Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-20302766-20130407124958/@comment-188432-20130407130637

By the way, you should absolutely make sure when you export pages in main or templates or other namespaces where posts aren't signed, that you preserve all revisions of each page. That way, you have a list of authors that is equal to that which exists at the original wiki, and (with the addition of an edit summary containing a link back to sherlockholmes.wikia.com) you're making a reasonable effort to satisfy CC-BY-SA requirements. It takes longer to do these "all revision imports", but it's worth it.

An anomaly you'll experience by doing this is that all previous authors of the material you import will become members of your wiki. But they become members based upon the earliest date of the earliest revision that you import. This can mean that some people will have a join date that's earlier than the creation of the wiki!

It doesn't hurt anything, but when Wikia redesigned the UserPageMasthead (UPM)—that is, that big header area at the top of user pages–they didn't really consider importing and exporting for the "join date" field. They base it on the earliest edit, not the time that a person makes their first appearance on the wiki. Technically, that field should be called "edits since their first edit on xx date xx" rather than "edits since joining this wiki". The UPM makes the mistake of equating "editing" with "membership".