On 10/30/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Kwan Ting Chan ktc@ktchan.info wrote:
No? Software change such that from a certain point on any edit will automatically update a credit page. At the same time, start running something that goes through all the non-deleted edits and update the page as well.
Yes, we could just extract the long list of names (including offensive vandal names) from the history, store it, and update it.
What real advantage would this serve over just directing people to the history page? Lack of duplication doesn't seem like enough of a win to justify keeping the extra data.
Presumably each author would only be listed once on the credits page, as opposed to possibly hundreds or thousands of times on "the history page". That alone makes a credits page much more useful than "the history page".
Most of the people who edit a page aren't authors, certantly not in the copyright bearing sense, and it's unfortunate and confusing that "Throbbing Monster Cock" gets equal attribution for adding the word "the" to an article as an actual author.
I think a semi-automated credits page would make the most sense. So "Throbbing Monster Cock" would get attribution by default, but this attribution could be removed manually (or in some cases, by a bot). Likewise, names could be manually added for copy/paste moves or whatever.
But when someone makes a significant edit to a page, they would be attributed automatically by default (they could opt-out of this, I guess).