Having been a member of my high school cross country team and attended many practices and meets, I decided to view the Wikipedia article on cross country running. The article does a good job explaining the procedures for the start and finish of meets as well as scoring. Upon viewing the edit history, I was provided with the username or IP address that edited the entry, the date and time of the edit, the location of the particular edit, and the user’s reason for editing. By viewing the revision history statistics, I found out that there have been nearly 1,000 users who edited this Wikipedia article on cross country running. However, only fourteen of these users have made ten or more edits to the article. Thus, collaboration on editing this article tends to occur between a small group of committed users. However, Bryant, Forte, and Bruckman (2005) state that “an important first step in drawing new users into editing and writing activities was effectively removing barriers to participation and allowing them to contribute their own knowledge.” This relatively small barrier to participation in editing Wikipedia articles is illustrated by the large number of users who have made less than ten edits to the article on cross country running.
In addition, Bryant et al. (2005) explain that the “Wikipedia interface is designed to encourage surveillance of others’ contributions…watch lists help community members find and repair vandalism”. A specific attempt at vandalism is controlled in the following example of this article’s edit history:
# (cur) (prev) 15:29, 15 April 2009 Omarcheeseboro (talk | contribs) (22,244 bytes) (Undid revision 284004722 by 132.177.178.96 (talk) rv vandalism) (undo)
# (cur) (prev) 14:54, 15 April 2009 132.177.178.96 (talk) (22,537 bytes) (→Courses and distances) (undo)
Upon viewing the cross country running article before and after the above edit to remove vandalism, I found a section of text added to the end of the procedures for recording times at the finish line. However, this added text was irrelevant to the article’s subject matter and instead detailed a personal anecdote. This added text was removed by the user, Omarcheeseboro, but one’s ability to freely make an edit to an article on Wikipedia that clearly does not relate to the article’s subject matter raises certain questions regarding whether collaboration should be made slightly more difficult. By establishing small barriers to making edits on Wikipedia, users could be able to freely edit an article as long as their edit is related to the particular article’s grammar or subject matter. This change could help to reduce vandalism of articles, while still encouraging collaboration of users to edit articles, regardless of one’s reputation as a “Wikipedian” or novice user.
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I agree that there should be minor barriers for users to overcome before being able to edit an article. This seems it will be effective in preventing destructive trolls. However, you comment that users should be able to edit only if their edit is related to the particular article's grammar or subject matter. Do you therefore propose that there be a team of wikipedians who preview each post before they go live? It seems this would require a lot of man power. Furthermore, what's nice about the wikipedians is that they care about their pages on their own accord, not because it's a job. Requiring them to monitor novice user's edits may change the atmosphere of the self-policing community.
ReplyDeleteI believe that if you're caught vandalizing an article on wikipedia and you're identified by your IP addpress, your IP address can be banned from editing articles in the future. That's one way that wikipedia enforces standards. This can strike fear into some people who might otherwise want to write unnecessary comments into an article. Losing one's ability to edit (at all!) is good reason to edit the right way.
ReplyDeleteI like your barrier idea for new users, too. Maybe getting through the small barriers could build up one's reputation so that they can later have more access privileges.