Traceable authorship
From WhyNotWiki
Wiki features edit (Category edit)
Contents |
[edit] Derived/traceable authorship/licensing
I need to know / be able to trace authorship of every paragraph/section of the site. To determine copyright ownership (and thus control of license).
[edit] Contribution attribution
Whenever you submit a change/addition, it is attributed to you by default. But if you submit a quote, you should set attribution to its author. You will then be associated with the quote only as the quoter/poster, not as the author.
[edit] Effective/sum calculated/derived article attribution/author list
This feature would make it possible to deterministically (and instantly) determine/calculate what "attribution line"/"author list" should be given for a particular article.
Why do we need it?
To let people who cite the article actually put something meaningful for the "Author" field of their citation-- rather than the generic "such and such a web site" or "contributors to whatever.com" or something.
[edit] How is it calculated?
- contributors of all major edits (or those who have passed the threshold of having contributed a "significant" number of minor edits) will be collected as the "authors" list
- contributors of all minor edits will be collected as the "contributors" list
It's not really fair for the authorship of a page to suddenly change from a single author (who did most of the work) to two authors simply because one person fixes a typo. Sure, they should get credit for fixing their typo. But they should not get more credit than is due either!
Some thought will need to be given to what exactly constitutes a "major" or "minor" edit.
An author, once counted as an author, will permanently be listed on the author list (as long as all revisions derive at least indirectly from his contributions). In other words, the list of authors is expected to only grow, not shrink.
Almost always, an article will be edited gradually, through many, many minor edits. I suppose, though, it is possible (though very rarely) that a non-derivative rewrite would take place that did not derive from the work done by previous authors. If that was the intention, and it was intended to entirely replace the article done by the previous authors, then the current article should first be deleted and then a new one (which by default has 0 authors) created in its place.
[edit] svn blame - like
Have the equivalent of svn blame, where in one column on the left side it shows the author, and on the right side it shows the text/content that this author contributed.
Tyler [ asenthus .nsth
[ ausnth ansuhass
Bob [ asnsapchu suhsnuht
[ snatuh shu
[ saushantuh usnthunshu
[edit] "MediaWiki diff and blamemap" - like
Rather than doing it line-based like svn blame does, perhaps just color-code the sentences/words that each author contributed and show them in their native context (in their paragraphs) like the MediaWiki diff and blamemap extension does. Often people's changes are just minor changes, like single words.
There would also need to be a key/legend for the colors used so we know which author name each one corresponds to.
Aliases: Article attribution
