There are all kinds of role crediting systems out there. Movies have a huge list of credits; television not much so. And CNN, for example, usually has none (that I’ve seen, anyway). But let’s talk writing.

Books get credits right on the front cover, and on the title page. Newspapers have bylines, and a staff section. Magazines have a staff list not too far from the “From the editor” section, and bylines near the article title. Blogs and websites are usually just copyrighted by that individual.

But what about wikis?

Wikipedia has no credit. Of course, they have attribution on their commons materials, but they operate loose and fast often with often no regard to the actual owner.

Citizendium credits images, and signed articles. But in a culture of real names, where does the credit go? In its culture of experts, amateurs, and “average joes” there has not yet been any kind of way to represent yourself—to be able to stand up and say “I did this.” Many people have done it on their user pages; I’ve done it on mine. But how can you tell how much I’ve actually worked on? Of course, you could go to the page history. Let’s look at one I mostly wrote, “Bowling.” Looking through the edits, you can tell that most of them were performed by me, and a lesser amount were done by Hayford Peirce, Ro Thorpe, and Chris Day. But would you know that otherwise? Would you care?

In the wikipedia world, this might be considered “Ownership”: I wrote it, I maintain it, it is *mine*. But that’s where the similarity stops. In Citizendium, I particularly don’t care if someone comes along and adds material, as long as it’s pertinent and relevant. Heck, if they go in there and re-write a lot of my work to make it better, so be it, but I don’t consider it “my property”.

For a second, let’s pretend.

The year is 2018, and I have become the world’s foremost authority on the sport of Bowling. I’m a strikemaster. I annihilate splits. Shoes? My shoes cost 100,000 US Dollars. The laces are diamond-encrusted. My bowling ball has a huge crystal jade core. I dress like Elvis, but with more bling. People all around come to ask me, “How did you get so good? How do you know so much?” I simply tell them: “Citizendium, baby, the C Z. Let’s go get us some drinks, darlin’. I wrote the BOOK on bowling!” I hand out my business card, that proudly displays (in flexible OLED technology, millions of colors) the article I wrote. “Read that, and learn from ‘The King’”.

In this, far-fetched future, I have epitomized the worst-case scenario (in more than one way) that represents the core concern with doling out credit to authors. As ‘King Elvis’ I have simply obliterated any trace of contributions by others on the wiki. But I contend this is a very, very unrealistic scenario.

Let’s look at it from another angle. Academics write papers about their scientific findings and send them off to journals for publishing. Their work is credited to them, and everything is cited. More often than not, their statements of contribution are not false, they understand what is at stake. To be flaunted out in front of the scientific community as a fraud has very deep implications both emotionally and academically. “You will never work in this town again!”

Let’s return back to the reality that is 2008, and the wiki is upon us. Wikis, by definition, are collaborative. There’s just no escaping it. It’s entirely safe to assume that any major article on any wiki out there has been touched by more than one hand. Sure, there are dominant authors who wrote most of the material. But what’s the harm in enabling them, on the page itself (not buried in the history, or on their user page) to say, “Yeah, I did most of the work on this article.” If everything in the article is true, valid, well-written, and relatively unbiased then it only does well to strengthen their reputation in the community as someone who knows a little about that subject. Will it inflate their ego? Probably a little. But the very nature of Citizendium is that people from the same discipline can get together and develop articles around common knowledge.

I think the average person understands what a wiki is about, and recognizes that one sole author isn’t responsible for it all.