As an information science major, I have to do a lot of web programming, so I figured an easy Wikipedia topic to look at would be HTML. The first evidence I saw of the existence of collaboration in maintaining the page was in noting that thousands of users have contributed edits to this page. There are over 30 editors that contributed 10 or more edits to the page. In my opinion, 10 edits is significant, and thus I would say that this shows a large amount of people who have invested a lot of time revising and maintaining this page. In addition to those heavy editors, tons of other people have contributed by making one or more edits to the page.
After looking at the history, I saw a lot of other indications of update collaboration. Bryant et al describe the existence of four main “patterns of cooperation and conflict” on Wikipedia. Through the comments, I was able to see that comments were made to suggest that all of them exist on this page (vandalism and repair, anonymity versus named authorship, negotiation and content stability).
For example one user added the comment “the reason for lt and amp was already given, but examples are good I guess; quot is too esoteric but I'll leave it. Try to be illustrative, not exhaustive, though!” This suggest that he wanted to cooperate with the last editor to support his ideas, but that he also didn’t want to compromise the integrity of the article.
However, we all know that collaboration and cooperation can often be difficult, and this is apparent in the Wikipedia world as well. One contributor commented after an edit and said “cleanup of recent addtions by Cplot. rm incorrect info about importance of character entity refs - they are no more or less useful than numeric char refs; also: do not address the reader.” He clearly felt there was some degree of vandalism that resulted from the last edit. He didn’t want the article to suffer, so he was somewhat harsh with the previous editor.
I think collaboration on Wikipedia is pretty effective. I do think however, that it might more useful if there were multiple sorting options given with respect to article history. It would be easier to review an article if you could see what other edits of a specific kind were already made and why they were made.
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That's a cool idea to have edits grouped. Maybe edits in certain section can be grouped, or edits could be searched for by word. That way people would be able to more easily build off of each other instead of destroying each other's work. You mention that 10 edits is significant, but were these edits done all in one sitting and then the user never returned. If so, that doesn't seem so significant. If the user made ten edits over the course of three months, that would indicate a desire to return.
ReplyDeleteI was thinking about doing the Wikipedia page for HTML for the exact same reasons! Anyway, as we are currently in a "digital age", I guess it's not too surprising that this article has thousands of users contributing. I thought your idea of having the revisions grouped by categories was a really good idea. I think it would definitely improve collaborations; users could find the category that have an "expertise" in and contribute meaningful revisions.
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