What's wrong with using the article's history? (was Re: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Astrobiology encyclopedia and Wikipedia)

[Daniel Mayer]

On Thursday 31 October 2002 04:31 pm, Koyaanisqatsi wrote:
> Ortolan88 wrote:
> >We have no guarantee that the entries will remain the same either.
> >The bioastropedia is an excellent web site, but we aren't going to
> >import their articles wholesale and leave them untouched forever, are
> >we?
>
> Well, no, I didn't expect us to.  I guess the question is "at what point
> have articles changed enough from the source that it's ok to remove the
> citation"?  I would (today, anyway) urge people to leave the citations in
> and change "works cited" to "works consulted"--if for no other reason than
> that several notable academics have been caught plagiarizing lately.

General statement:
What really is so wrong with giving this attribution information in the edit 
summary that actually adds the info to the page? That way we know for sure 
just what the attribution is for and somebody can hit the 'cur' link to find 
out just how much has changed since that text was added. 

We could have another check box for saving edits stating 'major edit', 
'attributed source' or something else that would highlight that edit in the 
article's history. We could also allow URLs placed in these edit summaries to 
work - thus we have a link-back.  

In a longish article having attributions in the article text could become 
unwieldy and ugly - thus prompting the natural wiki habit of taking-out the 
ugliness by removing the attributions. We already have a mechanism for 
attributing work and we should use this in these cases. 

I don't think we should be giving special treatment to externally generated 
text by allowing those attributions in the article text when we don't allow 
Wikipedia users to similarly attribute their own work. The history is for 
logging attribution metadata, no? So then let's use it. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)