A tongue in cheek decision I made was to look up Wikipedia on Wikipedia. Wikipedia supports editing and mass collaboration in a few ways. One of them is through their discussion feature which is tabbed to the article in question. For example, for the Wikipedia page, the discussion touches on semi controversial points as well as has a running to-do list for the changes that have to be made to the page in the future. The to-do list is a great way to promote awareness and collaboration on the page to ensure that everyone knows what needs to be done.
The Wikipedia article is unique or rather is in a small group of articles on Wikipedia that are semi-protected. This is a protection system that Wikipedia has to protect popular or controversial articles from vandalism. The lowest level of artcles allow everyone to edit them, semi-protected articles require you to to be a registered user while locked articles are reserved for special users.
One of the most important aspects of mass collaboration is grounding or creating an atmosphere of shared understanding. Wikipedia supports this by having text boxes explaining the purpose and reasoning behind certain things. For example, if you click on the editing page, Wikipedia explains to you that the page is semi-protected and what that entails. This allows people who are not as familiar with Wikipedia rules to be on the same learning level as others.
On the edit or “source” page, each reference that is mentioned also includes the name of the user that mentioned it. On the discussion page, each comment is either followed by a user name (if said by a registered user) or an IP address as well as the date and time the comment was made. On the history page, each and every edit is logged in along with section the edit was made in, the date, the time, the size of the edit, and the user name/IP address of the person. There is also a little m that signifies if the edit was minor or not.
The only thing I would change about Wikipedia to make collaboration a little easier would be to have automatic spell check since sometimes, on a few articles, many edits are just simply the rectification of simple spelling errors. This would save a ton of time and allow more people to concentrate on “major” edits.
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Good eye for catching that! I didn't know that Wikipedia has a protection system to protect popular or controversial articles. I wonder what the criteria is for selecting articles for protection. I don't think though that the protection system is an example of grounding. I think Wikipedia actually is pretty bad at creating an atmosphere of shared understanding because unless you are an active user, it takes time and practice to get used to using the interface.
ReplyDeleteHaha, wow, come to think of it, it is strange that Wikipedia doesn't already have spell check. Then again, I suppose many of it's articles may involve pop culture terms that don't exist in any dictionary yet. Still though... you'd think they would do some basic spell checking anyway!
ReplyDeleteI've always wondered how Wikipedia prevented stupid edits from happening to well known articles. This system makes perfect sense, although it does involve having the man power to look through all those articles and find 'important' ones...