Assignment 11, Beth

I looked up some information about Louis Armstrong for my music class, and as often, Wikipedia came up as the first Google match. This page contains an extremely detailed description of many aspects of his life, music, and legacy as a result of a highly collaborative effort behind the scenes.

In the history page, the first thing I noticed was that many of the editors include descriptions of the focus of their last edit, as well as ideas for additions. For example, one user exclaimed “need more about music.” Users consciously try to get others involved in editing the page to make it more thorough. There were several cases that I noticed where a user would edit something out based on doubts of its factual validity. Sometimes this sparked immediate dialogue in the discussion section where other users would form a consensus on whether the information was indeed factual. Although I did not see any information about people’s work, references to authority on the facts were common. If the information was deemed factual, the Wikipedia page would be reverted to its previous state to recover lost information. These examples of consensus building and the need for references to show authority confirm that Wikipedia is, in fact, based on a community effort with guidelines. Further signs of these underlying rules show up in cases where a user personally warns another user for posting inappropriate things and obstructing the truth. This act shows the ability of the community to try to eliminate bad behavior.

Bryant, Forte and Bruckman (2005) discuss how a user’s editing behavior changes based on how long the user has been a part of the editing community. First time editors of the page tended to edit for succinct language and formatting. There are three main editors of content in this page who dominate the edits of content and discussion for the page’s lifetime. Additionally, in the discussion page, there were many instances of newer editors asking questions to double-check with others about a new addition they wanted to make on the page. These more experienced users tended to answer most of the questions in the discussion page as well.

The discussion seemed to work well with the different threads, but most of the dialogue pertained to edits that had already been made. Linking specific edits to discussion might make collaboration easier, so users would not have to go back and forth between the two pages. Additionally, the display of the history page could be improved by deleting some of the wordiness in the log and writing out some of the links that are abbreviated. When viewing one specific change history, it might help if it looked more like Microsoft Word’s track changes, showing exactly what was deleted or added with the ability for comments.