For the past week, I’ve been part of a performance at the Schwartz Center of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. I decided to look up the Wikipedia article on this work. The body of the page has not been updated recently (last major edit was October 14, 2008), but it is kept up to date with an updated link as the last update (February 12, 2009). This is a good example of collaboration by the fact that someone actually cares enough about the page to check for the correct links, even if the information on the page is not really changing anymore. Since the page was started in 1995, there have been many updates that are mostly naming semantics. For example, removal of all references to “play” was removed at one point and change from “songs” to “movements” both show how people can collaborate and decide more concretely how to name correctly.
What is interesting too though is how much information was added over the course of two years and by whom. It always looks like the editors are never the same people as the screen names don’t repeat after the few edits he or she does in a row. This gives us an idea that perhaps either these people don’t come back to the page often (poor collaboration) or that they do come back and nothing has changed out of what he or she accepts (good collaboration). There’s no way to actually tell though. The other information we have on the editors are when we look at their user wiki pages. Glancing through a few of them, nothing seemed to point out that any of them were particularly well suited to edit this page.
I would find it interesting if Wikipedia decided to keep track of what pages people were looking at too (maybe they do?!?). This could help us understand which pages people care most about (and thus could mean most knowledgeable about). Take for example someone who knows a lot about a subject that is updated quite often, but never is able to be the first to edit the page to update the information. That person should still look over the subject’s wiki page and see if the information stays correct. Sadly, that person does not get any reward for doing so.
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It's funny that on this page the editors were all different. The page i looked at had two or three editors frequent the page a lot, making many changes. I guess it depends on the topic and how many people in general know about it/ are involved with it in some way. It definitely would be interesting if there was a way to see what else the editors were looking it or editing, which ties into the lecture we had on reputation systems. If there was a way editors could be rated, wikipedia might gain some credibility at least for specific articles.
ReplyDeleteThe Wikipedia article that I wrote about also had a limited number of editors who made a large number of edits. It is interesting that your article was usually edited by all different people. Perhaps the type of article could indicate whether users would seem to comment more often and be invested in the presentation of information in the article. A feature to keep track of pages that users look at could be interesting to see whether they tend to comment on articles that they frequently visit. Overall, nice post.
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