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Infrequent Anonymous Cowards Reliable on Wikipedia
Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers at Dartmouth University have recently discovered that infrequent anonymous contributors, so called "Good Samaritans," are as reliable as registered users who update constantly and have a reputation to maintain. A graph from page 31 of the group's original paper (pdf file) shows that the quality of contributions of anonymous users goes down as the number of edits increases while quality goes up with the number of edits for registered users."
Unlike what some users may tell you, many anonymous users contribute content and not vandalize. The quality of the edits per se is all over the place, but this is to be expected, as there is no way a new contributor can know all the nuances of the in-house referencing system, or the indications made by the Manual of Style. But they do try.
~~~~
RESPECT ME!
That study was published by Dartmouth College. Dartmouth University is an unrelated entity in Canada.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Look at it another way... registered users who are "experts" are no better than the riff-raff.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Another interesting study might determine how many posts a person usually makes before becoming registered...
I remember the good old days when it was 2 minutes between posts, now it's sometimes 30-60 minutes. I'm pretty sure I'm being punished for other people on my ISP/school network.
Maybe someone just forgot his/her password or don't want to login in library computers.
Researchers at Dartmouth University have recently discovered that infrequent anonymous contributors, so called "Good Samaritans," are as reliable as registered users who update constantly and have a reputation to maintain.
Even better, the number of these "Good Samaritans" has tripled in the last six months!
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
This is to be expected. A lot of people read wikipedia to look up stuff and learn and all that. They never really wanted to edit it though cuz they're lazu. And then when they look up a topic near and dear to their heart like a specific video game or show and find something incorrect or totally lacking and just can't bear to not do something about it. But that's as far as the motivation takes them. I'd assume the majority of editors are like that. Who has like hours and hours to write really good articles all the time?
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
You're welcome!
Just don't cite wikipedia as a reliable source of the elephant population.
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
Seriously you get all these crackpot organizations getting tens of millions of dollars from eccentric billionaires, why not wikipedia?
I am hereby calling on multi millionaires and billionaires out there to please donate 10 million to wikipedia. And let's get some of the wikibooks finished.
Founded google? Founded Yahoo? Founded Apple? Facebook? Youtube? Good, now donate to wikipedia.
Sincerely!
I hope /. has antiretroviral software running.
now back to our program...
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.
Which is why I should be allowed to accrue karma.
I made a few grammar, punctuation, and spelling fixes before I ever bothered to register.
If I'm not already logged in and see a minor problem in an article, I'll usually fix anonymously. Not worth the time to log in.
Collecting data on which submodels of cable boxes were in use in which cable franchise. I had little traffic, I think maybe less than 800 submissions over the lifetime of the site. But not once did anyone screw with it, despite there being several freeform fields. I would have thought I'd get at least one "FUCK OYU" plugged in there, before I started. Never once.
Maybe I was below the traffic threshold for trolls to show up.
I'm pretty sure I have a Wikipedia account somewhere, but I almost never log in unless I'm going to do a big edit on something. 90% of the time I only visit to read; if I happen to notice a mistake, I don't want to go through the hassle of logging in to make a tiny edit. I'd bet a lot of anonymous editors are the same.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
I have yet to read the entire article, specially to see what "reliable" exactly means, but if anything a user can do counts as a contribution, what the article says is not surprising at all. I, myself, do my share of anonymous "good samaritan" contributions to Wikipedia articles I occasionaly read and, since I'm not a specialist at anything, those contributions are usually typo corrections, deletion of vandalism or something simply blatantly wrong. I know those aren't terribly relevant contributions, but restricting my contributions to that certainly assures one thing: they are usually correct. Meanwhile, I know some "higher-level" Wikipedia contributors and I have the impression that they sometimes lose themselves between "standards", "wikification" and other stuff that, although necessary, might be decided by subjective criteria that make them go around in circles on a same article, not necessarily converging.
The graph on page 31 is the retention rate of characters contributed by an editor relative to the total edits by that editor to the article ("The dependent variable is the retention rate, R, of contributions, measured as the percent of characters retained per contribution by each contributor.")
This metric makes sense if the wiki is new, and most of the edits are adding new content. The metric is virtually meaningless if the wiki is established, and most of the edits by a group of people are vandalism or reverts - people fixing the article will have a lower score by virtue of the fact that they are making the same edit (more or less) over and over again.
Normally, you'd expect that the more edits a user makes, the more trustworthy he is. If he were vandalizing, he wouldn't make more than a few before being blocked. If he's making hundreds, he should be considered more trust worthy (and have a higher retention rate) than if he's new. The results here show the exact opposite for anonymous users. In short, the methodology is flawed and the results are wrong.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I think that accounts for some of them -- there is little question that a significant number of those anon ids are from previous users who choose not to use their login id for whatever reason. I think there are also users who have been regular contributors in the past under a login id who got sick of the endless back-and-forth from users they have disagreements with. Some of the fights get vicious and even when they don't, there is a lot of tedious "lawyering" that goes back and forth between users about all of the rules (whether or not they're relevant to the particular situations). It's easy to get sucked into and if you take a strong position on anything (even questions of basic fact), there is another user somewhere who thinks you are wrong and is just as stubborn .... The argument can go on ad infinitum and it's easy to see why some people withdraw from it; read this article for some examples of the kind of thing that can happen.
...that I'll be taken more seriously because I checked the box?
As long as his surname is not a palindrome.
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.
I probably edit two entries a month (mainly corrections, sometimes minor additions). I'm not registered and I cannot see any real benefiit in doing so. Perhaps being registered allows you to add pages or modify GW Bush's entry or something but I have not been motivated enough to find out what the benefits are.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I fully admire the eagerness of individual contributors, anonymous or not, to improve Wikipedia.
Unfortunately, not all edits which are good-intended actually contribute to the overall quality. Of course, edits which fix simple things like revert vandalism, fix a typo, update a number etc, are all good. But the rest pose a potential problem. First off, newcomers, while well-intented, simply do not know the way Wikipedia works. They may include unsourced or poorly sourced material, insert a POV without even realising it, piss off another editor by being careless (and thus start an edit war) etc.
But even those edits which do not break any Wikipedia rules or guidelines still can cause damage, this time much more subtle. The thing is, a (good) Wikipedia article is not just a collection of facts, even if every single fact is relevant, neutral, sourced, and deserves to be in the article. An article is a unified piece of work. It should flow to the reader, not bump. Information must be properly organized and related to each other. A major suffering of Wikipedia is the so-called "contribution creep", where people just keep dumping more and more facts into the article. The result is grossly disproportional coverage of some sections compared to others, a huge overemphasis on bullet-point lists rather than coherent paragraphs, lots of small factoids which while each good on their own right, do not belong together, parts of articles being outdated compared to other parts, and a lot of other problems which make Wikipedia look like a search result by Google rather than a real encyclopedia.
Early on, Wikipedia's first priority was to fill its databank with stuff, and all contributions (other than those breaking policy) were welcome. Recently, WP is at the stage of more stringent enforcement of policies, as well as guidelines and styleguides. And by all means, that is very important and should be the first priority. But it's not enough to be a good encyclopedia. Making sure everything is neutral, notable, verifiable, attributed, legal, and formatted according to style, is all sub-article tasks, which you apply to a particular sentence, paragraph, or image. But then you have to pause for a moment and look at an article at the big picture. Does it flow smoothly? Are all sections balanced? Are all parts equally updated? Would an average reader get a proportional representation from the article?
You can easily handle the sub-article problems (those that break a clearcut policy or guideline) contributions from anonymous edits (as well as non-anonymous edits). But "Contribution creep" is biggest problem to the overall article, where there is no clearcut right or wrong. And that's why, no matter how important anonymous edits are to Wikipedia (and they certainly are), the already developed articles should be marked as "revised" and new contributions screened before updating them. Not because of potential vandalism or policy violations (those are easy to fix), but precisely to manage contribution creep and make sure well-intented contributions don't introduce speedbumps to an article and break its coherent organization and flow.
I just want to reacte to the makesense tag. I think it is an example of hindsight bias... given the statistics we think:
"An anonymous user who makes a single edit is probably a good guy who spotted a mistake, an anonymous user who makes lots of edit is probably a vandal, if his contribution were good he'd probaly register to get credit. A registred user who does bad edits would be kicked pretty soon therefore registered user with large number of edits probably do quality edits".
Duh ?
If the finding were the opposite, namely that regardless of the anonymous status a large number of edits means better quality, wouldn't you think
"Duhh... the ip of the anonymous user is blocked if a large number of edit is made..." or "Large number of edit means the user invests time, he is commited and strives to make quality edit"
And it would make perfect sense....
When presented with data, our mind often builds a little story around it to convince ourselves that, "we knew it all along", even when the result is far from obvious.
\u262D = \u5350
This makes sense, right? If someone is editing anonymously, why are they editing anonymously? If they edit the Wikipedia frequently and just haven't bothered to get an account, it seems likely that they're lazy, stupid, or have something to hide. If they're anonymous because they don't make frequent edits and don't see the point in making an account, they'll probably give better information.
Now, if someone has an account, why did they sign up? Did that person just get excited about the Wikipedia and they wanted to try making edits for themselves? Those edits might satisfy the need to try this "wiki" thing, but they might not be great quality. Or is it because they really want to try to contribute to the Wikipedia, and they go on to post often? Then the edits are probably better.
I would like to be the first to thank our Anonymous Coward Heroes!
br/
Why not get register? If you care to make a lot of comments, why not register a nickname? It's free. You don't have to be a subscriber.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Doing such a study requires checkuser access, which is something only a few people on Wikipedia have. Fortunately, I am one of them. I just sampled ten users out of the new user log. I am assuming a 1:1 mapping between IP and user (that is, that a user made no anonymous edits except with the IP he used to register his account). The number of anonymous edits prior to registeration for each user was:
A - 0
B - 0
C - 0
D - 2
E - 0
F - 0
G - 0
H - 0
I - 0
J - 0
In short: most of the people registering accounts had made no edits prior to registering. It's common knowledge on Wikipedia that something like half of all accounts registered never make any edits at all, so this makes sense.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I bet if /. ACs had IP addresses yours would rank right up there.
Unless of course you are trying to make a point. In that case mod parent +5 Funny and -6 TryingTooHard.
How outrageous! It really pisses me off that when you add something to a wiki that you know to be right but gets edited out by a registered user that thinks they know everything about a topic. I don't edit wikis anymore for this reason.
Or how many are made before they're driven away, or turned to the dark side?
Bias against anonymous edits and ongoing amplification of restrictions on anonymous editing has made Wikipedia an increasingly more hostile environment for casual editing, while at the same time increasing the clique/hierarchy-over-content mentality there.
Personally, I refrain from making casual edits now even when I recognize an improvement that could be made in an article, just because I find the draconian, anti-anonymous policies of modern-day Wikipedia are abhorrent and offensive.
Even though this is quite obviously a troll, the constant dire predictions about X company/software/OS dying is really starting to bug me. Nothing in the software world (and maybe even the real world) is dying until it's dead; recoveries are always possible. A downward trend doesn't mean something will die out, just look at RealPlayer (though whether that's a good thing or not is debatable).
Wiki-troublemakers will now start rotating their IP addresses.
With cheap long distance it's easy enough for a troll to call his ISPs dialup numbers in other states so his IP address looks very different with each post.
The technically savvy trolls will find proxies Wikipedia hasn't blocked yet.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It took me a while to figure out what y'all were talking about, but luckily, Wikipedia knew.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
thank goodness. maybe now people will stop deleting all my edits to the wiki pages of the cast members of "friends" explaining that each of them really did consume a diet of fecal matter for lunch on the set of the show on a regular basis.
respect my authoratas! Mod this up! ~AC
Where is Dartmouth University? I've certainly never heard of it, and I live in Halifax (which is a stone's throw from the city of Dartmouth (as it was formerly known)).
This is a troll, and is patently false, but I'll bite nonetheless: the Foundation's privacy policy (which governs the use of checkuser) strictly limits the conditions under which "personally identifiable data collected in the server logs, or through records in the database via the CheckUser feature" may be released. The release of aggregated, anonomyized data, such as I did above, is perfectly acceptable under the privacy policy and is a common practice in web traffic analysis
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
if someone is going to have their content available for manipulation it is a hacker's duty to do that manipulating - without regard to the immediate outcome - the hacking alone is the virute
I take that same approach for any edits. I think I have an account, but I'm not even sure why. I know I haven't logged in once since I started it, if I even did (it's only vaguely familiar as I've messed around with setting up my own wiki). I don't care about any sort of attribution so I get credit for corrections, and if it's a page that tends to get vandalized a lot and as such has been partially locked, I figure that any changes I make will end up getting reverted anyways. Basically, it's impersonal information, so I see no need or benefit to register or log in.
I do feel special for having fixed the Googolplex page. Some buffoon had it written as 10^100, not 10^(10^100). You'd think that someone would have caught it earlier, as it seems to be one of those obscure pages that you always end up hitting when you just start clicking random links.
I also feel special for throwing a shitfit at someone who was bragging about having vandalized the entry for some rival high school back then. Special in that "get out of the library, you're being way too damn loud" sense, at least. Good times...
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
I would imagine that most single edits are like that - someone with a good depth of knowledge on a subject, noticing something that's not quite right. The threshold for action is high enough that you'd only do it if it was worthwhile.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
You must be new here.
I've corrected quite a few items that are in my area of expertise. They're minor details, for sure, but if Wikipedia is to work, we have to do what we can. I have no interest in deliberately screwing it up.
A large portion of new users never make edits after they register. See here the new user log. New users that have made edits will have the word "contribs" shown in blue; otherwise, it is shown in red. For many new users that have made edits... those edits turn out to be vandalism and the account, a vandalism-only account that is blocked.
How many of those new users you selected have made edits since registering? I think many of those you sampled will never edit, period. Not before, not after. To make the "study" meaningful, you need to select new users who have made edits (and not vandalism).
I often don't log in when i want to edit an article, because i don't care how my "rep" is, i just want to fix something.
Help Me! I'm trapped in the tubes! Oh noes! Here comes a internet!
the "contributions" of an anonymous person on wikipedia these days, no matter how good they are, are instantly reverted by any number of so-called "anti-vandalism" bots and tools.
Although I realize that certain value can be placed on statements depending on their sources I still believe all statements should be scrutinized and should have to stand on their on for validity and worth. When posting here I often add links to show where my information comes from to support my opinions/facts. Nothing special in my background such as higher degees or notable accomplishments to add any credence to a name even if I used one. Though even I find myself giving more credence to statements made by certain nicknames here and particularly when they make comments in areas where I have seen them comment in previous articles, however I have no desire to build my own "karma". Even though I have had many +5s over the years I also have some that rotted at 0 or -1 that on re-examination I not only agreed with the modding but thought "sheesh, what was I thinking" and "glad that isn't permanently linked to me".
Having met many people in this world with extensive knowledge in areas that interested them though that knowledge was completely unrelated to their jobs or specific educational backgrounds, some of which had no desire for the whole world to know they had this knowledge, it doesn't suprise me that someone like them might be involved in Wikipedia. Further, it wouldn't suprise me much if some college professors of note don't spot something at Wikipedia that makes them think "I have to fix this" and then proceeds about doing so in an anonymous fashion either to avoid comments from others in their profession on them having supplied information there, avoid conflict of interests related to their university contracts, or just simply to avoid being asked to contribute more.
Information wants to be free and so does the truth. Like OSS, Wikipedia operates in part on the theory of thousands of eyes and counts on errors being spotted by the owners of some of those eyes. Position in society, even supported by educational and work background positioning, does not always indicate the truth of their statements. No where is this more apparent then in politically related "truths". One could say that at no time is someone more free to tell the truth then when providing their words anonymously. Unfortunately the converse is true as well.
I use the account for major edits so I can use the "track this article" feature and make sure no one vandalizes it, plus I'm always curious to see what kind of fixes get applied to the things I submit.
But yeah, I don't even do typo fixes on partially locked or "this article is disputed" pages because I figure it'll just get lost in the revert war or undone by a knee jerk "OMG an edit it must be vandalism on my precious page!" reaction.
It would be cool to see total +/- mods for the AC account.
Give AC a special user page with stats and something like:
AC has posted 9383484 comments, of which:
12356 Unmoderated
9382 Insightful
7475 Troll
...
96858 Good karma
- 43854 Bad karma
-----------------
53004 Total karma
Sweet, sweet recognition.
A combination of laziness and the irrational fear that registering will make us realize just how much time we actually waste here?
Anonymous gets shit done. Namefags are namefags first, contributors a distant second.
This here post is properly termed "insightful", rather than "funny". It may be funny because it's true, but it's insightful first.
If a contributor contributes regularly from a dynamic IP address, are these contributions all considered by different anonymous users? As far as I know, dynamic IPs are quite common and if their data was taken over different days (I didn't notice a mention of their time frame in the article, except they took the data "as of March 1st 2005") this could explain why they found anonymous users with less contributions tended to make more quality edits.
How many of these anonymous cowards are really Slimvirgin adding more information as part of her employment as a propaganda agent? I think that is the real question.
... if I log in, the guvmint will be able to read my mind!
I need more tinfoil.
I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.
As an anonymous infrequent contributor, I've corrected or enhanced a few dozen entries over the years. I find the most troublesome aspect of Wikipedia are ego-driven registered users who find some corner of the 'pedia to govern as their personal fiefdom where they either overwrite your factual changes with outlandish personal opinions or simply try to contain you in pointless discussion. A couple rounds of bureaucracy later and all I can do is leave a little-read note asking others to stop the abuse of the self-appointed manager. Fuck it; I have other shit to do.
I would bet that an objective look at anonymous posts on slashdot would show they are also more informative, balanced, etc. than attributed posts. But no one ever sees them because they are buried with initial scores of 1...like this one.
Generally if you just make a few anonymous edits, you're reading something, and you know it is wrong and change it. Or you change a spelling/grammar mistake. And if someone is making A LOT of anonymous edits, it's probably random gibberish.
And if you're going to go though the trouble of making an account, you're either going to do a quick piece of vandalism and leave, or be an active contributor.
I don't even think this is hindsight bias kicking in for calling this obvious. It really is just common sense. I'm surprised someone actually got money to research this. Maybe someone will give me money to research if a lower slashdot ID has a correlation to quality of posts....
"Stand clear, I know what to do!"
Yeah... and a larger sample size wouldn't hurt either. Also picking new users would tend to give you false positives on people who never edit after registering... picking users NOT on that list would be a better move.
This[Citation needed] is to be expected. A lot of people read Wikipedia to look up stuff and learn and all that. They never really wanted to edit it though cuz they're lazu. And then when they look up a topic near and dear to their heart[Citation needed] like a specific video game or show and find something incorrect or totally lacking[Citation needed] and just can't bear to not do something about it[Citation needed]. But that's as far as the motivation takes them. I'd assume the majority of editors are like that. Who has like hours and hours to write really good articles all the time?
and you fix typos? HAHAHAH
Research is useful even if it's obvious. Previously we couldn't cite anyone if we wanted to say that anons who edit once or twice make good edits. Now, thanks to this research, we can. While it's true that these researchers could spend their time and money in better questions, for example examining P=NP, but this research is still useful, if not for everything else, at least for putting it in the references of some other wiki-related research. Now, if I want to write a paper on wikis, I can cite their research and not have to prove it myself. That's a Good Thing. Spending one's time on ground-breaking research is, of course, The Best Thing, but there is still a need for more mundane research.
The key to useful research is its methodological rigour, rather than its conclusions. Everything that is proven scientifically is good for science... even if it's for some commonly known fact such as that rain comes after seeing dark clouds. We may know something intuitively, but that's not science, and good science must be based solely on scientifically proven facts. Therefore the more facts we prove scientifically, the easier it is to make further advances, and other researchers who will work on ground-breaking research later on can still cite the mundane research instead of spending time formalising and proving trivial facts.
Maybe someone will give me money to research if a lower slashdot ID has a correlation to quality of posts....I would. It sounds like a good research question, even though there are better things to spend one's time, a paper on this topic could still be useful in further research, for citation purposes (so that I can just cite you instead of proving it myself, it saves me time). If you write an academic-quality paper of 12 pages minimum on this topic using quantifiable methodologies and proper statistical methods and it gets published in a reputable academic well-known open access journal under GFDL or other similar free licence, then I will offer you a symbolical 10 EUR donation via PayPal (and more if the paper results in ground-breaking conclusions), unless this exact question (correlation of slashdot ID age and quality of posts) has been dealt in another paper before. That's a real offer, and if you write and publish the paper then just e-mail me (but as I said, if your paper is qualitative, you get nothing).
It should be said that if you sit down and attempt to write a rigourous paper, you will find it much more difficult than it initially sounds like, even for such a trivial topic. You would first have to define what a high-quality post is, and although the Slashdot moderation system may help a bit, you would have to decide whether it would be correct to assume that all high-quality posts get modded up or whether quality is the same as popularity.
I find it strange that it is suggested that logged-in users care about their reputation. I am such a logged-in user and I don't care that much about reputation or what people may think or say about me, even though my Wikipedia account is linked with my real name. I mostly care to improve articles or correct misunderstandings. If I find that in some specific occasion I can make the encyclopedia better at the cost of making 500 people hate me, I won't give a fsck what the people are going to think or say about me, as long as I know very well that my actions are correct. Actually I don't care about reputation in the meatspace, either. I just do what feels good and natural for me. If some people dislike it, that's their problem, not mine, and I don't like changing my behaviour and my personality to suit people's opinions about what is considered socially acceptable or good. For example, in the past it was considered immoral and socially unacceptable not to believe in the church's religion or to believe things that the Pope or other religious leader didn't like. Did this make early scientists immoral? Of course not!
Needless to say, I was talking about papers generally, and I don't necessarily agree or condone the particular paper being discussed here.
And ideally it should still be like this.
Recently, WP is at the stage of more stringent enforcement of policies, as well as guidelines and styleguidesWhich is a very Bad Thing, IMO. Wikipedia is still incomplete, and the more paranoid it becomes about 'protecting' its content, the less contributions it's going to get. There is now too much unnesessary bureaucracy on Wikipedia that makes everyone's life very difficult.
Things like this have not been addressed.
for the homiez in the gnaa!
"I said I'm not inclined to believe you, but that does not equate me calling you a liar"
I have a 12 year old son, and he will never admit he's wrong. I put that down to his being 12. Hopefully he grows out of that. You remind me a great deal of him. When you say you don't believe someone is telling the truth, that is calling him a liar. An adult will simply admit they're wrong when they're wrong.
Anyway, why don't you ask him for the entry that was affected so can verify it yourself.
Actually, you cannot use checkuser to do this. Why not? Because most people don't have static IP's. To do the research you are suggesting, you will have to personally ask registered users and trust them to tell you the truth.
P.S. Yes, this implies that all or most of the numbers you quote are wrong. How do I get someone to mod you down?
"It's common knowledge on..."
:)
Tsk Tsk Tsk
Isn't the elitism amongst registered users one of the biggest dangers a place like wikipedia face? People who through hard and honest work earn enough reputation to obtain a position where they can influence what is deemed right and wrong for wikipedia. But much more than that, people who post on areas outside of what they ought to because they want to climb the ladder of awesome reputation within the community, or simply keep their place.
Your argument looks appealing. However, the problem is that most people don't have the time to evaluate the validity of each and every random statement they encounter. Thus, for economic reasons people tend to filter information based on the repudiation of the source. You may bemoan this on philosophical grounds, but it's actually a fairly sound way to deal with the problem at hand.
anon contributors tend to be the sort that only make minor contributions, sure they fix a typo or add something useful from time to time but it is the long termers who do the real meat of the editing trying to keep structure to the articles, add citations and so on.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I am not a registered user, but i browse wikipedia quite frequently, and when i spot a simple error, i usually modify it. I think that lots of the anonymous contributors have this same pattern, so i am not impressed with this study.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
You'll get jerks going in and putting stuff like "This is gay!" I don't have to know much about the topic to know that's vandalism and remove it. Taking out the gay, I call it. But then I get into such edit wars on the queer theory page.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I liken this to how water cooler chatter among employees is often more factually correct (especially concerning gossip about work), than more formal means of communication passed down by employers.
What the heck is this? It seems that almost all articles in slashdot is getting this damn post! Is someone giving him/herself all that trouble?
So say we all
Dartmouth COLLEGE not University : update summary! http://www.dartmouth.edu/
Pages on meta are not policy; Foundation policy pages and statements are. My link is the correct one.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
/. and Wikipedia are substantially different resources. One is threaded conversations on geek topics, the other is an editable encyclopedia.
Thus I don't hold conversations on /. with those who can't be bothered to create even an a minimal identity and invest in some reputability. They rarely say anything of interest, rarely return to follow up their posts, and rarely have a legitimate reason for wanting anonymity (typically to-post-asshat-things-w/o-accountability).
Are there AC exceptions? Sure, but few, far-between, and not worth my effort to winnow through for. So I use the supplied tools to filter and let folks know not to bother to expect me to read AC postings, including direct replies.
On the other hand from my experience WP is fairly well managed. It's not perfect but good enough, particularly since I know it's limitations. For getting a quick gloss, looking up a half-remembered item, checking a verifiable fact, getting a start on actually researching something, it has proven invaluable.
While there are complaints of WP vandalism and reputability I haven't had any issue. Indeed on the articles I pay attention to the foolishness hasn't been a problem at all. Something inappropriate or irrelevant gets added, or something appropriate removed, it is quickly noted on the Talk page and soon corrected.
(As a test I just reviewed the past few AC responses to /. postings of mine. Nope, nothing worth anything. One I might have pointed out "national code" depends on the nation, and while the response apparently quotes US legal code I wasn't talking about a US install, but it's not worth pointing out their incorrect assumption.) The rest are complete time-wasters.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
There is no well-recognized Dartmouth University in Canada or anywhere else for that matter. The only significant entity called Dartmouth in Canada is a former town in Nova Scotia (which was absorbed by Halifax). Look it up on Wikipedia if you don't believe me!
How about because wikipedia and its associated non-profit org and for profit corp are a giant festering pile of shit run by dishonest, corrupt scum bags profitting off of the good intentioned work of others? They don't deserve $10, nevermind $10,000,000.
So, what I'm writing now is reliable, because it is the first edit and I'm anonymous.
Now this second paragraph is less reliable.
Less reliable.
Less reliable.
Less reliable.
Less reliable.
May be we should permit anonymous contribution for a small period of time, let's say 3 days after the original post.
Another blinded wiki-phile.
Why does your one data point override the dozens of data points you've seen other people post? And the poster you're responding to is obviously a liar, since his experience is different than yours.
Anecdote is not the singular of data, and it's pretty clear that there are lots of folks out there who've seen petty, ridiculous pissing contents by twits. But, of course, the important thing is to blindly defend the glorious Wikipedia from criticism, right?
Cue the mantra: Anyone can edit, anyone can edit, anyone can edit.
You wikipedia boosters make David Koresh look positively sane.
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I, for one, welcome our Occasionally-Editing Anonymous Coward Overlords. I'm not only a proponent, I'm one of them!
"Time is nothing; timing is everything."
Support Moderation. Read at 0.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I've been reading pretty much everything at -1 because I get mod points every wednesday.
So say we all
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2iZG5JU_Zk I AM a hacker on steroids. *Goes to blow up some vans*
First off, I still love to use Wikipedia as a resource. I have been calling it into question more and more though as edits made without first reading a thousand page guide on Wiki syntax are reverted or doggedly criticized for markup despite matching the format of the original article, and even if they're correct, they'll more likely than not be reverted or defaced by self-appointed guardians of a given article who refuse to let any differing views be presented. Pick any controversial topic and watch as it flip-flops back and forth and whole sections sprout up and vanish mysteriously overnight.
:/
It's better than nothing, and probably better than an encyclopedia (certainly is on average,) but article quality is affected by many behind the scenes actions, some balanced, others not so much. Some articles you simply won't find a consensus on and what they say depends on when you visit them.
Show off...
If you put that comment in a Wikipedia article, I might consider reverting it. I have personally reverted half a dozen IP edits recently, several of which were nearly a week old. What bot is this? It seems to be a rather lazy bot if it can't find a first-ever IP-based edit s/U.S./poopers in under a week.
The one comment I will make in your defense is that anyone running an active bot ought to monitor their talk page fairly aggressively. Nevertheless, sometimes life intrudes on even the most dedicated Wikipedian. I'm not sure on what basis you escalated "didn't reply in a short period of time" to "ignored me". Has the person been actively responding to others? Did you repeat the request in case the person simply overlooked your first attempt? Did you seek out any established user as a third party in seeking resolution?
I think you suffer from some serious misconceptions about the Wikipedia process offers. There is no contract that every constructive edit will stick the first time. There is no contract that the most constructive edit ever made won't degrade into a state of bit rot in the absence of continued maintenance. The permanance offered by the Wikipedia has more to do with the long term edit history than the surface state of any article at any time. I disagree with how much they delete. I think many of the article deleted fall short of article status at the time of their deletion. My opinion is that this material should be quarrantined not deleted so that people have reference to the material judged not yet acceptable for prime time. Quarrantined material would be excluded from the Google index, from the default Wikipedia search results, and would not be linkable from the regular article space. The create new article screen would warn about titles already in quarrantine, and the search function available from that screen would include the quarrantined material.
I didn't give much credit to your definition of liar. You criticized a person for authoring a bot as a "twat". That person's contributions, as well as the bot's edit history are there for all to see. In fact, I would say bots have the highest scrutiny level of any edit source. Bots tend to make a large number of edits, and hit a wide variety of pages, including many pages with a watch list that a state dept. would envy.
Does the author make the source code of the bot available? Did you check out the release history for the bot? Is it actively maintained? How many other people have complained?
You provide none of this detail, but manage to conclude that the bot author is a "twat" and hit the "liar accusuation" button on the people here with enough experience not to take your story at face value.
I think most of the horror stories about Wikipedia originate from a group of people who go there expecting one kind of experience, and then when it turns out to work quite differently, go on the warpath with theories of incompetence, malice, and pettiness, rather than making an investment in the culture to learn what works and what doesn't. It's the same thing with travellers. Some people go abroad and never make the effort to fit in, they come back complaining that the destination country is full of bigots and xenophobes. Probably true, but not more so than their country of origin.
In my view, the Wikipedia is the most imperfect social forum that has ever succeeded. Often the greatest innovations are the ones that survive despite the overwhelming deficits or their original incarnation. The original TRS-80 had the same DIN plug for the power as for the tape deck. If you plugged the power into the tape interface, you soon smelled a resistor vaporising from the main board. After the first three months, half the keys on the keyboad had a Poisson distribution for the number of letters produced by each keystroke. It had a lower-case font on board, but they decided to shave off a 1024x1 memory chip (bits) from the video memory, so the lower case font could not be displayed. The tape deck only worked if adjusted to within 5% of the ideal volume level. By any reasonable standard, the TRS-80 should have ended the PC era before it bega
obvious copypasta is obvious.
In order to be a moderator you have to be a registered user, so..
FRA: STFU GTFO
They will make-less of any complaint you have, no matter how valid.