Commenting as an experienced editor who has routinely worked on "breaking news" articles in English Wikipedia,my main experience is that with other experienced editors, the article and its history implicitly provide most of the collaboration needed. Edit summaries and edits speak to the other editor's intentions, views and approaches, and I work with those as implicit collaboration, taking them into account and adjusting mine accordingly (or disagreeing if needed) as if the editors had explicitly stated them.
 
My most usual routine editing a "breaking news" high profile article is to watch the diffs and see if anything's been done I disagree with. If it looks good then I don't have to do more than add mine, and with many other editors involved that's often all it takes. [[Higgs boson]] around 4 July (breaking news of major scientific discovery) is a good example of how this works.
 
I resort to the talk page when there is a stance or action by another editor that I feel needs explicit consideration, or to be explicit about my own editing when the above probably isn't sufficient, and explicit dialog is needed. It's useful to fill others in or check where we see a tricky of disagreed point, but it's wasteful of time if not needed, (or inefficient in academic terms) so it's less preferred compared to the above.
 
Often if I have a concern about an editor's actual way of editing, or factual accuracy or action, I'll post a note to their talk page explaining I have a concern and could they look at it, or I've removed a comment and this is why. The reason for that is, if it doesn't need wide consideration, or may reflect poorly on them, or I'm asking it as a friendly favor/request, putting it on the talk page is like someone's mom putting the request to tidy the kitchen on twitter or a blog - it's unnecessarily wide broadcast. If what I'm writing is just for the user themselves, even if article related, I might put it on their talk page first as a low key approach to keep them apprised. If there is a problem and it persists, then it might be handled at the talk page too.
 
So you see, there are many nuances to collaboration, and for experienced editors, the talk page becomes the place where we deal with less experienced editors, or matters needing explicit dialog - but many collborative matters don't need those.
 
FT2


 
On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 1:52 AM, Kerry Raymond <k.raymond@qut.edu.au> wrote:

I think this study of the “collaborative” dynamics is interesting, but I have some questions.

 

Do we have any evidence that collaboration is actually occurring? With breaking news like this, it may just be many individuals operating independently? Collaboration pretty much requires a communication channel, but internal to WP the only visible communication is the talk page (and perhaps user talk pages). We might infer that editors participating in a consensus-building thread in the talk page (or user talk pages) are acting collaboratively in relation to the issue under discussion (but not necessarily more widely. However, if editors are disagreeing in a talk page thread, it is hard to say whether their edits in relation to that issue are collaborative or “warring” (deliberating seeking to undo another) or simply independent (using their best judgement at that moment). Nor can we readily judge if editors not writing on the talk page might still be reading it and thus informing their actions based on those discussions – that is, might be acting in “silent collaboration”. Nor can we tell if any of the editors are having private conversations via email or other means . As communication takes time, in a breaking news situation editors might prefer to just “be bold” and keep the page as up-to-date as possible, using their own “best judgement” rather than “waste” time arguing on the talk page.

 

Can we consider reversions and mutual reversions in a “breaking news” situation as revealing an “edit war”? With many editors simultaneously active, I think you have to consider that it is just a stampede that is taking place. It’s a bit like “walking together”. If just two people walk down a street, we can say pretty clearly if they are walking together (they will remain in close alignment most of the time). But if a crowd of people are walking down the street, it’s hard to say that two people are walking together – they might just be forced into that alignment by the crowd. I think we have the same situation with reversions with simultaneous editors operating in a breaking news situation; many individuals acting independently and reversions might not be intentional.

 

From a research perspective, doing a survey or interview of some of the editors on their perspective of what was going on might be informative to provide better interpretation of the data. Given the protection/semi-protection of the page means it is probably possible to contact many of them via their user talk page. It would be very interesting to know if those who appear to be involved in an edit war saw it as an edit war, and to what extent they thought they were acting collaboratively and  by what means was that collaboration fostered (e.g. explicit discussions on talk page, or more implicit, e.g. adopting a consistent style established by other editors).

 

Kerry

 

From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Taha Yasseri
Sent: Monday, 23 July 2012 3:20 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia's response to 2012 Aurora shooting

 

I resend my previous message that is not delivered yet. Sorry for potential duplicate receiving .

Now, after two days, there are 30 Wikipedia language editions who have covered the event (have an article on it).
Here: http://wwm.phy.bme.hu/blog.html, see the dynamics, i.e. number of covering WPs versus time, measured in minutes and counted from the event time (t=0).
For those who are familiar with spreading phenomena, the curve comes as no surprise. What is surprising, is the fast reaction of Latvian  (3rd place) and rather late reaction of Japanese Wikipedia (the latter is most likely related to time zone effects).

As I did this in a very unprofessional way, errors and miscalculations are expected, please notify if find.

bests,
.taha

On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 7:06 PM, Dario Taraborelli <dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Nice (and timely) work as usual, Brian. I was going to enable AFTv5 on this article but decided to hold off for a number of reason (most importantly the fact that we're slowly ramping up AFTv5 to enwiki and we're mostly focused on scalability at the moment). It'd be interesting to study how enabling reader feedback affects the collaborative dynamics of breaking news articles, especially semi-protected ones on which anonymous contributors don't have a voice.

 

Dario

 

 

 

On Jul 21, 2012, at 5:06 PM, WereSpielChequers wrote:



It is currently semiprotected, there were IP edits when it was first created. But according to the logs it was fully protected for a while due to IP vandalism. However the edit history only shows it going to semi protection, but there were some moves which have complicated things

 

WSC

On 21 July 2012 22:46, Taha Yasseri <taha.yaseri@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok! the page is protected. Sorry!

 

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 11:43 PM, Taha Yasseri <taha.yaseri@gmail.com> wrote:

Thank you Brian,
Could you also plot the absolute number of edits, and editors, (instead of the ratio)? Though, since the data is ready I could do it on my own too!

Surprisingly I see no IP contribution to the article (or may be only few), not in accord with my expectation for such a topic.

cheers,
.Taha

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 9:05 PM, Brian Keegan <bkeegan@northwestern.edu> wrote:

My preliminary analysis of (English) Wikipedia's response to the 2012 Aurora shootings. Data is available at the bottom:

 

http://www.brianckeegan.com/2012/07/2012-aurora-shootings/ 

 

--
Brian C. Keegan
Ph.D. Student - Media, Technology, & Society
School of Communication, Northwestern University

Science of Networks in Communities, Laboratory for Collaborative Technology

 

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