avoiding forks (was Re: [Wikipedia-l] public service ads in Wikipedia?)

[Tony Sidaway]

Sj said:
> It would be wonderful and appropriate to list contributors at the
> bottom of each page.

Might be better if this was a "Special:".  Unless I see Marvin Minsky's
name in the list of contributors to an article to AI, or whatever, the
names of the contributors aren't going to help a lot, and I really can't
see fripperies like that persuading tenured professors, published authors
and so on, who aren't already interested in the concept, to contribute
their bits.
Having said that, the reason I got interested in Wikipedia was that I was
looking up the firearms researcher John Lott.  As it happened, a person on
an IP number that corresponded to the institute that employs John Lott
started to vandalize the John Lott article. An editor subsequently
reported on [[WP:ViP]] that the person identified himself as John Lott. 
Now that was quite a fascinating introduction to the immediacy of
Wikipedia and to the organic, self-repairing nature of the system.
I was hooked.

It was also nice to see that one or two people I knew from Usenet had
found their way here.