On Thursday 22 January 2009 16:56:57 Sam Johnston wrote: > On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 8:46 AM, Nikola Smolenski <[email protected]> wrote: > > We can develop tools that would identify principal authors with > > sufficient accuracy; and this list of authors is likely to be short > > enough to be practically included in full. > > I disagree with this assertion regarding automation and can think of many > situations both in which this does not hold true, giving false negatives > (e.g. single/initial uploads of large contributions, uploads using multiple > aliases, imports, IP numbers and not-logged-in contributions, etc.) and > false positives (e.g. minor edits not marked as such, spam/vandalism, > comprehensive rewrites, deletions, abuse/'attribution whoring', etc.).
I find your disagreement wrong, your lists of examples mostly meaningless, and even a large percentage of false positives and false negatives preferrable to no attribution at all. > masse. Oh, and I would place anyone who considers their own interests > taking precedence over those of the community (both within Wikipedia and > the greater public) into the category of 'tool' too :) If people feel they are not adequately credited for their contributions, they are less likely to contribute. Proper attribution is a need of the community. > Wikipedia is a community and those who contribute to it for egotistic > rather than altruistic reasons (even if the two are often closely related) > are deluding themselves given they were never promised anything, least of > all grandeur. What value do they really think they will get from a 2pt > credit with 5,000 other authors? If it is relevant to their field(s) of > endeavour then they can draw attention to their contribution themselves (as > I do) and if they don't like it then they ought to be off writing books or > knols or contributing to something other than a community wiki. Great way to care about community interests, there. Sure to draw a lot of new contributors. > "Requiring even 2 pages of attributions be included after every article > inclusion is a non-free tax on content reuse, and a violation of our > author's expectations." Luckily, that is not required. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
