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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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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...
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'
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
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.
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.
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
It took me a while to figure out what y'all were talking about, but luckily, Wikipedia knew.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
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
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.
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...
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!
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.
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.
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.
Happened to me once. I noticed a list of "movies about the Mafia" was full of titles just about crime, so I deleted those I knew were not Mafia related. Then later I see they've been reverted by some asshole (later I worked out it was a bot) that had decided I was a vandal (as stated in the comment).
Well, did you provide a reason why you deleted the content?
The bots are not infallible. They do catch a ton of the really ridiculous crap that people add to Wikipedia, but they miss some, and have a few false positives as well.
If you are not some random vandal, one thing that you could (actually, should do, as I strongly recommend it) is that you specify why you remove content in the "Edit summary" box. If you say, "Removing movies unrelated to mafia", the bot leaves you alone, or if someone sees the bot revert your removal for an invalid reasons, they can always revert the bot. I've done that myself many a time.
Remember: Humans watch the Recent changes feed too. If you provide a reason for the human, the human may leave you alone. Otherwise, you're just a random IP that is removing content for no reason whatsoever, which happens all day, every day. ~~~~
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
And the humor of your sig saying you don't read ACs! They aren't all about First Post you know.
This anti vandal bot's talk page has plenty of examples of mistakes. ~~~~
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You realise that you are calling me a liar?
had his mother raped. Guy Number Three had his ancestors' graves desecrated,
I told you exactly what happened. I didn't exaggerate or claim malice, just careless arrogance. Some twat sent a bot to delete stuff without bothering to check what it was, and ignored my attempts to discuss it with him. Fuck you if you don't believe me.
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.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
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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