Wikipedia:Attribution does not require blame
A list of authors satisfies the attribution requirements without providing blame.
Glossary
- Attribution is the credit that a contributor receives, required by the Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use, section 7. Licensing of Content. It should not be confused with attribution of sources as covered by Wikipedia:Attribution.
- Blame is a user's precise contribution, the individual diff in the page history. The term is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Wikipedia:WikiBlame tool and the
git blamecommand.[1]
List of authors
The Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use, section 7.b.iii, specifies a list of authors as a valid attribution method:
Through a list of all authors (but please note that any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions).
Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia § List of authors clarifies its use in practice.
A list of authors does not include page content and cannot provide blame. Therefore, the licensing requirements do not include blame.
Attribution without full history
Deletion
Deleted pages are generally restored if their content is non-problematic and desired for reuse, but there are alternative methods described in Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia § Reusing deleted material. Since deleted revisions are not publicly visible, attribution is provided by a list of usernames. When such a list is a separate page, it is tagged with {{Attribution history}}, which includes it in Category:Pages used to preserve attribution.
Wikipedia:Selective deletion is a copyright cleanup technique that has been superseded by revision deletion. It involves deleting the page and restoring specific revisions, so it uses these attribution methods.
Revision deletion
When using Wikipedia:Revision deletion and deselecting the Delete editor's username or IP option, usernames are not deleted. They remain visible in the history, which still functions as a list of authors. This is the setting generally used, including with the RD1 copyright criterion.