Article attribution: hot to provide incentives for experts

[Andrea moro]

I am new here, therefore I apologize if this has already been debated. I think this is a much needed project. I have written an entry on a group-blog advocating 1) some form of quality certification, 2) some form of article authorship attribution. The blog is in italian, therefore it is probably not understandable to most, but I am providing links at the end of the post for reference:

Anyhow, I would like to know if there has been discussion about 2). The point I am trying to make is that a quality encyclopedia not only has to be certified by "experts" but also has to attract the best writers. Different types of academic work is recognized and rewarded, not only original, peer reviewed work. Any work where knowledge is disseminated is valuable to the academic author and to the university or institution that employe him or her. The problem with wikipedia is that it is very hard to recognize who did what in an article. Would it be possible to think of a way to recognize authoship of articles? Clearly an article has dozens of contributors, but there is a difference between those that do typesettings, and others who do the research and writing. One possibility is that the expert "certifier" upon certification, whenever possible also attributes the authorship to those that provided the most important contribution (perhaps in decreasing order of contribution, as some scientific disciplines do). It might also mention the others that heped with minor edits, typesetting, and so on...

The point of all this is to provide incentives for academics and experts to write and improve the quality of the articles. With the current model, academics have no incentives to contribute except goodwill. This is good, but we need to capitalize on the fact that universities and research institutions already pay their researchers to "write" without specifying where they should publish - the beauty of academic freedom. If citizendium acquires reputation and readership, than having co-written "version x" of one of its articles becomes valuable to an author and its institutions if they both get the recognition.

I feel that this would make another essential step towards improving wikipedia's model.

Here are the references I was talking about
http://www.noisefromamerika.org/index.php/articoli/391.
The article has also generated a hot debate on the italian wikipedia: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bar/Discussioni/Il_parere_di_uno_stubber_esperto_accademico

[Simen Rustad]

I believe the governing idea is that there will be no article attribution on CZ, beyond what can be found in the History page. The main reason for this (which I agree with) is the tendency to be more reluctant to change an article "belonging" to another contributor.

As for academic incentive, the role of Editor could be an incentive if CZ gains common recognition. Also, what difference does it make if you have a list of authors? Any partial author may claim his/her part in the creation of an article, and his role will be supported by the History page of the article for anyone who wishes to check his/her claim. In fact, I believe this actually makes the system far more accountable than coauthored articles in journals.

While I sadly can't your original article, I'm interested in how you would propose to implement such a system. For instance, what degree/type of contribution would be neccessary to caim coauthorship?

[Andrea moro]

There is really no specific proposal in the article, but I think it would be worthwhile to have a discussion. I believe it could make a big difference, as I said. It is true that the Editor's role is potentially recognizable.

One possibility is to live attribution up to the editor. The editor could decide whether the article should be attributed to the people who contributed the most, and put a notice at the end of the entry. It is not farfetched to think that If I were the editor of the Economics section (my field), I could solicit contributions from colleagues, if I could promise that their contribution would be somehow recognized. Universities value "public service" of their faculty and this could definitely belong to that type of work.

I don't see why a signed article tends to generate inertia. Once a certification has been released, the article is open for a new version, anybody can contribute. In any case one has to weigh the inertia with the advantages of inducing better quality from more expert contributors.

[Zachary Pruckowski]

The problem with attributing an article to a specific person, or even ranking all the people, is that it's nearly impossible to do. 

For starters, most our articles are largely from unknown WP contributors at the moment.  Secondly, it's impossible to rank the worth of contributions.  I mean, number of characters is worthless, because the contribution might be a copy-paste from the public domain.  In fact, in my mind, the most worthwhile edits will be finding sources for all the un-sourced stuff we inherit from WP.  Then there's the fact that making an infobox is a lot fewer characters than writing a paragraph.

Also, we don't want to encourage one-up-man-ship by encouraging people to try to get the #1 status on a bunch of articles, because that's going to have negative consequences in terms of article quality, stability, and community that will outweigh any gains we get from competitive people.

The current plan is that one of the editors involved in the article will "sign" the article in approving it, which involves putting their seal as the "editor" (not creator) of the approved version, which doesn't imply creation of the article (or even that the editor contributed to it).  Even that risks people wanting to stack up on approvals just for the credit, and changing articles slightly to get their name on it.

[Andrea moro]

The problem with attributing an article to a specific person, or even ranking all the people, is that it's nearly impossible to do

you don't have to attribute all articles

Also, we don't want to encourage one-up-man-ship by encouraging people to try to get the #1 status on a bunch of articles, because that's going to have negative consequences in terms of article quality, stability, and community that will outweigh any gains we get from competitive people.

I was arguing for the opposite; by attributing responsability, you elicit more effort from the writer. I guess there is some truth in both position, the problem is how to strike the right balance.

[David Tribe]

Grazie mille Andrea

I'm not argung for change but to record an isolated event:

I showed a printout of approved CZ Horizontal gene tranfer article to a successful colleague. He started looking for the authors name. I asked him why and he replied: to check whether its worth taking seriously. ie credibility.

[tkjazzer]

wouldn't the most ideal way to get recognition be to write a review for a journal and then link the article from your edits in CZ?