The first Wikipedia page about my hometown, Glen Ridge, NJ was created in 2002. It consisted of only county, population, a little geography, and about a paragraph about demographics. Since then, it has grown to include that plus government, education, notable residents, controversy, and history. The first 50 edits seem to have come from only 20 different users, but one user in particular contributed 6 times within the first 50 edits. Viewing the history, this same user makes edits approximately every 4 edits by other users and clearly makes up the majority of the posts and acts as a sort of moderator.
On the history we can see the user (or IP)that edited the entry, the date and time of the edit, the new size of the entry, and a note about what they edited.
One area in particular in which there is a lot of evidence of collaboration is in the “notable residents” section. One main reason for this is that over time people become famous and editors deem them “notable” and add them to the list. In January 2008, Ezra Koenig (of Vampire Weekend) was added to the notable residents section. There was an alert that it needed a reliable source…which is pretty amusing to someone that knows the town well, and is around my age, because we all went to high school with him. Alas, it is not obvious to people from out of town that this is true and someone soon after added a reference to an interview in which he mentioned attending Glen Ridge High School. Another example is about Anthony Fasano, and someone changed the line from tight end on the Cowboys to the Dolphins. Facts about people can change, and there is clear collaboration going on in order to keep them all updated.
The notable residents section is by far the most edited part, however people are maintaining the other parts that are subject to change, such as government officials and stats about SAT scores. The demographics section is correct, but it has not been updated to result census results. That being said, although there is collaboration going on, it seems like the parts of the entry that are most active are the more “interesting” areas, or perhaps there is some self-interest in adding certain people (maybe that you know?) or higher SATs score.
I have never edited an entry, or even looked at the history, and I think that one change would be to make viewing the revision history easier. As a beginner, it was pretty hard to tell what was going on, and what had been changed at certain times-- and this might discourage newbies from attempting to learn the ways of Wikipedia. There should be more instructional features for nonregistered users to encourage collaboration by showing how easy it is.
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It is interesting to be the governing person deciding what counts as a notable especially with Wikipedia where anybody can decide something is worth knowing and add it. You noted that facts about people can change and there is a need for collaborative editing to keep everything updated. I think that the fact that Wikipedia has such a large community that consistently makes updates that people come back to editing it and results in network effects where more edits are made. I am skeptical of other systems that try to create a second community (such as Google’s Knol since abandoned) because it would be so hard to gain the initial community and overcome the initial barrier of network effects.
ReplyDeleteI agree that there does appear to be some collaboration involved in updating this page. I wonder what the motivation is though. You mentioned that there was 1 user in particular who made a substantial amount of updates. It would be interesting to see who this person is in the community. I assume they must live there, but we can't be sure of that. Perhaps they deserve their own section under "notable people" along the lines of "Best Promoter of the Community."
ReplyDeleteI also found that Wikipedia did not have the most intuitive interface, which could easily discourage newbies. It's interesting to think about how much information is potentially missing, such as community history, because the older folks who know the information can't understand the interface.