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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."
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
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'
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 don't think that this is really all that surprising, people that just do one or two edits aren't typically doing it because the have an investment, they are generally doing it because they found an error.
Some presumably do deface the pages, but I don't find it terribly surprising that somebody that primarily uses wikipedia would be more reliable than somebody that spends most of their time building a reputation. There's just so much more incentive to fix it if you are using it. That isn't to say that named contributers are inherently bad.
Some presumably do deface the pages
I think that's part of the "infrequent" thing. Sure, some people will deface pages, but how many will vandalize just one page once?
Do you really think that someone would go through that much trouble just to trash a few articles on wikipedia (that are easily revertible). But even as I write this, I know that there are probably a few people out who would do exactly that...
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.
Lol.. I wouldn't cite it as a reliable source ever. I would use it as a starting point to get familiarity with a topic or subject or to point some one to where they could. But I wouldn't stake a grade or even an argument on the accurateness of it.
Wikkipedia has had it's share of experts that amount to people lieing about their credentials to fix a page in a certain way and keep the tones of pages agenda driven. This is especially true for anything political or even emotional. I don't know how many times I have pointed to something on Wikki in a post just to have someone come back in a few days and argue that didn't understand what was written only to find everything had changed.
It just isn't reliable for much more then quick references and general primers before getting information from other sites or sources.
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.
Care to provide any evidence for this? I have seen hundreds of anonymous edits. ( a few of them my own when I can't be bothered to login. ) But I have yet to see a single edit being wrongly reverted by a bot.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
Um... you don't need *anything* to register a Wikipedia account. While the login form may ask you for a ton of fields, only your username and password are required; nothing else is (aside the CAPTCHA, but that goes without saying). In fact, being an unregistered editor exposes your IP address to the public, while registered editors are covered by the Wikimedia privacy policy.
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I was tempted to reply with "rv or" but seriously your post is a wild claim. I have 200+ pages on my watchlist, and while I cannot speak for other pages, I can tell you that anonymous edits do not get reverted by default. I've personally reverted some edits, and others have reverted others, but by far most edits have stayed in one form or another.
1. Look at the edit summary 2. Find the name of the bot that reverted you & click it 3. Find the user who runs the but and go to his page 4. Talk with him. You're way too angry for way too little reason. I'd understand if you got angrty if someone shot your or something, but getting angry over a minor misunderstanding is ... a bit much.
If the edit you're making is minor (e.g. fixing a typo) the last thing you feel like doing is getting into a pissing contest over it.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Ah, but that's when it is the most fun. :-D
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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.
Because the chance of the new editor reading the talk page is dismally low, as well, and probably even lower than reading an edit summary. (New editors: YMMV, of course.) I've done that before, and it is like watching a tumbleweed go over a remote road: Not even registered editors care to discuss that stuff in many cases.
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And the humor of your sig saying you don't read ACs! They aren't all about First Post you know.
The problem is that when a longtime editor is wrong, they are generally much more committed than the anonymous editor, so even worse than democracy, articles become shoutocracies.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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've replied to 2 or 3 other articles on /. today, so I'll probably get 5: Insightful for this.
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