Wikipedia, Stephen Swigut

When looking over the Wikipedia article for soccer there was a large amount of collaboration to maintain the page. First within the article there are at least minor changes every few days. Surprisingly many of these changes are to different areas of the article which occur not just within obscure rules or past history of the game. From the start of this article there have been over 1000 changes which seems like a substantial number. Within many of these larger changes there is often debate and discussion over its validity and relationship to the article. For example just with regards to the name “soccer” there is a wide discussion on whether it should be included and should the article be entitled football etc. Many individuals from other countries especially Britain think that it is derogatory to call the sport soccer and is very “American oriented”. American individuals feel that it is a way to differentiate the sport from others without mistake. These individuals are working together to put both into the article.

There is also a lot of information with regards to people’s work and changes. You can see through the history when a user adds a comment to the overall article. One can also see when there are edits made to the article. Users are also flagged and talked about in the discussion section when their changes are deemed in some way inappropriate. Going on this idea, Bryant, Forte and Bruckman (2005) discuss how user involvement changes the longer the user has been on the site. In this soccer article this idea can be seen as many users make small changes but there are a few users making larger more important changes. These individuals are often making useful comments on the discussion page.

There are examples within Wikipedia where collaboration could be made easier for the user. First even though this would be hard, the revision history log is very long and cumbersome to go through and understand especially for a new user. I would try and revise the interface to make it easier to see exactly what was changed and possibly a reason why. Changes between versions are hard to see where exactly the change occurs but you can see where it was modified. There also needs to be some system where new users know of the revision area and one where changes were enforced when a certain number of points were accrued for a change. It could be based on number of users and a point rating from experienced users.