Considering Attribution

On a federated wiki, attribution is central to composing. While the local wiki and neighborhood of wikis can manage the edits in the Journal, there's a social / human side to work with.

First, it's in how the page is composed. Beyond Personal Attribution gives some alternative ways of handling attribution when the author keeps changing: it's a matter of phrasing the intro tag from "So and so writes" to "this page argues".

But attribution more than naming a source. As we've seen from work with other wikis, users don't want to see wiki work as protean, fungible, changeable. Lurking behind the fear of revising someone else's work is attribution:

quote

attribution undercuts the idea of the community. These documents are meant to be "proto-pages", the sort of primordial ooze of collective thought. When we get too wrapped up in who said what, we lose some of the advantages of that culture.

end quote

But

quote

Of course, the world does run on reputation, and you may want to reap advantages from stuff you have done in federated wiki.

end quote

This problem can be handled by upstream work. Once the story is sorted out, we need to let others in the neighborhood what's going on. Tell People What You Did.

quote

One approach to credit is simply to Tell People What You Did. This is applicable to wiki, and to life in general. When it matters, citation can be usually sourced and demonstrated.

.

This is the social move in attribution that moves reputation forward. It's the social equivalent of tracing cites. Tell People What You Did is a public move of attribution, so we recommend using a list of articles that you started in a list of articles that you contributed to on the index page.

Also part of the same gesture is using Via Attribution, a reminder of the importance of weak links.

In federated wiki, authorship is Discoverable but not Obvious. And even where it is discoverable, authorship is complex. For that reason we suggest you consider alternatives to personal attribution when you write. We suggest some such alternatives here.

One approach to credit is simply to Tell People What You Did. This is applicable to wiki, and to life in general. When it matters, citation can be usually sourced and demonstrated.