I chose to read the article on Ender Wiggin, the main character of the "Ender's Game" book series. Most of the article details Ender's role in each book in the series. I found that the best place to find evidence of collaboration was on the Discussion page, where people talk about changes they have made to the article as well as changes they think should be made. Several entries are about parts of the article that could be classified as speculation or original research, which do not belong in Wikipedia. These topics usually get a few responses showing collaboration in deciding whether or not the information should be removed. In other entries, people ask questions about the article. For example, one user asks, "Shouldn't this article contain a nice big spoiler alert at the top?" Another user responds by saying that "spoiler alerts have been nixed on Wikipedia." I noticed that the responder's username appeared multiple times on the discussion page, so I followed the link to his User Page. It turns out that he is a true Wikipedian: he has made over 30,000 contributions and has started dozens of articles himself. The availability of this information acts as a reputation system on Wikipedia. After looking at this user's profile, I would trust that he knows what he's talking about.
Wikipedia provides a vast amount of information about people's work on the Revision History page. You can see a record of each edit, who made it, the date and time it was made, and the type of change (i.e., a minor edit or a large change to a section). You can view the article as it appeared after any edit, and I was especially impressed by the ability to compare the differences between any two versions of an article.
I think Wikipedia has enough information for effective collaboration using Revision History and Discussion pages. Therefore, I would suggest improving the website's interface to make the information more visible. For example, it wasn't clear to me at first what the two columns of radio buttons located on the Edit History page were for. The edit history could be organized in a table instead of a list to make it more readable. On Discussion pages, usernames could be displayed in a more prominent place next to their posts. I think improving visibility would make collaboration easier.
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Nice job. I also thought it was interesting that Wikipedia offers the full revision history for any article and users are able to compare differences between edits. I would think this feature provides for more accountability in making edits, but users still would sometimes engage in vandalism. For example, one anonymous user added a personal anecdote on the article I wrote about, which was later removed. Perhaps removing the anonymity would allow for more relevant edits, however this may decrease the number of users who wish to make edits. There is an interesting trade-off here.
ReplyDeleteHaha, good topic. I wonder though, why did they get rid of spoiler alerts? Recently, I've noticed that whenever I look up some tv series I'm watching to try to understand something better, I always end up reading some spoiler that I really didn't plan to :( I suppose Wikipedia just decided that the nature of an encyclopedia is to provide thorough information and that people should know that, but still....
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