Who Wrote That? is a browser extension for Mozilla Firefox and Chromium-based browsers, such as Google Chrome, that provides you with authorship information on Wikipedia.
Most articles on Wikipedia are free to edit. While that makes the editing process comfortable, it may also lead to texts on the site that are biased or factually wrong. Sometimes, you may want to know who wrote an article, or part of it, to help in your judgement. Wikipedia editors may also use authorship data for moderation on the site.
The information is already available on Wikipedia, but it is not well presented and it takes time to go through it.
Who Wrote That? is powered by WikiWho, a platform that parses texts to reveal ” who wrote and/or removed and/or reinserted which exact text at token level at what revision”.
The extension is compatible with most modern browsers. It requests access to the site’s it supports, but no more than that. Currently, Who Wrote That? works on the English, German, Turkish, Spanish and Basque Wikipedia articles.
A click on the “Who Wrote That” sidebar link opens the main interface. The extension pulls data from WikiWho when it is opened. Once done, you may hover over text to get information about the author.
Popular articles may have dozens or even hundreds of authors, while less popular ones may have one or a handful of authors only.
Most authors are displayed with their username and the time of the edit. There may also be a reason for the edit, and information on how much the author has contributed to that particular article.
Links are provided to look up an author, open the author’s talk page, which allows you to read messages and comments, and the contributions page, which lists all of the author’s contributions chronologically.
Who Wrote That? is closed automatically when you navigate away. You need to open the interface again, when a new article is loaded in the browser.
Closing Words
Who Wrote That? is a handy browser extension for Firefox and Chromium-based browsers that gives you quick information about authors on Wikipedia. While mostly useful for site editors, using the extension may help others in judging the quality of an article.
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