[Wikipedia-l] Where to put acknowledgements

[Ray Saintonge]

Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:

>On 21-08-2002, Jan Hidders wrote thusly :
>
>>WikiWiki is also about community building and as the biggest
>>kid on the block Wikipedia has a certain responsibility here. The more
>>interlinked the open-content sites are, the better it is. And as Axel
>>already said, it is simply a matter of common courtesy: treat others as you
>>would like them to treat you.
>>
>Knowledge, information and content cross all borders. It is the property
>of mankind.
>I agree that some acknowledgement should be made but not neccessarily
>on the page. I think most of us take advantage of a lot of sources and
>resources. We don't want them all listed on the pages ?
>OK. What's the consensus here ?
>
Here's my vote supporting the inclusion of credits on the article page. 
 A distant second choice would be for a separate acknowledgement page.

This isn't an issue of somebody's legal rights.  (The information in 
these long lists of kings is in the public domain.)  It's as much an 
issue of courtesy and public relations.  We don't sign our articles, but 
many Wikipedians use their user pages to give a long list of articles to 
which they have contributed, and that's OK.

The person who compiled these long lists must have done a lot of work to 
do this, and it doesn't harm the article to have the credit appear 
prominently.  When the efforts of others are taken for granted they can 
easily feel ripped-off.  There's no question of lawsuits, but sometimes 
we can lose potentially valuable contributors, or we can get a lot of 
negative comments on other people's pages.

Certainly our pages change over time, and a part of the editing process 
is making sure that links work and that they continue to be relevant. 
 When the links cease to be valid, they can always be removed at that 
later time.

Eclecticology