Usually on days when I work at CIT, I have to instruct someone how to boot into Safe Mode in Windows, if not, at least tell them to do so. Running virus scans in Safe Mode is the surest way to remove them from your system. It turns out that there is an entire Wikipedia page devoted to talking about operating systems, and even pieces of software using Safe Mode.
Since this page is short, the discussion page isn't terribly long either. What I noticed about the discussion page, in terms of collaboration, is that one of the most important aspects of editing Wikipedia is to make sure you sign your posts. There is one post in the discussion page by someone suggesting that a section on video games having safe modes be included. This person did not sign their post with a time, date, or name. The timestamp, although it may not be relevant in this article, could affect what gets posted on a page and what doesn't. Another aspect of the discussion that I noticed is that most posts are not about people directly collaborating with others, but instead informing others of the edits they make. A large majority of the edits in the Safe mode page are just notifying others of the changes they have made, and from what I've seen in the other discussion pages and in other blog posts, this seems to be the case for most of the articles in Wikipedia. For example, there is one post merely informing the public that the editor has moved information from the article entitled "Safe Mode" to the current article, "Safe mode." While this is very helpful to those who are viewing the article, this has very little significance to those who are editing the page.
Before this assignment, I visited no more than two or three discussion pages. However, I have edited Wikipedia, both as a joke and to include factual information in the page. What I notice when I'm editing the article, Wikipedia does not provide any link to the discussion page that is more obvious than the same tab at the top. I think that discussing an edit before it is made, or at least suggesting that the user discuss the edit first, would be an excellent way to improve the already efficient standard of integrity on Wikipedia.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
I think that the discussion pages often are good sources of getting more in depth knowledge of what sources and controversies an article goes through before it reaches its final form. It is definitely an interesting idea to make the discussion page more obvious or even more user friendly. Currently it is just a long list of items that is supposed to be chronologically ordered but in many cases people add things under each arbitrary category. Basically it is kind of a mess and could be put on to a timeline which would aid users visually in seeing when which posts were made.
ReplyDeleteI feel the same way about the discussion page being hard to find. I think that there are a lot of people who could be good Wiki contributors but they don't even know where to start or how to do it. After all, being an expert in a specific field doesn't guarantee you are an expert computer user.
ReplyDeleteI also thought the discussion page was not in an obvious location. I find it interesting that a comment could be rejected just because of a missing timestamp. I suppose the dialog of the collaboration is just as important to maintain as the page itself, so if changes aren't well documented, it's intuitive for the user base to reject them.
ReplyDelete