I chose to look up Cornell's West Campus on Wikipedia. Looking through the discussion, there are a few examples where collaboration is clear. Most obviously, there was a debate as to whether the War Memorial should be included on the page since it is not a dorm. It seems that it was decided that the article should include non-residential buildings as well as the houses, so references to the War Memorial were left in. Also, there is a quick question regarding Sperry Hall (which I had never heard of). Another user simply answered the question and remarked that he updated the article.
In this specific page, the users made notes of the changes they made. For example, one says "I am temporarily re-adding the history of the gothics." This allows others to know exactly what was done, and the conversation that took place above it mentions the rationale behind the edit. However, the users do not cite references. Wikipedia even alerts visitors to that fact at the top of the article's page. This talk page makes it easy to see what was done, why, and by whom, but if the editor was qualified to make such remarks.
The most obvious thing I see to change is the display of the histroy pages. I found them pretty difficult to navigate at first (what is this? "noting Image:Wc201021.jpg is about to be deleted WP:NONFREE"). I think the lack of simple usability prevents novice computer users and infrequent visitors from diving into the community right away. As we discussed in class, users usually start out making small changes and then becoming more immersed in the community. However, I think it would definitely be piossible to speed up this process. Also, a user (let's call him "my dad") might know a lot about some pretty obscure topics but be just about clueless in regards to computers. "My dad" would never be able to figure out even how to make basic edits on his own, so his potential contributions never even get a chance to show. A simpler, less “experts-only”-looking interface could make users like this much more willing to dive right in.
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I agree about the usability issue, I found that the interface was not intuitive. I'm curious how these debates occurred, since I didn't notice any type of "forum"?
ReplyDeleteYou didn't actually mention it in your post, but i like the (citation needed) in the title. I remember there was an article in the Daily Sun last year discussing all of the Bond actors. The author updated Wikipedia to support his statement that one actor was the best bond. He then took a screen shot and cited Wikipedia as saying that his bond was the best ever. Surely his post was taken down shortly after, but there was a brief time that it was live. And even if it says (citation needed), how many people actually observe that?
You bring up a good point in saying that the talk page doesn’t really telling you anything about the qualifications of users who made particular comments. One decent heuristic might be to know whether or not the person has attended Cornell. Clicking on one of the user links in the history brought me to a profile page, whereupon I found out that there is a WikiProject for “Cornell University.”
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Cornell_University
Here I found out that the user in question is indeed a member of the Class of 2009, and which raises my confidence in the credibility of that user’s edits. This process is clearly less than ideal though, since I had to do some digging to verify this.