[WikiEN-l] Wired: Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text

[FT2]

Since the analysis is over a period of time, it's easy to trial it offline
by statically calculating results for a past period or certain editors, then
seeing if those mean anything. Overall my suspicion is 1/ it'll be so poorly
correlated with quality as to be unhelpful compared to other guides, 2/ we
don't want to encourage a move to that kind of user evaluation metric anyway
for the many reasons given.

FT2


On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 3:57 AM, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 8:28 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com
> >wrote:
>
> > 2009/8/31 Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu>:
> > > I would also point out that competition can be a very healthy thing and
> > it
> > > could very well be a motivating tool. Assuming an algorithm that is
> > > difficult to game editors might well be very interested in improving
> > their
> > > reputation scores. It could even give some credibility to the
> > encyclopedia.
> >
> > Yes, competition is a good motivator, but that is only useful if it is
> > motivating people to do something desirable. We don't actually want
> > people to try and avoid being reverted - WP:BOLD is still widely
> > accepted as a good guideline, isn't it?
> >
>
> From the perspective of building an excellent encyclopedia you might want
> people to be bold. This is an inherently inclusionist perspective where we
> assume that bold editors who write awful, inaccurate or mediocre stuff are
> still making valuable contributions. They are either contributing cruft
> which is easy to get rid of, or they are contributing seeds for some future
> editor to improve, or seeds for conversations on the talk page that will in
> time result in high quality content. Or if we're lucky, they are not only
> bold but really smart and only capable of producing brilliant prose. In
> short, in the limit of time any contribution is a good contribution. Even
> the worst contribution you can think of (which is probably engineered to
> stick but blatantly false) is going to eventually be tagged as vandalism
> and
> will help contribute to future intelligent algorithms that automatically
> weed out vandalism.
>
> From the perspective of an editor whose reputation is at stake, they are
> going to want to think more carefully about their contribution. On average
> they want all of their edits to remain in the encyclopedia for a long time.
> They might not want to be bold and thoughtless because that means they are
> simply planting a seed for another editor to improve on, making it easier
> for that other editor to improve their reputation at the stake of your
> reputation. You might want to start your seed of an edit as a draft and
> improve it over time, only finally submitting it to the encyclopedia after
> it is already high quality and likely to stick.
>
> I tend to think that the latter version is healthier than encouraging
> everyone to contribute every thought that they have. Similar to the
> [[Foot-in-the-door technique]], first we convinced you to edit this page,
> now we'd like to ask you to spend some time thinking about your edit before
> you submit it. If you do, your reputation will improve and your peers will
> respect your edits more in the future.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>