Folks,
Science Daily reports on Dartmouth research on the value of anonymous
contributors to Wikipedia.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071017131854.htm
"The beauty of open-source applications is that they are continually
improved and updated by those who use them and care about them. Dartmouth
researchers looked at the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to determine if the
anonymous, infrequent contributors, the Good Samaritans, are as reliable as
the people who update constantly and have a reputation to maintain.
The answer is, surprisingly, yes. The researchers discovered that Good
Samaritans contribute high-quality content, as do the active, registered
users. They examined Wikipedia authors and the quality of Wikipedia content
as measured by how long and how much of it persisted before being changed or
corrected.
"This finding was both novel and unexpected," says Denise Anthony, associate
professor of sociology. "In traditional laboratory studies of collective
goods, we don't include Good Samaritans, those people who just happen to
pass by and contribute, because those carefully designed studies don't allow
for outside actors. It took a real-life situation for us to recognize and
appreciate the contributions of Good Samaritans to web content."
Anthony worked with co-authors Sean Smith, associate professor of computer
science, and Tim Williamson, a member of the Dartmouth Class of 2005 who
worked on the project as an undergraduate. They set out to examine the
reputation and reliability of contributors to Wikipedia. Wikipedia has an
archive of the history of changes and edits to its entries, which allowed
the researchers access to analyze the perceived quality of content.
By subdividing their analysis by registered versus anonymous contributors,
the researchers found that among those who contribute often, registered
users are more reliable. And they discovered that among those who contribute
only a little, the anonymous users are more reliable. The researchers were
most surprised to find that the reliability of Good Samaritans'
contributions were at least as high as that of the more reputable registered
users' contributions.
"Wikipedia is a great example of how open-source contributions work for the
greater good," says co-author Smith. "And because it welcomes input from
anyone, not just programmers and geeks, it is a great research tool. We can
mine information from Wikipedia that helps us understand human behavior."
Wikipedia may at some point require that anonymous contributors who make
numerous edits register.
"This will probably limit the number of low-quality contributions we find
among high-use anonymous contributors, because in exposing their identity,
they will have their reputation to consider," says Anthony. "I don't foresee
this new policy affecting the quality of those Good Samaritans, though.
Their presence should continue to be valuable."
Their study has been presented at academic conferences."
Regards
*Keith Old*
Jimbo has added a reply on [[Talk:Gary Weiss]] to the effect that the
block might be "a tad excessive", but he still respects it under his
prior orders for "zero tolerance and shoot on sight". He's invited
Durova to reduce the block or not, and will respect it either way.
Now, does anybody else think that orders of "zero tolerance and shoot
on sight" seem to fit better for the East German Stasi guarding the
Berlin Wall than for anything on Wikipedia? Where's the Wikilove in
that? (Have I just triggered some relative of Godwin's Law?)
We really need to change that tagline "The free encyclopedia anyone
can edit". Anyone, that is, except the growing number of banned and
blocked users, or anybody new who sounds too much like a past banned
user and is tagged as a sock/meatpuppet, or anybody who runs afoul of
a "zero tolerance and shoot on sight" edict, or anybody who wants to
edit an article that's protected (perhaps indefinitely, like
LaRouche), or anybody who objects to any of this at the wrong time
and place and attracts the ire of an admin.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
Can anyone shed some light on why the en.wp recent changes RSS feed is
only updating once every 20 minutes or longer? It used to be as often
as every 2 or 3 minutes.
I use Lupin's Anti-Vandal Tool to keep an eye on the recent change
when I feel like vandal patrolling. It relies on the RSS recent
changes feed (since it includes diffs as part of the feed), but it's
practically useless if it only gets two or three updates an hour.
Just now, the feed updated at 02:25 (UTC) and didn't update again
until 02:49.
Yes, I checked my browser cache, and forced a reload of the feed, and
even checked with a different browser -- it really isn't updating.
Thanks for any input y'all might have,
--Darkwind
Here's one possible way to implement this that wouldn't relate to the NPOV
policy: don't remove links, simply deactivate them. The same information
remains for anyone who wants to cut and paste the URL into a browser
manually. The article content isn't affected. What does get affected is
the outgoing traffic from Wikipedia to the site (since a lot of people are
lazy), and Wikipedia is a very considerable source of link traffic. This
doesn't need to be done on a permanent basis, just as long as...say...a
certain editor got specifically targeted on the home page of Michael Moore's
website.
I haven't pushed this idea particularly because another editor whose
judgement and experience I very much respect asked me not to. I'm not
necessarily advocating it now, rather presenting it as an alternative
perspective at a polarized discussion.
-Durova
-----Original Message-----
From: William Pietri [mailto:william@scissor.com]
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 06:08 PM
To: 'English Wikipedia'
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Harassment sites
fredbaud(a)waterwiki.info wrote:
>> The problem is the cases in the middle. What overrides NPOV?
>
>
> I still don't understand what NPOV has to do with this. A link to edit a Wikipedia user's page is as shameful for MIchael Moore as any excess of ours. In a way, linking to it puts him in a false light, displaying petty bullying.
The NPOV violation here is that in the POV of some of us, harassing,
maligning, or exposing Wikipedia editors is a bad thing. More
specifically, it is seen as the one bad thing in all the world that
might merit link removal. Other people do not share this POV.
Perhaps one could make an NPOV-friendly case for removing all links to
all harassment, or maligning, or exposing of anonymous or pseudonymous
people. It would be even more clearly consistent with NPOV to argue for
a removal of all links to all living miscreants everywhere.
Needless to say, I don't think those are a good idea either. I think our
job is to give people the facts as best we can, while leaving the moral
judgments to our readers.
William
_______________________________________________
Yep, your stawmen are indeed straw. You know they are not genuine alternatives, just debating points.
Fred
-----Original Message-----
From: David Gerard [mailto:dgerard@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 04:41 PM
To: 'English Wikipedia'
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Harassment sites
On 19/10/2007, Eugene van der Pijll <eugene(a)vanderpijll.nl> wrote:
> Jimmy Wales schreef:
> > The only real question is where and how to draw the line, but we are
> > actually fortunate in this regard: there are virtually no borderline
> > cases as an empirical matter.
> They may be a minority, but most of the recent discussion was about
> borderline cases. The Nielsen Hayden blog, the WikipediaReview Signpost
> article, the Michael Moore site.
> Perhaps you don't hink these are borderline, but in each of these cases
> I've seen people arguing on both sides.
And whether naming antisocialmedia.net in [[Judd Bagley]] should count
as a personal attack on the people attacked by that site, even though
the site itself is named openly in the NYT etc. as relevant. There was
an arbitration case about this.
The problem is the cases in the middle. What overrides NPOV?
- d.
_______________________________________________
I still don't understand what NPOV has to do with this. A link to edit a Wikipedia user's page is as shameful for MIchael Moore as any excess of ours. In a way, linking to it puts him in a false light, displaying petty bullying.
Fred
Right now discussion takes place on-wiki or on the mailing list
(focusing on wikipedia and wikimedia in particular) or on blogs (where
the interface for discussion is kind of lacking) -- I figured I'd
start a broader discussion forum about wikis to complement milos's
wikiworld list --
http://benyates.info/wikiforum
Cheers
--
Ben Yates
Wikipedia blog - http://wikip.blogspot.com
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Daniel R. Tobias" <dan(a)tobias.name>
To: wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2007 00:43:12 -0400
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Cla68 blocked for asking question
On 20 Oct 2007 at 20:48:48 -0700, "Steven Walling"
<steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Jimbo, at first glance my Portland liberal brain knee-jerk reacted to your
> comment about bringing back the WikiLove by thinking, "How? By simply
> blocking or banning anyone who can't agree with our vision and play nice?
> Seems rather in contrast to wiki values."
>
> But then I thought about it, and that's exactly right. For a long time,
> civility and WikiLove have been rhetoric without any force behind them, or
> at least the force of a block. Perhaps it's time for admins to step up to
> the plate more when it comes to trolls who dance around the letter of the
> law to stick around.
Your first impression makes more sense to me. Love isn't something
you can gain by force or threat of it. Fear, yes, and maybe
compliance, but not love. Are you looking for a fake civility and
feigned love that comes from everybody being afraid to openly show
any other feelings for fear of sanctions? That would be like on the
Twilight Zone episode where the mutant kid reads everybody's mind and
makes people vanish or transform into things if he doesn't like what
they're thinking, so everybody has to constantly think pleasant
thoughts even though they really hate the kid's guts.
******
I don't hate the particular editor I blocked. Nothing personal. And in
situations like this it's rather farfetched to ask for love. I can ask for
civility and adherence to site standards, and when someone drives wedges
into that I can use the tools. They may not construct love, but they do
construct a space in which certain things don't happen - where Wikipedia is
not a battleground, or a soapbox, or a lot of other things people would like
to make of open edit capabilities. Wikipedia isnt anarchy either. We're an
encyclopedia, and people who stray too far from that get a short block to
think about it. If they're basically reasonable people they see that we
mean it and adjust.
-Durova
Just adding "on top of everything else" to the end would have helped.
Anything to make it clear that it wasn't a block purely for asking a
question.
******
I did say "after repeated warnings" on his user page, which expresses that
the behavior took place over a longer span of time. The people who spun
this complaint - and I do believe it was a deliberate spin job - simply
ignored any circumstance that could mitigate their assertion that Jimbo,
Guy, and I were nuts. Some other Wikipedians believed that spin job.
Fortunately, large parts of the community know us better than that.
It wouldn't have much mattered what preventive measures I took, that
group had gotten away with what they were doing for quite some time because
they carefully chose methods that were really harmful in aggregate, but not
startlingly so on any particular diff.
You know how to boil a live frog, right? Don't drop it in boiling water;
it'll hop out. Drop it in lukewarm water and slowly turn up the heat. I'm
not afraid to step forward and shut off the stove.
-Durova