This is a good example of how academic citation practices subtly launder out the role of compute, trial-and-error, and practitioners in favor of academia. OP concludes that if you want to cite Fidge & Mattern for credit for 'developing the <i>theory</i>', that's fine. But notice, that's not how it started and is an answer to a different - no one was asking, 'who finally explained why vector clocks work in a rigorous way', the very title is 'who <i>invented</i> vector clocks' (repeated in the first sentence, and in various forms thereafter as 'system...developed', 'introduced', 'idea...developed', etc), and she objects to WP describing her as uncovering who really 'invented' vector clocks. The actual answer to her question would seem to be Parker 1983. (And looking at the description of 'LOCUS' in <a href="https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Classes/739/Papers/parker83detection.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Classes/739/Papers/parker83...</a> , it sounds more like they are reverse-engineering why LOCUS works...)