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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...
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'
Which is why I should be allowed to accrue karma.
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?
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!
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. ~~~~
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.