[Wikipedia-l] History

Sat Apr 1 15:16:28 UTC 2006

Hello,

I would like to read what you think of the following:

When someone copies some text that is under the GFDL to a wikipedia article, the
rule is to write about it on the bottom of the article to pay attribution. I
think this is not fair for users of wikipedia, as for them the only attribution
is in the History section. Take as an example an article of five paragraphs, two
from some other GFDL source and three from a user contributions. The X source
will me mentioned in the article, while the user will be mentioned only in
history, among minor edits and bot edits. Remember that the GFDL says that
authors should be mentioned in a section entitled "History" not in the
Document.

I think we would follow the GFDL better, if there was a feature in MediaWiki
that would allow a user to make a contribution, and put a note and/or a weblink
instead of his username to the history (independent of the summary note). I mean
something like:

* (cur) (last) 23:13, 19 February 2005 User1 (&#8594;This)
* (cur) (last) 23:12, 19 February 2005 128.205.218.14 (&#8594;Something -
translating a paragraph)
* (cur) (last) 18:15, 18 February 2005 66.134.120.164 (&#8594;That - partial
English translation)
* (cur) (last) 15:17, 16 February 2005 '''FOLDOC''' (copied text from FOLDOC)
* (cur) (last) 10:05, 16 February 2005 UserX (some edits)

Instead of having a history like this:

* (cur) (last) 23:13, 19 February 2005 User1 (&#8594;This)
* (cur) (last) 23:12, 19 February 2005 128.205.218.14 (&#8594;Something -
translating a paragraph)
* (cur) (last) 18:15, 18 February 2005 66.134.120.164 (&#8594;That - partial
English translation)
* (cur) (last) 15:17, 16 February 2005 UserX (copied text from FOLDOC)
* (cur) (last) 10:05, 16 February 2005 UserX (some edits)

And having to put a note on the article (''This article is based on...'')

It would be nice for all users to be able to make contributions like this, or at
least sysops or bureaucrats to be able to change attribution of some edit to
something other than just a username (this would be very useful: many times
there are new articles from anonymous IPs from copyrighted sources and we
receive permission under the GFDL when we check about the copyrights).

What do you think? Is this possible?

Konstantinos (geraki at el.wikipedia)