Revisiting giving authors credit

[Drew R. Smith]

I remember some time ago there was discussion about whether or not authors should be given some sort of credit for the articles they write. I remember one of the reasons the discussion died was that it was too difficult to implement. Going through the extensions mediawiki has on their website, I found Extension:AuthorInfo, which goes through the history of an article, and creates a list of authors with the top contributor to the article first. Then one simply adds <AuthorInfo limit="X"></AuthorInfo> (X being the number of authors one wants to show) anywhere on the page. If the extension is installed, we could even add it to {{subpages}} or an undeveloped footer template.

Drew

[Daniel Mietchen]

I didn't follow these discussions closely (didn't use the forum much at the time) but noticed that there were also other reasons for them running dry: It was agreed that counting the number of edits (which is presumably what the AuthotInfo extension does) would not be the way to go, and there were disputes over how large X should be, or whether individual names or Workgroups should appear at all on CZ pages.

[Drew R. Smith]

Point taken. I'm just pointing out that there is a way.

[Hayford Peirce]

There have been a couple of *extensive* discussions of this in the 2.5 years that I've been here, with many clever and elaborate proposals floated as to how this could be done.  But if there were ten people discussing the matter, there were also ten different proposals, so nothing ever came of any of it....

[Tom Morris]

If we are rethinking credit for authors, perhaps any discussion on the subject can be guided by the experiences of software developers.

Giving authors credit can be seen as analagous to people having their names listed at the top of source code: it gives people a sense of ownership of the code, or the article in our case.

In software, there are three positions that are discussed:

• Code Ownership
  
• Code Stewardship (sometimes called 'weak code ownership')
  
• Collective Code Ownership
  

I'll leave you all to work out the analogies and how this applies to author credit - but the links here (and Google) will give you some idea of the various opinions that people in the software business have to this problem. May be useful as a discussion point.