How to credit authors: proposal

[Anthony.Sebastian]

Regarding the issue of crediting authors/editors of CZ articles:

Consider a non-editable tabbed subpage entitled "contributors".
Keep an automatically updated list of all contributors, in order of the date of their first contribution, or in alphabetical order. [Someone writes code for that.]
Asterisk, or otherwise highlight, 'major' contributors--'major' in respect of volume of work or of importance of contribution.
Editor(s) who approved the article take responsibility for determining who gets asterisked or highlighted.
Since ongoing process: "Contibutors" subpage should indicate date last updated.
Since number of authors fewer than number of edits, page much shorter than History page.
Highlighting done by editor quarterly.

This might satisfy everyone or none.  History page okay, but not 'reduced'--i.e., reader has to work hard in many cases to follow a contributor's work.

Others may wish to suggest modifications of this idea, or different ideas.

[Chris Day]

I like the idea with respect to the automatically generated list but i think i would forgo the asterisks for quality. This is so subjective and will potentially waste a lot of time.  Or worse, cause arguments.

[Larry Sanger]

As I said last night, Anthony, I generally like this idea.  If it would help motivate people, without dismotivating collaboration, I'd be in favor of it.

The only difficulty of course is that it would require creating a new plugin for Mediawiki--not something we can get working on immediately, although anyone could ask the Mediawiki programmers to consider adding the (optional, of course) plugin.

[Anthony.Sebastian]

Larry, I agree, after rethinking, on eliminating asterisks/highlights.  Probably alphabetical order best.  Link each name to history page where name first appears--just objective information.

How does one contact the Mediawiki programmers, and who has best leverage with them?  I could draft a detailed description of how we would want the page to function, for modification by the Editorial Group.

[Derek Harkness]

It may be possible to have the list of contributors ordered automatically by using the history comparison system to automatically count the number of characters of text inputted by each contributor. This could be ordered in two different ways, by the total quantity of submitted text over all time or by only the quantity of text remaining in the current draft of the article.

[Stephen Ewen]

Total quantity would provide high motivation to authors and I am all for it.

[Anthony.Sebastian]

It may be possible to have the list of contributors ordered automatically by using the history comparison system to automatically count the number of characters of text inputted by each contributor. This could be ordered in two different ways, by the total quantity of submitted text over all time or by only the quantity of text remaining in the current draft of the article.

Or both, because the difference between the two has meaning.

Would also include proviso re 'quantity' vs. 'quality'.

What good can we say of computerized algorithmic analysis if we can't accomplish the project as developed so far?  And if accomplished, the further beyond WP we go.

[Larry Sanger]

Why not a veritable statistics rundown?  Surely there can be an analysis done of

• number of edits
• number of characters added (approximate word count)
• number of characters deleted (approximate word count)

Who knows?

Anyway, I think you'd want to contact this list:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

Again, we might be able to do it, but it would probably have to wait in line a fair bit.

[Greg Woodhouse]

Total quantity would provide high motivation to authors and I am all for it.

Quantity of what? It's possible to add paragraphs to existing articles without too much effort, but harder to write new articles or contribute to existing ones in such a way that the article is cohesive, focused, and readable. It is also important to provide adequate coverage of the subject matter. I'm afraid authors might be motivated to write 5 (or 10) average articles, instead of one good one.

[Robert Winmill]

Giving credit to authors could be a useful tool in the recruitment of experts.  I could see that they could include contributions to CZ as an addition to their CV's.

[Stephen Ewen]

I think a really great way to deal with giving author credit is to simply have it be editor nominated. They are the ones who will know which ones played very important authoring roles in the content they approve.

I really do think giving author credit is important. And for those reluctant over the real names policy, it would serve to overcome it mightily.

[Thomas Simmons]

As a supplement to this we could list type of contribution. Some people may only copy edit or check sources but that takes time and these activities are essential to maintaining the quality of writing and content. Others advise on the discussion page on where to go with the article, new news, old news that has been omitted and is significant and so forth
 Something like:
A. Authors
B. Editors
C. Advisers -- sources and general topics