On 21/12/06, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Giving people credit for their contributions on the page itself would encourage [[WP:OWN]] violations. I think keeping all credit on the appropriate history/image page is best.
People who contribute on Wikipedia still own copyright to their content, they are merely licensing it under GFDL (and so others can use/modify/copy it, subject to the new work being under GFDL).
I understand the point of WP:OWN - but it's not an excuse to avoid crediting people for their work. Having the GFDL notice and history page is certainly good faith, but it doesn't really seem like particularly good or useful attribution. Most of the history page can be viewed as "spam" if you're looking at it with an interest in attribution - as the bulk of it is usually minor edits (formatting/language/style/accuracy tweaks) and vandalism/reverts. The more major the article is, and longer history it has, the more useless the history page is in this regard.
Zoney