CZ:Proposals/Pilot to allow Citizens to take credit for pages

This proposal has not yet been assigned to any decisionmaking group or decisionmaker(s).
The Proposals Manager will do so soon if and when the proposal or issue is "well formed" (including having a driver).
For now, the proposal record can be found in the new proposals queue.

Complete explanation

Here finally is a real proposal for what so many people have asked for, engineered, but never actually put in front of the Editorial Council. We would, to a limited extent, allow Citizens to take authorship credit of articles. My aim here is to articulate a proposal that I'm willing to try out (not necessarily to make our permanent policy) and that we can make into an Editorial Council resolution.

This would (for now) take the form of a template placed at the bottom of the page. (Please, do not create this template yet. Let's talk about what it should look like first.) Features of the template:

• Small and unobtrusive print.
• List the contributors to an article strictly in alphabetical order.
• Contributors would add themselves. (This has various good features I will explain under "reasoning" below.)
• Names would appear only if there were three names in the list.
• To avoid issues about what counts as an "important" edit, a person could take co-authorship credit for the very smallest of edits (e.g., removing commas).
• We would try this out in just one or two workgroups (the template would be removed from articles in any other workgroup).
• There would be a small notice wherever the template appears that pithily conveys the notion that, despite our having listed these names, the article is wide open and available to work on by any Citizen.

I propose that we do a pilot project for at least one month, maybe two or three, in which the template's use is limited just to, say, the Biology and History workgroups.

Finally, if you want to do this in some other way, I'm willing to listen, but you need to spell out how the other way would work in some detail.

Reasoning

I'll fill this in later.

Implementation

To be filled in later.

Discussion

I'd be delighted if anyone would like to take this one on as driver. If not, I'll drive it on... --Larry Sanger 22:22, 12 February 2008 (CST)

A few questions:

• Would Citizens be permitted to add other Citizens to the author list? For example, if Citizen A and B mostly write an article and Citizen C adds a comma, could Citizen A add Citizen C as an author to raise the number of authors over 3 and hence get credit for their work?
• What happens if 100 people edit a popular article and all ask for credit? That won't happen during the proposed few-month pilot, but that would be an issue eventually as Citizendium grows.

With the current Citizens, I think this proposal would achieve its goals. However, I fear this proposal won't scale well.

• Currently, if someone were to game the system and claim credit for a comma-fixing spree, people would notice and get annoyed. As the number of Citizens grows, more interactions will be with strangers, so gaming the authorship system will become more attractive.
• As we scale, we'll get a lot more immature people of various sorts who are more likely to game the system. If as few as one in a thousand Citizens decide that claiming authorship for as many articles as possible is a fun game to play, the credit system would become worthless since the fake authors would drown out the real ones. Writing a good article takes days, but one can add a comma to a different article each minute!

--Warren Schudy 23:20, 12 February 2008 (CST)

• Authors should be given credit according to how much approved additional content is added to the article. If there is an argument over authorship content, there should be some admin mechanism in place to resolve the issue. I think the idea of getting credit by just adding commas, is open to abuse. Meg Ireland 23:30, 12 February 2008 (CST)