On Oct 30, 2007 1:48 PM, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
And even if it is a discouragingly "expensive" task for high-profile articles, here's one definition of "reasonable": a short list of the top five or so contributors (as suggested in GFDL section 4B), which could be cached at an interval proportionate to the total length of the history, i.e. greener articles would allow the "principal authors" list to be re-cached more frequently, something like [[George W. Bush]] much less so.
Most of the edits to a page with a long history are not by authors.
If in fact I'm hallucinating (must be that gray acid) and meta-data like this wouldn't actually put us any closer to obeying the GFDL, it would at least be interesting for casual research while browsing unfamiliar pages, and doing "&action=history&limit=5000" (or worse, loading one page of 50 at a time) to get an overall response to the mental question "lol, so whose work is this, really?" can be painful.
We're already obeying the GFDL in this regard. We list all the contributors. Don't believe the FUD.