Assignment #11: Wikipedia (Lisa Park)

Feeling nostalgic for my not-so-long-ago childhood, I decided to look up the Wikipedia page for Animorphs, a children's book series I love/d. Upon perusing the revision history, I was surprised by how much activity is going on underneath the polished article I am initially presented with. First of all, Wikipedia provides many tools to ensure and maintain quality of information. Every edit made to an article is recorded, along with the author and time. The logs also show you the exact different between the post-edit and pre-edit versions of the article. In this way, every iteration of the article is saved and available for viewing or bringing back.

Because it holds authors accountable in this way, Wikipedia facilitates collaboration and the sense of community that comes with it. Every user, whether registered or recorded as an IP address, is given a "talk" page, where other users can post messages, usually regarding the user's contributions. Every user's entire history of all changes s/he's made to any article are logged and available for viewing, providing transparency and opportunities for others to make suggestions or comment.

The most obvious example of collaboration is the "Talk" page for the article. The Animorphs "Talk" page is a place where users post suggestions, questions, and ideas they have regarding the article's content and organization. For example, I saw two users discuss the issue of moving the "character relationships" section to the individual characters' pages. In this exchange, one user initially suggested the change. Another responded that they liked the current format, but volunteered to rewrite it if others agreed. Finally, a third user reports that they have made the proposed changes and also elicits others to help flesh out what s/he's written. Thus, the "Talk" page is a space where users not only discuss improvements, but also request help from others in their quest to contribute.

As I browsed through the articles 5 year long history, I saw the development of legitimate peripheral participation, as discussed by Bryant et al. in "Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of Participation in a Collaborative Online Encyclopedia". Bryant et al. state that "According to LPP, newcomers become members of a community initially by participating in peripheral yet productive tasks that contribute to the overall goal of the community." The original creator of the page build an impressive framework of information, creating sections for "Characters" and "Books". Several months later, peripheral editors began adding details to these sections.

Assignment 11 Kevin

Friday Night Lights is an American TV drama series that began airing in 2006. The show is in it's third season so the wikipedia page has been updated many times. It has been updated at least 500 times. Contributing to the multiple edits is the constant news surrounding the future development of the show, such as future seasons, cast member changes, and it's future scheduling.

The page was modified just recently on April 26th, 2009. The discussion page states "the article is within the scope of wikiproject disambiguation, an attempt to structure and organize all dissmbiguation pages on Wikipedia." With this said, everyone can edit this page. If you don't have an account then your IP address would be made public; however, if you have an account your identity could be concealed. This could cause vandalism and destroy structure within the article's editing process because it removes credibility. Also, you can just use a pyblic computer so tgers wont see your IP adress. You can't copy from other websites without a GFDL compatible license, which allows users to copy, redistribute and modify a work. It's copies are also available under the same license.

There are revision statistics which allows readers to see who edited the page at any point. It contains user names and their first and last edits. You can also search for revisions. Revisions also have categories; thereby adding to structure: minor edits, section edits, and automatic edit summary.

Assignment 11 : Eric Gunther

When trying to think of something I know a lot about, one of my friends suggested my fraternity. So I checked out the Wikipedia page and sure enough there was a plethora of information about our national organization available. The page itself was broken down into two logical sections: founding and history, and notable alumni. The founding and history part was consistent with what I knew to be true and the notable alumni was a large list of names, some of which I knew, but most of which seemed somewhat obscure and new to me. Upon clicking the history tab I was able to view the entire page history. This is the first time I've ever viewed this function of Wikipedia and I was at first confused by what I was looking at. For one Wikipedia is almost entirely text, so it was a lot to take in at first. However, upon further inspection, it seems that Wikipedia puts a lot more information at our fingertips than I initially realized, I was able to view every single page revision and who changed it in the pages history! It appears that there are well over 500 revisions of this page, but I only viewed the newest 50. I was able to view history statistics, perform a search, and most importantly view all the revisions. However, this would be worthless if I was not able to see what specifically changed between versions and who changed it. Wikipedia provides two links, allowing you to view the difference between a revision and both the preceding and current version, with all the important information highlighted. Furthermore, you can view the edit date, who edited it (a username or IP address), the size of the page at that time, discussions regarding the edit and what section they edited. It seems that most of the more recent edits have been to the notable alumni section, probably people trying to add themselves or people they know. There also seems to be a lot of "fix vandal work" edits. While there seems to be very little personal interaction for collaboration (ie. the lack of discussion about the edits) people are collaborating indirectly by all adding to the same page. I also find it interesting the shear number of people editing such an obscure page, atleast 10 different people edited the page in the last month. For something that rarely changes, a lot of people are working on this page.

I can honestly say it looks like Wikipedia has done all they can to foster a collaborative environment. As I mentioned earlier, perhaps a more graphical interface would help inexperienced users like myself adapt quicker, but even so I was able to figure things out pretty fast. It would be nice, however, to see how many people are viewing a page and perhaps start live chats with them, but having a live chat/discussion part of every page where anonymous users can exchange impromptu information about that page, perhaps sparking edits.

Assignment #11 - Austin Lin (akl29)

I used the page for my school Thomas Jefferson High School located in Alexandria, Virginia. The content on the page is very detailed and as far as I can tell, up to date. Looking at the edit history, you can immediately see a about half IP addresses and fewer registered users. This means that there are a lot of unregistered and possibly first time editors which attests to “legitimate peripheral participation”. These first time editors were contributing snippets of information in which they had unique expertise on or making changes to errors thus drawing them into the editing process. One of the items that was discussed at length about this article and comes up in many Wikipedia articles is that it is too long and filled with trivia. Since users get edit what they choose, they often edit what they know and like. This occurs especially with subjects with niche cult followings, which skew the content of the system away from informative articles.

Looking at the specific edits, you can see every change made to the page over the course of its lifetime by going to the edit history. This is where the collaborative effort becomes interesting. As users both registered and unregistered add content, a set of bots or automated computer scripts will magically make maintenance changes, fix typos, and change tagging data. Another set of users looked like they spent a good deal of time making copywriting changes and unifying the format of the page to fit the Wikipedia standard. Though this article did not spark a great deal of controversy, admins sometimes step in to settle disputes and removing vandalism from histories.

The discussion page reveals that many of the edits were not just blindly made and that each addition was often discussed and to much length. This sets many of the Rules and sometimes the Division of Labor if you think of Wikipedia using Activity Theory. There is a review section in which some editors rated the article on how well it was written, how accurate it is etc. This section also included improvement areas in the article. This defines the Object or objective of the activity system.

Adding an awareness element to editing pages would be very interesting so that users could see when other users are editing and possibly chat with them. This would help diminish edit wars. Though there are some tools out there today such as Dan Cosley’s Suggestbot, better recommendation systems that can suggest parts of an article for users to edit would be very helpful.

Assignment #11 -- Geisha and Wikipedia

The Wikipedia article I looked at is about Japan’s famous geisha. I’ve been interested in Japanese culture for a long time, and I’ve read a lot about Japan’s history.

My first step was to read the article. I was impressed; the information is consistent with what I know to be true. The next thing I did was to look at the article’s talk page. The first thing which caught my attention was a discussion about whether a common American mispronunciation of geisha – geesha – should be merged into the main geisha article or left separate. Another ‘hot topic’ is whether the women in the image attached to the page are really geisha-in-training, or maiko. Since many people admire the geisha culture, there are many chances for ordinary citizens and even foreigners to dress up as geisha for a day. The clothing and makeup are well-done, so it was concluded that it is impossible to tell if they are real maiko or not.

A major part of the talk page is dedicated to clearly explaining what geisha actually do. Geisha are trained to be hostesses and entertainers – they are skilled in the traditional Japanese ways of reading, singing, dancing, and hosting. They spend their nights entertaining customers, usually male, in traditional-style teahouses and restaurants. This is especially hard to explain, since many Americans find it hard to imagine paying someone to pour liquor and read to you. The contributors also talked about the best way to emphasize that part of a geisha’s work does not include prostitution, and mentions that most Japanese also think of geisha as women of loose morals.

I think a way to improve Wikipedia would be to publicize the talk page. I think if people could see the thought that goes into creating and maintaining the accuracy of an article, they would be more inclined to trust Wikipedia as a valuable resource. In addition, I think that requiring users to create an account in order to see the behind-the-scenes workings creates a barrier.

A-11. Wikipedia

Example Wikipedia Edit History for Facebook:

• (cur) (prev) 22:03, 22 August 2004 Laguna72 (talk | contribs) m (→List of school facebooks hosted by thefacebook.com)
• (cur) (prev) 21:59, 22 August 2004 Laguna72 (talk | contribs) m ('the' george washington university)
• (cur) (prev) 21:56, 22 August 2004 Laguna72 (talk | contribs) m (new schools added.)

After looking over the history tab on the facebook Wikipedia page, it is clear that there are 100's of even 1000's of editors going back over the last few years. The first post comes at 04:42, 23 October 2004 and it seems that facebook is updated as often as once a day, and at least a few times a week. I really enjoy this feature of Wikipedia, and believe that it has value that goes beyond what the "current" state of the site is. Who knows what a quarter century of this metadata could reveal about the way people work collaboratively online, or share ideas... or the way ideas/knowledge evolve and is transferred, how we learn to share those ideas in "more organized" ways. It would be neat if Wikipedia joined some type of Visual with their History tab....something that allowed you to see how the look and structure of a specific page has changed over the years...or what key concepts/word have been used and which ones have been removed or downplayed. There is so much potential research questions to be asked and learned from a site like Wikipedia, and only time will tell how much we are able to learn from this type of massive online collaborative network/project.

Assignment 11: John Fox

A subject that I know very well that I have a particular interest in is my favorite TV show Scrubs. The wikipedia page itself is very detailed, including a synopsis, information on the cast, episodes, music and lots more. Because Scrubs is in the middle of the season right now it is under constant construction, some edits even happening as I post this message.

The edit page is protected and can only be edited or moved by administrators of the page. One piece of general knowledge is that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that is run by the users of the site. Because Wikipedia does this there is an unlimited amount of information and content available to users of the site. But Wikipedia's strength is also it's weakness. Because wikipedia is a self sufficient media, is causes the trustworthiness of the information to come into question. That is why administrators for pages are set, it is for the integrity of the site and the accuracy of information, controlling vandalism and inappropriate content.

Collaboration is welcome however through the discussion board since the administrators are the ones who make the actual edits on the page. For the Scrubs page most of the people in the discussion board spoke on the controversial 8th season, the changes in networks, and the possibility of a 9th season even though the creator and main character are calling it quits. For the most part there are a lot of unsigned commentaries that are usually answered by three main people. When looking closer at the history it shows that Davidbhoy2805, SineBot, Jac16888 are the main contributors. Because Wikipedia makes accuracy a priority it stifles collaboration in information gathering. In this case there are about 4 or 5 people who are constantly adding things when there are a couple million people who have watched the show and have information about the show to contribute. Although this is a huge problem, I'm not completely sure how to edit the system to encourage more people to share information without the possibility of a slip in integrity.

Assignment 11: Eric Dial

I decided to look up the St. Louis Rams on Wikipedia. They are my favorite football team and since the draft is still lingering on everybody's mind, I wanted to see if their page had been updated. Revisions to the page have been made fairly recently (April, 25th) and the differentiation of users editing is high. It's not just one person making all these changes. Incredibly enough, the players they drafted this past Saturday are already listed in the current roster, even the players signed in free agency.

Collaboration is definitely key for Wikipedia. When looking at the history page, there is tons of evidence of collaboration. The history shows users who have made edits to posts by other users. Sometimes they add things to what a user has posted and sometimes they undo revisions made. Obviously the users are big fans of the Rams, and Bryant discusses their action becomes more frequent in the same "place" because they are motivated to provide and share their knowledge of the Rams.

I think changes to the history page need to be made in order to enhance collaboration. The history page is kind of hard to understand and it seems like there is a lot going on. I think collaboration would be much smoother if they kept it simple. As in, this user added "this information" at this time under this section. Edits on this addition will be showed underneath, kind of like on blogger it says this post has "2 comments". Inaccurate information can also be highlighted. Wikipedia could put an asterisk by sketchy information, or something like that; just something that lets users of Wikipedia know this information has no source or something.

Assignment 11: Jeanette Pineiro

I chose to look at the Wikipedia page regarding the Twilight book series, which consists of four different books. I am a big fan so I do know a lot about it. It appears that the page started in August of 2007. A lot of the users contribute to the article at least a few times a day. Collaboration seems to be a very important part of maintaining the page. Under the discussion tab, the users will ask each other whether another approach may be better for providing information or if they should just keep things the way they are. Collaboration is also important for two more reasons. First, the Wikipedia page started before all four books in the series were released. Therefore, as the series developed and new information was released the page would have to be constantly updated. Second, the book consists of fictional characters and creatures that have attributes that are unique only to the series. Therefore, it is important to get the information regarding them correct and collaborating can help each user cover all the basics. You can see this happening under the discussion section. Users will add something to the page, tell everyone they did it, and then ask their opinion and tell them they can change anything that may be wrong. The users also tag the references from which they find their information and they check each other to make sure that it is reputable.

A way to make collaboration easier in the discussion section is to make the page look more like a chat box. Right now under each section of the article, users comment and their name and the date is followed after the comment. Sometimes it looks very crowded so anyone new going into the page may have a hard time finding things. If it looked more like a chat box you could first find the name of the user, followed by their comments or questions. Also, the page that shows the revisions is not very easy to read. It is hard to tell exactly what has been revised, so that should be made easier to show.

Assignment 11 Julie Bai Cornell Rocks!

Since I am graduating in less than a month, I thought it would be nice to look at an article about Cornell University, where I have made great memories for about 4 years. The article was very long with many images, and included recent events as well, including recent picture of inauguration of President Skorton.

The edit history included information about each edit, such as user name/ IP address, date and time of the edit, and user’s reason for editing. One could also compare previous edit with the current version. From looking at the edit history, I learned that edits were mostly made by repeated users. There were few users who vandalized or included comments in the article. For example, “'''Cornell University''' located in [[Ithaca, New York]], [[USA]], is a [[private university]]” was edited to '''Cornell University''' ((You Ever Heard of It?) located in [[Ithaca, New York]]. Several users such as NotYourBroom, ElKobvo who are active contributors of the article, often reverted to the previous edit because of vandalism and errors in grammar, citation, and sources. Thus, active users not only write or update content, but also guard the article from being vandalized. Bryant, Forte and Bruckman state that users’ involvement change with time. As users work hard to maintain their work on the space and update information, they learn more about Cornell and become “experts” in the area. This enables them to work on multiple areas and oversee the article through time.

Also, a project page for the article was formed to better inform users about content they need to work on, and organize information. The pages contain users’ suggestions as well. There was also talk pages which were filled with users’ concerns, thoughts and ideas about the article. Some of them were really long and difficult to read.

Collaboration would be much easier if less time were spent figuring out what is going on. For example, the talk pages were list of comments and suggestions without structure. I could not figure out which posts related to the others. It would be nice to use a forum so that it is easier to read. Also, users need to learn wiki syntax to contribute to the content and style of the article. More users can collaborate if they are given an option to use WYSIWYG, which would make it easier to edit content. Last, but not least, effort to improve the article should not be wasted in safeguarding it all the time. I realized that most users who perform vandalism are not registered. If Wikipedia changed its policy so that only registered users can edit, it would be much easier for active users to focus on the quality of the article and collaborate with each other.