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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.
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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.
This being Wikipedia, where they are by definition the same.
It would be interesting to try that study with a commercial entity.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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This here post is properly termed "insightful", rather than "funny". It may be funny because it's true, but it's insightful first.
Really? I just checked the half dozen edits Ive made over the past six months. The 5 trivial ones are all intact, and the extensive one (transportation in the town I live in) was edited & rearranged, for the better.
Perhaps the quality of the edits is important.
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.
Yes, I did try to communicate with him, and no I wasn't abusive. He ignored me.
I'm not "way too angry". I only mentioned it at all in answer to a direct question. At the time I was pissed because I'd spent time and thought "giving back" to the community only to have it deleted and be insulted for my trouble. I got over it a few minutes later and haven't mentioned it to anyone till now. Now I know Wikipedia is infested with self-important twats who like to play power games, so I don't waste my effort on it.
This anti vandal bot's talk page has plenty of examples of mistakes. ~~~~
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Yes it does. Weasel words.
these claims always come up in wikipedia discussions on slashdot, and I've yet to see evidence for them
I don't "always make these claims". I'm talking, for the first time, about something that happened to me, personally. So if you don't believe me, you are calling me, personally, a liar. Your smug response is exactly what exacerbates these situations.
If these "claims" are not true, why do so many people make them? A vast conspiracy?
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.
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Interestingly, Dartmouth College is structurally a University-- it consists of multiple distinct schools or colleges. (Dartmouth College, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and Tuck School of Business.) I always wondered why it was still called "Dartmouth College", and perhaps the Dartmouth University in Canada explains that.
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