Because the novella Le Petit Prince had been published so many years ago, I was surprised to see that its Wikipedia edit history still featured frequent edits, at least once a week. From its inception in 2002, the article had gone through some large changes, such as added sections and expanded discussion (and an occasional sabotage), as well as many smaller changes like grammar, wording, and added references. The frequency of the edit listings in the History page indicates that users still care a great deal about the condition of the article, as the book is very dear and important to a wide readership.
The History page provides concise information about the content that was changed during each subsequent revision and clicking on versions will show an explicit “diff” between different versions. Also, any two versions can be compared textually to see the differences in a highlighted form while hiding text irrelevant to the revision change, making it easy for users to track changes. For example, a typical entry in the revision history will show the date/time of the edit, the user name or IP address of the editor, and an indicator for whether an edit was minor or a specific section of the article. In addition to History, a Discussion page is available for users to talk about changes and additions, whether revision ideas are valid and in line with Wikipedia article guidelines.
A feature that could be useful for Wikipedia collaboration is a tool that allows users to visually assess the chronological changes. Personally, I would like to see a slide bar at the bottom of the revisions page that can be moved to change the article to a certain version. This could be important for editors to gain a more holistic sense of the history of the article and they can avoid pitfalls and edits that had already been resolved in the past. I believe this would make the articles easier to edit. We had discussed in class the balance between making a system such as Wikipedia easier versus harder to edit, implying that easy access is prone to sabotage (which was seen in this article when somebody replaced all contents with the word “Doodies” while difficult access will discourage contribution, and important revisions may have a hard time finding their way to the front if they get lost in bureaucracy and validation, and it seems to me that the current level of access is a decent balance, as reverting and article maintenance are adequate.
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If we could see the chronological order of revisions we could see the evolution of the content on the pages. This could be useful updating content. Also, it let's you relate the content to the time it was developed.
ReplyDeleteI think it is quite interesting how what I would think would be a relatively timeless and static article has so much activity. This is a reflection of what Wikipedia is. It is not actually an encyclopedia, but a community of editors constantly updating and revising information. This mirrors the reality of human understanding - that humanity's body of knowledge is simply the sum of all of our interactions, and that what we regard today as facts may become incorrect tomorrow. The concept of "edit this page" is so central to knowledge, that it makes sense to allow anyone to edit an encyclopedia. MediaWiki is a collaboration tool used by the Wikipedia community of scholars to exchange and archive information.
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