Perhaps we add something like this on the toolserver, some way examine
> all edits to an article and get a list of users who have made changes
> to a section with a certain title. This could be integrated with some
> kind of "extended attribution" tool as long as it knows which rocks to
> look under.
>
> There would always be a number of false positives (credit where none
> is necessarily due) to this approach. However this is already the case
> when you consider vandalism and reverts, or edit wars or any other
> case where no unique revision is added. I guess one could get more
> sophisticated with this, by considering only the earliest revision
> when duplicates are found, then get a list of unique users
> contributing to the short list of revisions.
>
> False negatives on the other hand would be harder to correct.
>
> —C.W.
>
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG