A wiki idea - authorship

Some of the threads on this site are Wiki threads.  The first post can be edited by staff, the audience, and depending on the settings, other members of the site.   We do this a lot on the summary threads like book summary, video summary, stuff like that which will be plugged into the review grids.  Threads where the first post is always being updated.

The thing about the wiki posts is that there is no author associated with the post.  Some of these posts are updated hundreds or even over a thousand times, by several dozen authors.  Since it's a work of the community, we don't assign an author to the post.  

This makes sense to me.  What if I created a wiki about natural textiles and someone tried to be helpful and added bamboo or soy silk to the list.  I would not want my name associated with anything calling that 'natural'.

However, some people like the idea of having the name of the original author associated with a wiki page.  

So here's an idea.  What if we had the option to (or not) have authoring information visible?  

It could look like this

This Wiki was created by so and so
with contributions from
long
list
of
names

There are no promises this will happen.  It might be a terrible idea.  I'm just putting this out there to see what the community (hint, that's you guys) thinks.  


The first problem I can see is that it is very probable that the long list of names could easily be longer than the post itself.  

Here is an example of a wiki: https://permies.com/wiki/109851

It's a book review thread so the first post is a book summary.  We're always finding more to add to book summaries so we generally make it a wiki.  


Here's another wiki: https://permies.com/w/0/31762/

It's been edited nearly 400 times already and gets edited a couple of times a week.  There are probably 50 to 100 people who have contributed to that page already.  

What if the authorship started off automatically minimized and said "Credits - Click to View" and then someone could view all the people who have contributed?

Could someone explain why we want names on a wiki?  My understanding is the nature of a wiki is to be 'authored by the community'.  It's based on the idea of the Hitchhiker's Guide.

So, the basic reason I think it would be nice to have authorship on a wiki is that it gives credit to contributing members of the community for the work they have done, which was part of the hub-bub that precipitated this discussion.

Without names of contributors being displayed on wikis, I think it detracts from the sense of ownership and involvement in those pieces of work. Because not everyone in the community contributed to every wiki page, so I think authorship in wiki pages restores that sense of personal attachment and involvement in community efforts. I think this part of why in-real-life community projects typically have something where contributing volunteers leave signed handprints, footprints, or stuff like that. It personalizes the community effort made and dignifies the contributing members.

That is kind of why I think it would be nice to have authorship added to wiki pages, because it would bring in that aspect of personal involvement in community efforts.

So, after a good discussion behind the scenes, we're thinking a better way of doing showing authorship would be to make "view revisions" visible to the public on all wiki pages.