On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 3:47 AM, Petr Kadlec <petr.kadlec(a)gmail.com> wrote: I also have a blame engine of my own design. It is new and I haven't released the source. I think I have a more positive view than you do. Blame engines as a tool can certainly inform copyright discussions and provide relevant information, even though I agree they aren't by themselves a complete solution. For example, with situations where one is trying to list a fixed number of "major authors" (as provided in the GFDL, for example), blaming tools can make a reasonable guess at which authors are relevant. They also help estimate the answer to important meta questions, such as "How many authors does a typical Wikipedia article really have?" When the license calls for attribution to be treated in a "reasonable" way, I suspect that one could make a good case that relying on a good blame engine would often generate a reasonable attempt at attribution, even though there are cases (like translation) where they will fail. Attribution generated by blaming can be a good starting point, though it may not necessarily be the final answer. -Robert Rohde

It's more of a starting point, to flag editors who may have made the edits. All that would remain is looking over if that user did in fact make that edit (and if they didn't, it's back to square 1) On Jan 26, 2009, at 3:38 PM [Jan 26, 2009 ], Gregory Maxwell wrote:

Platonides wrote: This particular case should be easy to fix, but only because we're fairly meticulous about flagging bot accounts. Essentially, we'd be falling back to a human saying "that account is a bot, don't attribute anything to it". Which, I suppose, is a fairly straightforward and objective decision to make, but it's still a human decision made according to someone's personal point of view. Certainly such a fix won't easily generalize to more controversial cases. Sort of reminds me about the story somewhere in the Jargon File about closing one's eyes so that the room would be empty. Deciding who are the "major contributors" to an article is ultimately a subjective issue; it can be algorithmically approximated, given a suitable weighting function (such as "number of words contributed"), but ultimately the choice of the weighting function itself is to an extent a matter of personal opinion. Trying to achieve neutrality by focusing solely on purely objective metrics is likely to produce results that are neutral only in the sense that everyone can agree that they suck. Such a convention (or, better yet, a separate field for attributing edits to someone else) would help a lot. Of course, it would only be as reliable as the users entering the data, and wouldn't help with legacy edits. A particularly common and tricky use case would be text copied from one article to another (possibly across different wikis). Either the blame tool would have to chase such references (which seems impractical at least in cross-wiki cases) or it would have to rely on the users making the copy to correctly determine the actual author(s) of the copied text (a process which is highly error prone, even with computer assistance, and likely to lead to errors accumulating as text misattributed once is further copied using the incorrect attribution). Also, there would obviously have to be some way to correct attribution errors after the fact. Which, of course, leads to the question of who should be authorized to make such corrections, and how this would be any less subjective than revising the author list directly. -- Ilmari Karonen