Portal is a puzzle video game with unique mechanics. It’s been very well received by critics and gamers, so as a result there is a fairly lengthy Wikipedia article about it. The game itself was only released in 2007, but the edit history dates back as early as July 2006. Before the game was released, edits mostly circulated around adding or correcting bits of information about the game that had been revealed to the press. In the days shortly after Portal was released, there was a HUGE onslaught of edits adding to the information on the page. From the discussion page you can see what issues still need to be worked out by the page collaborators, and evidence that they are resolving them. The recent history also shows ClueBot intelligently detecting and removing vandalism, which has become a bigger problem now that Portal is more widely known.
The edit history shows all user edits that have ever been made to the page, as well as the time at which the edit was made. Contributors can choose to mark their edits as “minor” which means it is a small change that isn’t likely to be a subject of dispute. The actual content of the edit can be viewed in three ways: as a diff against the previous version, as a diff against the current version, or as a snapshot of exactly the way the page existed right after the edit. Contributions also use the discussion pages to explain why they are making (or are planning to make) the changes they did (or will).
While scanning the history in order to write up this blog post, one thing I found lacking about Wikipedia’s interface was the lack of indication about the size of each edit. Merely flagging an edit as “minor” or not simply isn’t detailed enough. It would be more informative to include a count of the number of lines or letters that were added or removed by a particular edit. This count should be displayed for each edit in the history list. It would allow you to easily discern which edits had affected a great deal of content on the page; these kinds of edits are more invasive anyway, and should warrant greater attention from people looking to review changes.
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That's an interesting point about the size of one's edit. You can always look at the size of the entire page (shown in bytes) but obviously that isn't very useful. Perhaps a light color coding scheme could help out a lot in terms of edits that have changed a lot compared to more minor changes.
ReplyDeleteI also recently discovered a cool Greasemonkey script that allows you to visualize and animate the changes over time. This at least allows for an easier way to see if any large sections were changed.
I'm also glad that you brought up vandalism in this, as my blog post didn't have any because it isn't a very popular article. I know wikipedia occasionally turns off anonymous edits to a page for this reason, but do you think people would vandalize with an account with a good reputation?
Nice job!
Cool. I never heard of ClueBot before; that's interesting. I agree with what you said about edit sizes; it was quite overwhelming to sort through the huge pages of revision history and to get an overall feel of who contributed what. It would've been very helpful to be able to see instantly how big edits are.
ReplyDeleteVandalism is always a problem on anything that involves informing people through a big collaborative effort (which is the case for Wikipedia). It is also interesting how early pages go up for games, even though some games are released months after the page on Wikipedia. This seems to lead to a lot of speculation and even wrong information. The quantity idea is an interesting idea. It probably would be a good idea.
ReplyDeleteNice Post! BTW, The cake was a lie and the computer made me destroy my Companion Cube!! Infuriating!!!!