In another thread, we are discussing the preponderance of problematic
merges of gene/protein items. One of the hypotheses raised to explain the
volume and nature of these merges (which are often by fairly inexperienced
editors and/or people that seem to only do merges) was that they were
coming from the wikidata game. It seems to me that anything like the
wikidata game that has the potential to generate a very large volume of
edits - especially from new editors - ought to tag its contributions so
that they can easily be tracked by the system. It should be easy to answer
the question of whether an edit came from that game (or any of what I hope
to be many of its descendants). This will make it possible to debug what
could potentially be large swathes of problems and to make it
straightforward to 'reward' game/other developers with information about
the volume of the edits that they have enabled directly from the system (as
opposed to their own tracking data).
Please don't misunderstand me. I am a big fan of the wikidata game and
actually am pushing for our group to make a bio-specific version of it that
will build on that code. I see a great potential here - but because of the
potential scale of edits this could quickly generate, we (the whole
wikidata community) need ways to keep an eye on what is going on.
-Ben
