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