I can honestly say it looks like Wikipedia has done all they can to foster a collaborative environment. As I mentioned earlier, perhaps a more graphical interface would help inexperienced users like myself adapt quicker, but even so I was able to figure things out pretty fast. It would be nice, however, to see how many people are viewing a page and perhaps start live chats with them, but having a live chat/discussion part of every page where anonymous users can exchange impromptu information about that page, perhaps sparking edits.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Assignment 11 : Eric Gunther
When trying to think of something I know a lot about, one of my friends suggested my fraternity. So I checked out the Wikipedia page and sure enough there was a plethora of information about our national organization available. The page itself was broken down into two logical sections: founding and history, and notable alumni. The founding and history part was consistent with what I knew to be true and the notable alumni was a large list of names, some of which I knew, but most of which seemed somewhat obscure and new to me. Upon clicking the history tab I was able to view the entire page history. This is the first time I've ever viewed this function of Wikipedia and I was at first confused by what I was looking at. For one Wikipedia is almost entirely text, so it was a lot to take in at first. However, upon further inspection, it seems that Wikipedia puts a lot more information at our fingertips than I initially realized, I was able to view every single page revision and who changed it in the pages history! It appears that there are well over 500 revisions of this page, but I only viewed the newest 50. I was able to view history statistics, perform a search, and most importantly view all the revisions. However, this would be worthless if I was not able to see what specifically changed between versions and who changed it. Wikipedia provides two links, allowing you to view the difference between a revision and both the preceding and current version, with all the important information highlighted. Furthermore, you can view the edit date, who edited it (a username or IP address), the size of the page at that time, discussions regarding the edit and what section they edited. It seems that most of the more recent edits have been to the notable alumni section, probably people trying to add themselves or people they know. There also seems to be a lot of "fix vandal work" edits. While there seems to be very little personal interaction for collaboration (ie. the lack of discussion about the edits) people are collaborating indirectly by all adding to the same page. I also find it interesting the shear number of people editing such an obscure page, atleast 10 different people edited the page in the last month. For something that rarely changes, a lot of people are working on this page.
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it's interesting how you say that there seems to be a lot of "fix vandal work" being done on this page, I've heard that it's really common to see that on wikipedia, although I didn't see it on the three pages that I looked at for this assignment. I wonder if some types of articles are more prone to this problem than others. I've also heard that vandalism gets cleaned very quickly on wikipedia (in some cases in mere seconds!). I would bet that in addition to there being a lot of people on Wikipedia who only make minor edits, there are also many people who only fix vandalism
ReplyDeleteIt surprises me that you did not find much interaction or collaboration between people who edited the page. Especially for an organization like a fraternity, it seems that there would be a lot of effort going into fixing mistakes about factual information, etc, that people make. My sorority also has a Wikipedia page (though I chose not to examine it for this assignment), and in the places of our history where there is a question about how events truly transpired, there is some sort of note (e.g. "Though there is some disagreement about whether..."). These conversations are usually then carried over to the discussion tab, which is (by nature) filled with collaboration.
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