[Foundation-l] Proposed revised attribution language

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/3/15 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com>:
> I think the practice of using summary lines for attribution
> has from the start been viewed as a temporary solution,
> only to be used until we figure out a better way to handle
> content such as translations from other language projects.
>
> I think if we do go towards creating an easy link which
> contains a list of editors culled from history with no
> duplicates, it might include a method of externally
> adding attributions into that plain text form, for just
> such translations and imported content from other
> sites, where the content may even have a large list
> of authors itself.

That would be great, if it can be made to work.

> When and if that eventually materializes (next year in Jerusalem;
> yearning for Zion; by and by, lord; when the lion shall lie down
> with the lamb - insert your own religious affiliations allusion
> to the eternal return here) naturally the summaries should
> be purged and the attributions temporarily lodged there
> given their proper place. I could even imagine some
> semi-automated method that would while stripping off
> the summaries, simultaneously scrape off the urls and
> wikilinks in them and for good measure append them
> to the list of editors.

Unfortunately there is no standard way of writing attribution edit
summaries, so automation is going to be difficult. Semi-automation, as
you say, might be possible for those summaries that include links (a
person would need to determine if they are attributions, but that's
easy enough - a couple of seconds a summary with a decent number of
people helping out could get it done is a reasonable amount of time),
but what about content taken from offline sources? Probably extremely
rare, but can we risk failing to correctly attribute even one or two
sources?