Contributions and other alternate topic views

Summary

Add a topic view that shows who contributed each part of the topic.

More detail and ideas

The contributions view would be a normal copy of the topic, except that all contributions would be highlighted with a colour unique to the contributor of that piece of text. Other cues that could be used to indicate the different authors might include popups, a sidebar with authors names, links to authors after each block of text, etc.

Related ideas

I'd also like to see a similar thing where colours are used to indicate the relative age of various parts of a topic.

Reasoning

Currently, it is hard to determine who is the author of which parts of a document without reviewing either the recent or the whole history of a page. Currently this leads to people placing their wikiname after each contribution they make, and also the accumulation of bunches of signatures at the end of topics. Being able to view who made each part of the topic would be a useful feature.

Both of these alternate topic views are designed to help people judge the content, its accuracy etc and to add better accountability than just the diffs.

-- PaulWise - 22 Sep 2004

nice idea Paul.

-- MartinCleaver - 23 Sep 2004