Having just spent a weekend in Philadelphia watching one of the most spectacular Track and Field events run in the world, I decided to check out the Penn Relays page on Wikipedia.
From the start, Wikipedia’s interface is not very intuitive. I found the Penn Relays page without any problems, but when looking for the history of the page, I accidentally redirected myself to a page showing the most recent changes to all/any Wikipedia changes. I went back to the page and then found the history for the individual page. This brought up a page with the date changes were made followed by the section that contained changes. You are given the option via radio button the select the date and view the previous version and then view all changes (highlighted) that were made.
I’ve never looked at the history of a page before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. One thing that became quickly apparent is that there is an evident battle between spammers and topic enthusiasts. Next to some of the changes you can see a note that says something along the lines of
Reverted edits by Spammer987 (HG)) (undo)
If you look at the history, you can see that the above user made nonsensical changes to the page, and whoever came there afterwards reset the page to what it had been before. This certainly exhibits behavior of collaboration of members of the community to safeguard Wikipedia. To create a reputation for the user, his screen name has been highlighted in Red in the history notes, to warn others that this user may not be imparting reliable information. I assume there must then be an approval process for the next page that this user wishes to change.
I would certainly change things on Wikipedia to make collaboration easier. As mentioned, it is very difficult to see what has been recently modified or added. When comparing a page against its previous form, the changes are seen as wiki-markup, which is less than readable for the average person. It is easy to get a sense of where information is added or modified, but it is surprisingly difficult to see exactly what information has been added.
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I wasn't even aware of the reputation system of the users... and I also found the visibility of the editing pages of Wikipedia to be terrible. Editing and viewing history does not seem to be very intuitive, and I wonder how many people (such as myself) are discouraged from editing because of this. It would be interesting to join the community, but I figure many people don't want to put the effort into learning how everything works.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the history page is not very intuitive, and it is also quite difficult to pinpoint changes when comparing different versions of the same article. It seems that, at least for reviewing recently edited articles, Wikipedia’s layout is more suited to people who are constantly watching an article. The history list is easy to navigate in terms of recent dates, and changes are more obvious to those familiar with the page. That said, I agree with the changes you would make to Wikipedia, because collaboration in this regard could definitely be easier for less frequent users.
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