Jimmy Wales wrote:
Delirium wrote:
So, more interesting would be to address the fundamental problem---that is, mark revisions that have been reviewed by [n] people.
Totally. I think we'll be experimenting a lot in coming months, especially in en where it seems to me that a lot of time-honored processes are starting to be overwhelmed by sheer volume.
That makes sense, although I prefer to view it as incrementally improving what already works, rather than ditching processes and bringing in new stuff. For example, "in the beginning", we just looked at every edit on recent changes by someone we didn't recognize. Now there are far too many edits, so we need some better way of organizing them, and marking which edits have been checked and which still need to be looked at. Not really a fundamental shift in how Wikipedia works, just adding some tools to help us deal with things.
Slightly more fundamental would be displaying to users that a particular revision has a certain level of confidence. This is already implicit for experienced Wikipedians---I think most of us know almost immediately whether a particular article is trustworthy or not, based on patterns like what the prose looks like, how wikified it is, how many people have edited it, what subject area it's in, etc. But formalizing that a bit and making it explicit for newcomers and casual readers can't hurt---we all know that an unwikified page just created by 1 person and not edited by anyone else should be read with a grain of salt, but we can point that out to others in some automated way. Again, just kind of incrementally improving how things work.
For the most part, I think we're doing pretty well, and there are lots of good ways to incrementally improve what's already gong well, it's just that period media frenzies kind of catch us when we're not yet ready.
-Mark