I looked at the Wikipedia article for one of my favorite bands, Third Eye Blind. I know a decent amount about their rise to success and their later years, so I figured I’d take a look and see the edit activity that occurs on Wikipedia. Previously, I had edited a Wikipedia page for one of their songs, their 1997 smash Semi-Charmed Life, correctly crediting Eric Valentine (Dodd) as the producer rather than Colin Thurston.
The discussion page of their Wikipedia article is rife with debate. There are arguments on genre, history, and factual accuracy. Mostly, the discussion page yields information about people’s opinions, not their actual, concrete work, credentials, or sources. Some users specify that they will merely tag sloppy writing and will not fix it because they do not like the band and it is not worth his or her time. This, of course, kicked off a great debate between this user and the fans of the band.
The primary part of Wikipedia I would change is to increase the visibility of reputations. A more detailed and thorough user account system would help not only increase the credibility of the authors, but also the usability of the website and the quality of the content, which is the reason people come to Wikipedia in the first place. I would like to see something similar to Facebook, that tries to enforce a real name and some sort of real-world credibility, like Facebook does by requiring a university email address to affiliate with a university. In addition, a revamp of its user interface would be a welcome change. Perhaps integrating more AJAX features or a rich-text editor would increase the quality of the markup and better end-user usability.
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I imagine that wikipedia pages for music are especially plagued with opinions as opposed to facts. Specifically when classifying the genre of a band, there really is no right answer, but a lot of people get up in arms about it. I think your idea of a reputation system would greatly help to solve this problem; people would be more likely to believe edits made by a music page frequenter as opposed to a random user, even one without a user name. Some people like the all text aspect of wikipedia and I personally think adding AJAX features would require too much computing power that Wikipedia desperately needs to keep from crashing.
ReplyDeleteI think the fact that there is debate between fans and non-fans of the band indicates that people really do care about the quality of Wikipedia pages. Disagreement can produce good results because differing viewpoints are represented in the article, providing some much-needed balance.
ReplyDeleteRegarding a revamped user interface, I agree that Wikipedia could be improved. I think one helpful feature would be to have tips that appear when the user does certain actions, similar to the tips and confirmations in Gmail.