Wikipedia:Attribution does not require blame

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Shortcut WP:NOTBLAME

This page in a nutshell: Attribution must be given to all contributors, but the licensing requirements do not include their precise edits.

Wikipedia's licensing requires that attribution be given to all users involved in creating and altering the content of a page. Wikipedia's page history functionality lists all edits made to a page and all users who made these changes, but administrative deletion actions may remove or hide some of this information. A list of authors satisfies the attribution requirements without providing the specific contributions.

• 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 blame command.

The Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use, section 7.b.iii, specifies a list of authors as a valid attribution method:

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. In January 2022, via email with a Wikipedia administrator, Wikimedia Foundation Legal shared their perspective reaching the same conclusion.

Deleted pages may be 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Wikipedia:Selective deletion is a copyright cleanup technique that has been superseded by revision deletion.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.

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.

Wikipedia:Revision deletion § Notes on use:

Wikipedia:Revision deletion § Changing visibility settings: