Thanks, Phoebe. I finally finished my post on this, now herehttp://thewikipedian.net/2010/08/12/wikipedia-infographic-lamest-edit-wars/. Although it's a little more rant-y than I usually get, I hope McCandless finds this, takes it well and goes back to the drawing board. Getting Gizmodo to post that if it happens... well, one can dream.
As I've alluded to, I am working on a visualization project involving Wikipedia, so if there is any list or on-wiki group to know about, someone please let me know!
And if there is not a more rigorous study or project about edit wars, I'd love to see that, too.
Cheers
On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 10:33 AM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.comwrote:
On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 4:42 PM, William Beutler williambeutler@gmail.com wrote:
I'm working on a blog post about this, but here's an infographic from
David
McCandless (who does some nice work, i.e. Information is Beautifulhttp://www.informationisbeautiful.net/) about Wikipedia edit wars. Full thing here<
http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/08/wikipedia-edit-wars.pn...
.
At least it acknowledges its source is WP:LAMESThttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars, which is intentionally humorous, but sure wasn't made with statistical precision in mind. So he's done something else: it looks to the average reader like 11,000 edits were spent on the subject of Freddie Mercury's ethnic history in early 2002, but he's clearly taking the total number of edits and that's the oldest record of the article on Wikipedia. It also categorizes incidents glibly (or just inaccurately) listing Jimbo and Wikipedia-related subjects as "Religion" -- and the question over which Palin was more famous occurred in 2008 (which makes sense) not 2003
(which
doesn't) as it's listed in there.
Maybe I'm making too much of this, but while I think it's one thing for Cracked or Something Awful to joke about Wikipedia, I think if you're offering up visual representations of information, more care should be
given
to accuracy. Erik Zachte does some great work -- it would be nice to see more of that developed for visual interest of non-Wikipedians. That's something else I've been thinking about, but I'm curious to hear what
others
think.
Infographics are awesome, but many people rarely take the time to investigate the data behind them; thanks for doing so.
I don't know if this is something that would specifically come under the purview of the new research committee that is being formed (http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-August/060306.html ) but I definitely think this is the kind of thing such a group might facilitate -- putting out a call for designers to make infographics out of various things that we need to be visualized, or helping getting community review of various efforts. I'm not sure what the best way for a researcher or designer to get quick Wikipedian peer review of their work is now (to catch issues like you identify above); maybe a post on the village pump?
BTW, do we have a *non*-humorous page about edit wars with *good* examples? I'm not sure if there's a good set of example disputes with their resolutions somewhere -- this would be great to have since it's invariably one of the first things non-editors ask about, in my experience, and having examples (beyond just the vague description of process) helps convey what happens.
-- phoebe
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