On 12/23/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/23/06, Katie the Obscure nihthraefn@gmail.com wrote:
Several people have mentioned (in this thread) crediting authors of a page on the page itself. Wikia has/had an attribution feature which is somewhat similar (see http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Attribution ). This incarnation probably wouldn't work for Wikipedia, but if it appears useful, perhaps someone can submit a feature request/argue it to death in the Village Pump until all our eyes are bleeding.
Two problems:
- it presents some performance challenges on pages with longer histories
What kind of challenges? Just cache the results periodically - then you only have to look up the modifications made since the last cache. The only real challenge is a political one, not many people have permission to make the changes to the software and database to support it.
- It's a terrific vandalism tool which is, I believe, why wikia turned it off.
Considering the ability to "remove_credits", I don't see why it's any better of a vandalism tool than any other. Care to elaborate?
(according to http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Attribution, it was removed for performance reasons)
It also, like page history, does a poor job of fairly representing attribution.
It's a start, and it's much better than the page history. In addition to "remove_credits", there should be a way to "add_credits". Then you've got all the advantages of a manually edited list, plus the additional advantage that it's automatically populated with a good default.
Anthony