I decided to look up the St. Louis Rams on Wikipedia. They are my favorite football team and since the draft is still lingering on everybody's mind, I wanted to see if their page had been updated. Revisions to the page have been made fairly recently (April, 25th) and the differentiation of users editing is high. It's not just one person making all these changes. Incredibly enough, the players they drafted this past Saturday are already listed in the current roster, even the players signed in free agency.
Collaboration is definitely key for Wikipedia. When looking at the history page, there is tons of evidence of collaboration. The history shows users who have made edits to posts by other users. Sometimes they add things to what a user has posted and sometimes they undo revisions made. Obviously the users are big fans of the Rams, and Bryant discusses their action becomes more frequent in the same "place" because they are motivated to provide and share their knowledge of the Rams.
I think changes to the history page need to be made in order to enhance collaboration. The history page is kind of hard to understand and it seems like there is a lot going on. I think collaboration would be much smoother if they kept it simple. As in, this user added "this information" at this time under this section. Edits on this addition will be showed underneath, kind of like on blogger it says this post has "2 comments". Inaccurate information can also be highlighted. Wikipedia could put an asterisk by sketchy information, or something like that; just something that lets users of Wikipedia know this information has no source or something.
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I agree with you, the history page in wikipedia is really difficult to understand especailly if you are new and do not understand it. The first time I viewed the history aspect of an article was for this assignment and I was so confused. I literally started clicking around to try and figure out how it works and what did what. Being an unregistered user, I wonder if registered users get a message or something giving them a quick tutorial about using that page and what every link mean so it is not so confusing and people can understand the edit history of a page they and others are contributing to.
ReplyDeleteWhile it's clear that fans of the Rams have a lot to contribute to the Wikipedia page, I think it would be interesting if we could find out how many changes come from Rams fans versus NFL fans or Draft enthusiasts in general. Coming from the South, I know a lot of people who obssess over where their favorite college players go on to play pro ball. I wonder what kinds of features Wikipedia could add to usernames to help identify their interest in a subject as well as establish some credibility and reputation. For example, I would take edits from "Eric Dial- Rams' Fan" a lot more seriously than I would take comments from "Eric Dial- enthusiastic hater of professional sports." Just a thought!
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