I used the page for my school Thomas Jefferson High School located in Alexandria, Virginia. The content on the page is very detailed and as far as I can tell, up to date. Looking at the edit history, you can immediately see a about half IP addresses and fewer registered users. This means that there are a lot of unregistered and possibly first time editors which attests to “legitimate peripheral participation”. These first time editors were contributing snippets of information in which they had unique expertise on or making changes to errors thus drawing them into the editing process. One of the items that was discussed at length about this article and comes up in many Wikipedia articles is that it is too long and filled with trivia. Since users get edit what they choose, they often edit what they know and like. This occurs especially with subjects with niche cult followings, which skew the content of the system away from informative articles.
Looking at the specific edits, you can see every change made to the page over the course of its lifetime by going to the edit history. This is where the collaborative effort becomes interesting. As users both registered and unregistered add content, a set of bots or automated computer scripts will magically make maintenance changes, fix typos, and change tagging data. Another set of users looked like they spent a good deal of time making copywriting changes and unifying the format of the page to fit the Wikipedia standard. Though this article did not spark a great deal of controversy, admins sometimes step in to settle disputes and removing vandalism from histories.
The discussion page reveals that many of the edits were not just blindly made and that each addition was often discussed and to much length. This sets many of the Rules and sometimes the Division of Labor if you think of Wikipedia using Activity Theory. There is a review section in which some editors rated the article on how well it was written, how accurate it is etc. This section also included improvement areas in the article. This defines the Object or objective of the activity system.
Adding an awareness element to editing pages would be very interesting so that users could see when other users are editing and possibly chat with them. This would help diminish edit wars. Though there are some tools out there today such as Dan Cosley’s Suggestbot, better recommendation systems that can suggest parts of an article for users to edit would be very helpful.
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It's interesting how you say that there are a lot of unregistered users and ip addresses editing this article. I wonder if there are some articles that are more likely to have unregistered users editing them. Of course, there are some pages that wikipedia "locks" (due to vandalism or some other reason) so that only registered users can edit, but I wonder if among other pages, there are some that are more likely to be edited by unregistered users
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting topic to look at it. I am curious as to how the page has evolved over the year. Since schools are relatively stable and do not change all that much, did you find that the changes were small and the page is relatively the same as it was when it was first created? Also, were there repeat people who edited or was it scattered? Good post!!!
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