[Wikiquality-l] default views

[Luca de Alfaro]

I think most of you know more than I do about the dynamics of user
contributions to the Wikipedia, but I am seriously worried that showing
stable revisions, rather than the most up to date revisions, will change for
the worse how the Wikipedia evolves.

For one thing, this would delegate spam fighting almost entirely to a cadre
of editors: others, even though they are motivated contributors, would not
bother manually checking the latest page for every page they read, and thus,
they would not discover whether the latest page is altered.  The "good
samaritan" phenomenon of people casually landing on a page, and fixing it,
would be much reduced.

I fear even the incentive to edit pages would be reduced.  People are
motivated by instant gratification.  Anonymous users, while they contribute
a lot of spam, contribute also the majority of the factual, correct, and
informative content of the Wikipedia (this is just a matter of statistics; I
could easily post statistical data on this).  Already now, the experience of
an anonymous user contributing to the Wikipedia is not very positive: often,
well-intentioned contributors are reverted, rather than helped, because they
violate some style or convention or other thing they are not aware of.  I
fear that if we introduce the extra step, that their contributions will be
put in a sandbox, maybe with many alternative versions by different users,
and no clear probability that their version will be at some point included,
we will provide a major discouragement for all those contributors.

Not all on-line communities are successful.  The Wikipedia so far has been
wildly successful, and I am worried at the change of something as
fundamental as the principle of wikis: always show the last revision, make
it easier to undo spam than to do it, and trust that most people are
helpful.  I am worried that the inflow of contributions, and especially, the
variety and background of contributors, will shrink significantly.  I am
worried that dedicated contributors will continue to contribute, but the
casual users, experts of some domain, that so far have contributed a very
large proportion of the factual content of the Wikipedia, will withdraw.

Luca



On Oct 8, 2007 6:16 PM, Jonathan Leybovich <jleybov at gmail.com> wrote:

> All,
>
> The proposed behavior of the flagged revision extension is to show the
> last reviewed version only to anonymous users.  I submit that this is
> should be default behavior for ALL users (subject to personalization
> settings override, I guess).  The question here is not just of
> vandalism control, but also of making Wikipedia's content creation
> process more deliberative.  The power to command an article's content
> by submitting the last edit is an incentive not only for vandalism,
> but also the sort of uncivil version contention that has long been
> damaging the community's social fabric.  In making the last reviewed
> version of an article the default view for practically ALL users, we
> remove the incentive for not just vandalism, but all sorts of unsocial
> behavior.
>
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>
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