The Wikipedia page that I examined was the "Abington Senior High School" page, my former high school. Although it took me a little while to figure out how to see the edit history, I finally figured it out.
It was surprising and kind of cool to see the school Wikipedia page transform from, ""Abington Seniort High School" is a high school located in Abington, Pennsylvania. Its famous allumnis include Bob Saget of "Full House" fame" to the page it is today.
At first, the revisions were pretty minor. People fixed the spelling, added links, marked the article as a school stub, and placed it into a category. It wasn't until a little later that more detail was added such as the grades attending the school, the enrollment numbers, and the address of the school. At one point an anonymous member posted the entire Hall of Fame list to the article. After the site was marked as being needed to clean up, another anonymous member deleted all the Hall of Fame information. Eventually more information and a table of content were added, and the page became more organized.
As for collaboration, it was clear that people saw this as a community and worked together to make the article as accurate as possible. A great example of this is reactions to vandalism. At the bottom of the article someone wrote, "Chuck NorrisLives here foolzzzz goat.cxis real as well". One minute later another user removed the comment. Similar situations have happened multiple times within this article. A lot of anonymous people vandalize the Notable Alumni section, but it's always quickly remedied.
I’m sure there’s a way to change Wikipedia to make collaboration easier but I’m not exactly sure how. Like I said before, it was difficult to find the history of the page, so maybe making that more visible would help. I think there should also be clearer instructions when you get to the history page. It took me a little while to figure out how to look at the changes. If there were clear instructions, more people might be willing to contribute to articles.
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That's interesting that anonymous members both added the Hall of Fame list and deleted it. Were there errors in it? Was it not cited? Being anonymous would definitely encourage people to post false information, especially when the Hall of Fame information isn't something that could potentially hurt other people if it is incorrect.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that it was difficult to find the history page. If things like that were more clear, new users could pick up on norms more easily.
One of the criticisms of Wikipedia is that it is easy to vandalize. While technically true, I have never had a problem with it. It seems that it is usually cleared away pretty quickly, especially when it's very obvious. You showed a good example of this. I think as time goes on, and vandalism becomes easier to detect, Wikipedia will be even more effective as a source.
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