Where content is quoted or reused by someone else, it should be as automatic as possible to include provenance and attribution information, or at least to be able to trace back to original sources.

Ideas often get messed around when they are quoted and reused. While we can’t stop people plagiarising ideas, if it were really easy and automatic to cite the source, more people would do it.

I know very little about how fedwiki does it. What is apparent is that fedwiki can compare two similar pages, to show what is the same and what different. While this is useful, by itself it doesn’t facilitate e.g. compilation or comparison pages, where what you want is to be able easily to see sources from several different pages.

This clearly interacts with edit history, but not in a wholly straightforward way. A contributor who adds original material should be credited with authorship, but someone who merely rearranges material could be credited with contribution to the page, not with authorship. Pasting in material would ideally include provenance information. If provenance was not available as part of the pasted information, the editor could be asked, “is this your original material” and to reference its source if not. This is, of course, extra work; but if an editor does not confirm the source of any material, it should be marked as from an unknown source. Text search – as with plagiarism detection systems – could be helpful to alert an editor about previous occurrences of material they are adding, and then take the work out of referencing by simply presenting a list of possible provenance options for them to select from.

Fedwiki does this in a very interesting way.

Other wikis that keep a record of all edits also show who has made which edits, so it is usualy possible (if rather time consuming) to trace who has written what. However, when a piece of text is copied, the authorship is not copied alongside it — this is in any case hard to do, as an extended piece of text may have contributions from several author/editors.