Since I am graduating in less than a month, I thought it would be nice to look at an article about Cornell University, where I have made great memories for about 4 years. The article was very long with many images, and included recent events as well, including recent picture of inauguration of President Skorton.
The edit history included information about each edit, such as user name/ IP address, date and time of the edit, and user’s reason for editing. One could also compare previous edit with the current version. From looking at the edit history, I learned that edits were mostly made by repeated users. There were few users who vandalized or included comments in the article. For example, “'''Cornell University''' located in [[Ithaca, New York]], [[USA]], is a [[private university]]” was edited to '''Cornell University''' ((You Ever Heard of It?) located in [[Ithaca, New York]]. Several users such as NotYourBroom, ElKobvo who are active contributors of the article, often reverted to the previous edit because of vandalism and errors in grammar, citation, and sources. Thus, active users not only write or update content, but also guard the article from being vandalized. Bryant, Forte and Bruckman state that users’ involvement change with time. As users work hard to maintain their work on the space and update information, they learn more about Cornell and become “experts” in the area. This enables them to work on multiple areas and oversee the article through time.
Also, a project page for the article was formed to better inform users about content they need to work on, and organize information. The pages contain users’ suggestions as well. There was also talk pages which were filled with users’ concerns, thoughts and ideas about the article. Some of them were really long and difficult to read.
Collaboration would be much easier if less time were spent figuring out what is going on. For example, the talk pages were list of comments and suggestions without structure. I could not figure out which posts related to the others. It would be nice to use a forum so that it is easier to read. Also, users need to learn wiki syntax to contribute to the content and style of the article. More users can collaborate if they are given an option to use WYSIWYG, which would make it easier to edit content. Last, but not least, effort to improve the article should not be wasted in safeguarding it all the time. I realized that most users who perform vandalism are not registered. If Wikipedia changed its policy so that only registered users can edit, it would be much easier for active users to focus on the quality of the article and collaborate with each other.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
With an article that's based upon a place (like Cornell), it'd be interesting to see if the IP Address of the person was located in what area. I would expect that a person more educated on recent Cornell events, would be located here either on campus or in the Ithaca area. There are ways to track this, but locations can also be faked. Nonetheless, keeping track of this information could help determining which editors are more likely to be good.
ReplyDeleteYou also bring up a good point on the WYSIWYG editors. This actually is an interesting problem and people have tried to solve it in a few ways but it just never is as good as having one built in. There's actually a Wired article talking about it (http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2008/12/wikipedias-wysi). One point to consider though is that the robustness of Wikipedia's pages don't necessarily translate well to a WYSISYG editor, and that the added bandwidth of making an editor makes it already more expensive for a non-profit org.
I have looked at the Cornell page- agreed it's very long and informative. It seems like the people editing it are devoted alums or faculty. I don't feel like the student body is a huge contributor to the wiki page.
ReplyDeleteI think your suggestion for users to learn wiki syntax to make contributions.