Attribution

I suppose a discussion of attribution of content in the wiki is more of an issue for a discussion of ?cyberculture, but since it's relevant to the contribution of this wiki, I shall include it here.

I want this wiki to recognize and support individuality and discourse, and disagreement. I don't know what this is going to look like in a few months or even a few weeks. I think some of our pages will be more polished than others, some pages will be collaborative from beginning to end, others will have ad-hoc discussions throughout. We don't need to decide how to manage these different kinds of contexts, and given the form of text, and our generative/editing process, I don't think it matters much. Problems will be dealt with later.

At the same time, as part of the material that I've written to sort of "kick things off" I've pushed the notion of attribution as a possible tool in resolving conflicts around different opinions and first-person content. Collaboration in the context of ciwiki, I think, need not erase ?individuality or individual perspective.

I think simple signatures (eg. "--tychoish") that link to our opwn personal pages in the wiki should be enough to keep our distinct voices from fading into the background, and enough to clarify the origin of opinions. The location of the attribution doesn't strike me as incredibly important, a note saying "I wrote the initial version of this --tychoish" on a discussion page may be the most appropriate in some cases, where if we were inserting in-line comments or threaded comments, signing our contributions seem to make sense.

My personal feelings are:

• No content should be removed from the wiki because it lacks attribution.

• First person needn't be expunged from a segment of text regardless of the presence or lack of attribution.

• Some content (eg. a "literature review") probably doesn't require attribution, particularly if it's constructed by more than one person.

• If it seems awkward to include citations in-line in a page, but you feel attribution would be helpful, useful, feel free to start/append an attribution to the discussion page.

• Contributors to the wiki should all feel welcome to edit each other's contributions even if the section in question is in the first person. We should assume by default that edits are made in good faith.

--tychoish