[Wikipedia-l] Study on Interfaces to Improving Wikipedia Quality

[Maury Markowitz]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 2:23 PM,  <avani at cs.umn.edu> wrote:
> We hope to get your valuable feedback on these interfaces and how Wikipedia
> article quality can be improved.

Given the older snapshots, I selected older articles that I had
started, NuBUS and ARCNET.

The "time based" system from UMN did not work at all, every search
resulted in a page not found.

The USCS system did work, but gave me odd results. Apparently I have a
very bad reputation, because when I look in the History at the first
versions, which I wrote in entirety, it colored it all yellow!

Newer versions of the same articles had much more white, even though
huge portions of the text were still from the origial. This may be due
to diff problems -- I consider diff to be largely random in
effectiveness, sometimes it works, but othertimes a single whitespace
change, especially vertical, will make it think the entire article was
edited.

My guess is that the system is tripping over diffs like this, and thus
considering the article to have been re-written by another editor.
Since this has happened, MY reputation goes down, or so I understand
it.

I don´t think this system could possibly work if based on wiki's
diffs. If its going to work it´s going to need to use a much more
reliable system.

Another problem I see with it is that it will rank an author who´s
contributions are 1000 unchanged comma inserts to be as reliable as an
author who created a perfect 1000 character article (or perhaps rate
the first even higher). There should be some sort of length bias, if
an author makes a big edit, out of character, that´s important to
know.

Maury