[WikiEN-l] Attributing articles to their authors

[Nathan]

I guess some people have a rosier view of human nature than I do. I
can easily foresee a practically unlimited number of conflicts over
credit. I can easily see a dozen major news articles based on who it
is revealed wrote a particular article. What if it turns out that 40%
of the George W. Bush article was written by an Australian 12 year
old? (Not at all unlikely). How will that increase the trust in
Wikipedia of the general population?

How would you deal with the fact that a large portion of the content
on Wikipedia was contributed not just under a pseudonymous nickname
but by a nameless IP address? I'm afraid that manually written credits
in the content of an article is just not ever likely to happen. There
are far too many problems for it to ever get beyond an intellectual
debate on a mailing list.

If you are really into the idea of credit, investigate something
similar to David Gerard's suggestion.

Nathan

On Jan 24, 2008 4:29 PM, Ian A Holton <poeloq at gmail.com> wrote:
> How about a separate author tab, similar to the revision one? All
> authors of non-minor marked edits could be named, possibly in the form
> of a "tag-cloud" where weight is given to the amount of edits and bytes
> added.
>
> Ian [[User:Poeloq]]
>
>
> On Thu, 2008-01-24 at 21:22 +0000, Thomas Dalton wrote:
> > On 24/01/2008, Shmuel Weidberg <ezrawax at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Jan 24, 2008 4:08 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > It doesn't need to happen often for it to be a problem. Even if 99.9%
> > > > of articles never have a problem, that still leaves over 2000 articles
> > > > that we'll have to fight over.
> > >
> > > I really don't think it's a problem. There are plenty of resources.
> > > There will always be people who will be happy to adjudicate cases like
> > > this. I think questions about authorship will come up less often than
> > > requests for article deletion. And many of those debates are even more
> > > stupid than the ones that would come up about article attribution.
> >
> > Are you sure there will be people willing to adjudicate? I certainly
> > wouldn't want to be the one to tell someone their contribution isn't
> > worthy of credit. There are plenty of people willing to adjudicate
> > content disputes, sure, but this isn't about content, it's about
> > people, and that changes things.
> >
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