I typed in Long Island to Wikipedia, and I found a pretty extensive article with quite a few subtitles including geography, demographics, transportation, education and others. Bryant, Forte and Bruckman (2005) discuss several ways Wikipedia’s maintenance is a collaborative effort. For example, they describe the discussion space as one which is focused on reaching consensus about the article. When I clicked on the discussion tab for the page on Long Island, I found nuanced conversations about many topics that were or are on the site. For example, people engaged in conversation as well as debate over how many counties were on the Island. There were nineteen different dialogue inputs in this particular section. What’s great about the discussion page is that the user’s name an date appears at the end of their comment, so it is clear how many people are engaging in conversation about a topic, and its possible to track the same user’s comments throughout all the posts, which could be useful in deciphering credibility and reliability.
The history page revealed further insight into Wikipedia as a collaborative technology. Bryant, Forte and Bruckman (2005) discuss how user involvement changes the longer the user has been on the site. They differentiate between new users who start out making minor edits on articles with content they are very familiar with and experts who are concerned with maintaining Wikipedia as a whole, rather than individual articles. There is evidence for this distinction on the history page of the Long Island article. Several different users seem to have made one minor comment each correcting either grammar, or a small mistake. There are also several users who have each made many revisions about specific details on the site. From this, it is evident who are the new users and who are the experts. It is possible to discern this information because each user’s comments are identifiable through their username which appears next to every comment they make as well as the date and time of their comment, and what the actual revision was.
Clearly, Wikipedia survives because of a combined effort from interested users.
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Nice post. Wikipedia is pretty good at helping its users determine credibility and reliability, but it is also true that many of the site’s users are anonymous. Many of the benefits you list stem from the fact that a username is displayed, but in the absence of a registered user, only the IP address is shown. A change you could make, then, would be to restrict editing power based on site registration. This way, small mistakes and grammar could still be fixed by anonymous users, but big changes could not.
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