Certain information in the 'contribs' list for this specific contributor indicated the high level of involvement that this particular user had for this topic. Furthermore, delving into the specific contributions by this visitor gave an even broader perspective on relevant topics around Microfinance such as microfinance on the web, self-help groups, credit unions, and flat rates. Also, it was useful to have the edit labels because it specified the section in each article that was edited by the user. Many of his contributions actually centered around POV discussions, which are commonly found on wikipedia articles. Thus, there were a large number of edits indicated on both the talk and the main article page from this user which showed his investment in this particular topic.
Apart from identifying a user who contributed both to the main article and to the discussion page, I was also able to find relevant information on both novice and expert wikipedians and their most common behaviors. It was apparent that the novice users were undertaking behaviors expected from peripheral participants, such as reorganizing sentences or correcting minor grammatical or factual mistakes. The records indicate that some of these users became heavily involved in the transformation of the Microfinance article. The 'diff' functionality for tracking changes gave me a clear visual representation of the magnitude of these changes, as did the indication of how many bytes were added in that particular edit.
Overall, the collaboration tools on Wikipedia are quite useful. For experts and novices, the impact of these tools differs. As Bryant discusses, experts are concerned with Wikipedia as a whole, the novice is more likely to focus on small edits. Overall, the tools seem to be ample for addressing the needs of both these type of users and do not need to be changed. The article discussed that for the novice, the location and prominence of the 'edit' link leads to initial edits. Once they become comfortable and accepted within the community they can start contributing and taking full advantage of the collaboration tools on Wikipedia.
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It sounds like the user who you followed really takes advantage of the watchlist feature, which alerts him or her of articles of possible interest. I'm not an expert on wikipedia, but the watchlist seems to be one of the most valuable tools that general users can use to maintain the quality of all of the articles on the site. Redirecting users to articles that they are likely to know more about probably increases the net number of edits per day, since the watchlist takes out most of the work of searching for an article that you might be able to add something to.
ReplyDeleteParticularly, I like looking at individual contributor's profile pages This consolidates all of the information they have contributed to Wikipedia on one primary page. This is interesting because it allows us to get a better picture of who is writing wikipedia, and more importantly, can help to give some context to certain edits in addition to the context given on the discussion page. This sort of grounding could probably be better integrated into the discussion or recent changes page, but that is more of a usability engineering problem rather than a genuine design change.
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