A subject of particular interest to me, and one that remains quite popular in the tech world, is the iPhone. Its wikipedia page is quite detailed, with content ranging from the very technical,e.g. hardware specification, to less technical overviews of device functionality. An initial inspection of the page's edit history reveals that there even on a day-to-day basis there is a significant amount of revisions being made.
It should be noted that the iPhone page has the restriction that only established users may make changes to the page. This restriction looks to have directed many (less established) collaborators to the iPhone Talk page, where users can suggest minor changes and corrections to the page. Judging by the threads generated on the discussion page, it appears that one user, Atama, has been acting as the primary maintainer of the wiki page. Atama responds to most requests and suggestions, often within a day of the original users post.
After further inspection of the history and discussion pages, I was quite surprised the professionalism and objectivity of the page's contributors. Much of the discussions pertain to how to objectively present the iPhone in a culture that is all but unbiased. This level of quality speaks to the establishment of Wikipedia as a premiere collaborative tool. Perhaps largely due to the network effects and payoffs associated with contributing 'good work' to the site, Wikipedia's user-base seems to have a personality unlike much of the open web.
Particularly in the case of the iPhone, Wikipedia's access levels, in terms of who can edit what, look to be quite effective at keeping articles of high quality while still permitting users to make suggestions that are heard, and often followed through on.That being said, I felt that the discussion pages, while understandably are not designed for typical threaded conversation, do seem to be relatively unstructured, to the point where it seems like it may some times be annoying to keep track of who is saying what. Having more structure would seem to make it easier to see who has been making the most suggestions/edits and maintain more of history than just an revision log.
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It seems that by restricting who can change the page increases the amount of discussion about the page. On the page that I looked at, anyone was able to edit the page and there were a lot of instances where people just came in and edited and more established editors had to go back and fix what these newbies wrote if it was incorrect. This process seems to become more collaborative in the iPhone page's case because it requires group discussion to make a change in the page.
ReplyDeleteHow were the edits before the page became protected? Obviously something must have had happened for the page to become locked or semi locked. Also, what category do the most of the edits fall under? I found a lot to do with minor spelling errors something that could easily be fixed with an automatic spell checker.
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