At 05:32 PM 3/20/2007 +1100, Steve Bennett wrote:
On 3/20/07, Bennett Haselton bennett@peacefire.org wrote:
balance, independently of which system is actually better -- such as, Wikipedia having gotten there first, or having more users.)
Why do you think Wikipedia has more users? I know that's kind of a cheap shot, but it's true: unfettered ability to edit and publish is a major drawcard for people wanting to contribute. And, of course, vandals.
Well Citizendium also builds up articles by having them go through an initial growth period, before they are "approved" and signed off on by editors, and any future changes also have to be approved by editors.
If the difference were only due to the fun of real-time editing, then there would be just as many Citizendium users participating in the real-time-editing process during the growth period of an article, as there are on Wikipedia. I think it's safe to say that Wikipedia's first-mover advantage and name recognition is the main reason this is not the case :)
Your idea is interesting, and I agree with your "more bang for your buck" theory: 100 hours of community-provided work followed by 20 minutes of expert work could easily double or triple the value of the work provided by the community. However:
- Where would we find experts?
Well, the same place you find them now. It seems there are enough experts motivated by fun, altruism, etc. to put together pretty high-quality articles on things like Biology. It seems likely that some of them would make the comparably tiny extra effort just to read what's already there and say "Yep, that's true" if they knew it would make the article many times more useful.
- Who would want to verify our really boring articles, lists, etc...
- Would an expert really "stake their reputation" on an article?
What's in it for them?
The answer to both questions is the same, I think, except that in the first case the person approving the article wouldn't have to be an expert. There's the same fun/altruism motive that motivates people to contribute in the first place, and then there's also the name-up-in-lights factor of being the person who approved *the* Physics article in Wikipedia, for example.
I've actually argued that Citizendium should go even further with the name-up-in-lights factor by giving the approving editor(s) name recognition right at the top of the article, with individual contributors listed in the "end credits" (at the bottom, or on another page if the credits run too long). This may become an "ego thing" for the editors, but to the extent that the "ego thing" motivates them to make sure the article content is good, that would serve the interests of the project. Some people think that kind of thing detracts from the "spirit" of the project, but I think such choices have to be judged on how much they serve the project's goals, and if it results in better content, then it would be a good thing.
If the person's name is not right there on the article (even if it can be looked up in the history), then the reward associated with signing off on it, decreases. However, if their name is not on the article, then the *risk* associated with signing off on the article also decreases. So in either case there is a reward associated with the risk.
For having your name on an article, does the reward outweigh the risk? It would seem that many people believe the answer is overwhelmingly yes, given the amount of stuff people write and almost always sign with their own name.
- Can we really present this in a useful way to the public? "This
article is unverified. However, 3 months and 280 revisions ago, an expert from a university you've never heard of verified it as accurate." Um...
In the Citizendium model, once an article is approved, that's the version that people see by default, and the next one in the pipeline only replaces the current version after the assigned editor has signed off on that too.
-Bennett
On 3/20/07, Bennett Haselton bennett@peacefire.org wrote:
- Can we really present this in a useful way to the public? "This
article is unverified. However, 3 months and 280 revisions ago, an expert from a university you've never heard of verified it as accurate." Um...
In the Citizendium model, once an article is approved, that's the version that people see by default, and the next one in the pipeline only replaces the current version after the assigned editor has signed off on that too.
This strikes me as a major disincentive to have articles verified, since then it would mean all future edits have to go through an expert who may or may not be free to review the edits on a timely basis.
Johnleemk
On 3/20/07, Bennett Haselton bennett@peacefire.org wrote:
Well Citizendium also builds up articles by having them go through an initial growth period, before they are "approved" and signed off on by editors, and any future changes also have to be approved by editors.
If the difference were only due to the fun of real-time editing, then there would be just as many Citizendium users participating in the real-time-editing process during the growth period of an article, as there are on Wikipedia. I think it's safe to say that Wikipedia's first-mover advantage and name recognition is the main reason this is not the case :)
Hmm. If someone told me that any change I made to Wikipedia would have to be "approved" by someone, or that the change would be somehow "provisional" or "second-rate', I would be less motivated to work on it.
If the person's name is not right there on the article (even if it can be looked up in the history), then the reward associated with signing off on it, decreases.
"Article approved by Professor John Smith. And written by 190 nameless contributors." Hmm. I'm not against...but I guess I would have to see it in action.
Steve [whoops, wrote this earlier, forgot to send it]
On 20/03/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Hmm. If someone told me that any change I made to Wikipedia would have to be "approved" by someone, or that the change would be somehow "provisional" or "second-rate', I would be less motivated to work on it.
Mmm. Motivation is likely to decrease as the approval process gets backlogged, and I'd be impressed at a process which can (to pick numbers out of the air) re-approve a couple of hundred thousand articles on a weekly, or even monthly, basis.
As an aside, this is a perfect project for an "ongoing fork". Every article on StablePedia is a static copy of a past Wikipedia article, perhaps slightly tidied by SP editors and reviewers; old revisions aren't displayed, and people are pointed back to Wikipedia to work on the ongoing draft. When you want to update, you just dump the old one, grab a new copy, approve and post on StablePedia - GFDL compliance is simple enough, and this means you can display your "approval infrastructure" nice and cleanly without conflicting with the live project. There's no conceptual reason the Foundation couldn't host both, either, and it might even be beneficial to do so as a trial balloon.
(The downside is that it's much less high-profile... but the *upside* is that it might actually happen. Major changes to the publishing structure of enwp proper, especially a credentialled editorial-control system, are rather unlikely to ever actually get in place...)
Hmm. I'm not against...but I guess I would have to see it in action.
I think we'd all like to see proposals working :-)
On 3/20/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
As an aside, this is a perfect project for an "ongoing fork". Every article on StablePedia is a static copy of a past Wikipedia article, perhaps slightly tidied by SP editors and reviewers; old revisions aren't displayed, and people are pointed back to Wikipedia to work on the ongoing draft. When you want to update, you just dump the old one, grab a new copy, approve and post on StablePedia - GFDL compliance is simple enough, and this means you can display your "approval infrastructure" nice and cleanly without conflicting with the live project. There's no conceptual reason the Foundation couldn't host both, either, and it might even be beneficial to do so as a trial balloon.
Yeah, that's good thinking actually. If the proposal is "approval + live editing", and we already do the live editing, then why bother replicating that effort? Do your work at Wikipedia and get the instant gratification *and* contribute towards a high-quality approval-based encyclopaedia. The question just becomes motivating the approvers - perhaps a print copy? Some format that doesn't directly compete with Wikipedia...
Steve
On 3/20/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 20/03/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Hmm. If someone told me that any change I made to Wikipedia would have to be "approved" by someone, or that the change would be somehow "provisional" or "second-rate', I would be less motivated to work on it.
Mmm. Motivation is likely to decrease as the approval process gets backlogged, and I'd be impressed at a process which can (to pick numbers out of the air) re-approve a couple of hundred thousand articles on a weekly, or even monthly, basis.
As an aside, this is a perfect project for an "ongoing fork". Every article on StablePedia is a static copy of a past Wikipedia article, perhaps slightly tidied by SP editors and reviewers; old revisions aren't displayed, and people are pointed back to Wikipedia to work on the ongoing draft. When you want to update, you just dump the old one, grab a new copy, approve and post on StablePedia - GFDL compliance is simple enough, and this means you can display your "approval infrastructure" nice and cleanly without conflicting with the live project. There's no conceptual reason the Foundation couldn't host both, either, and it might even be beneficial to do so as a trial balloon.
(The downside is that it's much less high-profile... but the *upside* is that it might actually happen. Major changes to the publishing structure of enwp proper, especially a credentialled editorial-control system, are rather unlikely to ever actually get in place...)
Yes, I was just about to sugges a similar system myself. An ongoing fork is a much better solution than making the approved version the sole public one. Speaking from personal experience as a webmaster, simply making users take one more step to edit an article (i.e. clicking on "view draft article", instead of being able to go direct to editing) can drastically reduce (I'd say halve wouldn't be unreasonable) the number of users who take the desired action.
And speaking from experience as an editor, a lot of my edits are "impulse" ones made when I see an obviously erroneous statement or wrong formatting or spelling error, or when I see something obvious I can quickly add to an article. I'm sure a lot of other edits, especially those by anons, are made this way. If I had to take one extra step to view the latest version of an article (which I'm sure would be the only editable one), as I'm sure all anons would be forced to under the proposed Citizendium-ish idea, my number of impulse edits would probably be zero.
An ongoing fork solves this problem by making the tradeoff between "latest bleeding edge but prone to errors" and "quite damn accurate, but not quite up to date" explicit and clear to all users, and giving them a free choice. Most who would prefer the bleeding edge version are the type who would edit, while most who would stick with the tried and true ongoing fork are not as likely to edit, making it ideal.
Johnleemk
John Lee wrote:
Yes, I was just about to sugges a similar system myself. An ongoing fork is a much better solution than making the approved version the sole public one. Speaking from personal experience as a webmaster, simply making users take one more step to edit an article (i.e. clicking on "view draft article", instead of being able to go direct to editing) can drastically reduce (I'd say halve wouldn't be unreasonable) the number of users who take the desired action.
Probably so. While I still support the idea of an approved version that counterracts the most egregious silliness, I would prefer something far more sophisticated that takes into account a number of factors in evaluating an article. The result could be a single number (or block of numbers that measure different criteria). It would be a statistical accumulation of individual ratings applied by many people, and would need to take into account subsequent unreviewed edits. It would need to be sufficiently robust to not be derailed by the eccentric opinions of a single user.
Since I do not have the programming skills to implement this I can only dream. :-(
And speaking from experience as an editor, a lot of my edits are "impulse" ones made when I see an obviously erroneous statement or wrong formatting or spelling error, or when I see something obvious I can quickly add to an article. I'm sure a lot of other edits, especially those by anons, are made this way. If I had to take one extra step to view the latest version of an article (which I'm sure would be the only editable one), as I'm sure all anons would be forced to under the proposed Citizendium-ish idea, my number of impulse edits would probably be zero.
Absolutely. I'm sure we've all made minor corrections to articles we would not otherwise edit. That is an important element in the dynamism of the site. It becomes frustrating when the error is buried in a protected template. Sure we can always bring it to the attention of an admin, but who wants to enter into complicated discussions and explanations just to have a single letter changed in a spelling error. We can't both use the mantra "sofixit", and make that fix inordinately complicated or even impossible.
Ec
On 20/03/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
John Lee wrote:
Yes, I was just about to sugges a similar system myself. An ongoing fork is a much better solution than making the approved version the sole public one. Speaking from personal experience as a webmaster, simply making users take one more step to edit an article (i.e. clicking on "view draft article", instead of being able to go direct to editing) can drastically reduce (I'd say halve wouldn't be unreasonable) the number of users who take the desired action.
Probably so. While I still support the idea of an approved version that counterracts the most egregious silliness, I would prefer something far more sophisticated that takes into account a number of factors in evaluating an article. The result could be a single number (or block of numbers that measure different criteria). It would be a statistical accumulation of individual ratings applied by many people, and would need to take into account subsequent unreviewed edits. It would need to be sufficiently robust to not be derailed by the eccentric opinions of a single user.
Since I do not have the programming skills to implement this I can only dream. :-(
Perhaps we're thinking about this the wrong way around. We should aim to approve versions of the article in the history as factually accurate, not change our current processes for the approval of live articles. To ensure our continued growth we need to keep editing as simple as possible.
By allowing particular users to approve versions of articles in their article history (maybe even rating them on a number of scales: factual accuracy, presentation, breadth of coverage), we generate a trustable Wikipedia (users could change their preferences to always seeing the newest approved version of any article they search for, rather than seeing the live version) while retaining our dynamism.
This could mean that any article could have several approved versions at once: some of the approved versions would make claim to factual accuracy (if the approver went through the effort of verifying everything), some would make the claim to simply being vandalism-free. Users could alter their viewing preferences according to how trustable they need the information to be.
Oldak Quill wrote:
On 20/03/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
John Lee wrote:
Yes, I was just about to sugges a similar system myself. An ongoing fork is a much better solution than making the approved version the sole public one. Speaking from personal experience as a webmaster, simply making users take one more step to edit an article (i.e. clicking on "view draft article", instead of being able to go direct to editing) can drastically reduce (I'd say halve wouldn't be unreasonable) the number of users who take the desired action.
Probably so. While I still support the idea of an approved version that counterracts the most egregious silliness, I would prefer something far more sophisticated that takes into account a number of factors in evaluating an article. The result could be a single number (or block of numbers that measure different criteria). It would be a statistical accumulation of individual ratings applied by many people, and would need to take into account subsequent unreviewed edits. It would need to be sufficiently robust to not be derailed by the eccentric opinions of a single user.
Since I do not have the programming skills to implement this I can only dream. :-(
Perhaps we're thinking about this the wrong way around. We should aim to approve versions of the article in the history as factually accurate, not change our current processes for the approval of live articles. To ensure our continued growth we need to keep editing as simple as possible.
I absolutely agree that approval should be as simple as possible for the user. He would simply put a number from 1 to 10 in each category where he wishes to evaluate. Maintaining a historical record of the valuations on the history page sounds interesting if it is technically feasible.
By allowing particular users to approve versions of articles in their article history (maybe even rating them on a number of scales: factual accuracy, presentation, breadth of coverage), we generate a trustable Wikipedia (users could change their preferences to always seeing the newest approved version of any article they search for, rather than seeing the live version) while retaining our dynamism.
All registered editors should be allowed to rate. Any greater restrictions will just complicate the process. Don't worry about the trolls and vandals. When you depend on the Wisdom of Crowds their opinions rapidly become marginalized into expected statistical deviations. Most people will tend to give honest opinions.
This could mean that any article could have several approved versions at once: some of the approved versions would make claim to factual accuracy (if the approver went through the effort of verifying everything), some would make the claim to simply being vandalism-free. Users could alter their viewing preferences according to how trustable they need the information to be.
My first impression from your response is that you would end up with something even more complicated than what I would imagine. :-( While I see the value of having this ones preferences set to have a certain version as preferred, the drive-by viewer just looking for information is not likely to know about this. He can, however, be guided by whether an article has (in big numbers) a reliability rating of 2.6 or 7.9.
Ec
Andrew Gray wrote:
On 20/03/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Hmm. If someone told me that any change I made to Wikipedia would have to be "approved" by someone, or that the change would be somehow "provisional" or "second-rate', I would be less motivated to work on it.
Mmm. Motivation is likely to decrease as the approval process gets backlogged, and I'd be impressed at a process which can (to pick numbers out of the air) re-approve a couple of hundred thousand articles on a weekly, or even monthly, basis.
It's a bit like an "Articles for cleanup" feature. Things are put into the bin faster than they are taken out. For some it makes deletionism an attractive option. When a process becomes backlogged it is evidently not scaling well.
As an aside, this is a perfect project for an "ongoing fork". Every article on StablePedia is a static copy of a past Wikipedia article, perhaps slightly tidied by SP editors and reviewers; old revisions aren't displayed, and people are pointed back to Wikipedia to work on the ongoing draft. When you want to update, you just dump the old one, grab a new copy, approve and post on StablePedia - GFDL compliance is simple enough, and this means you can display your "approval infrastructure" nice and cleanly without conflicting with the live project. There's no conceptual reason the Foundation couldn't host both, either, and it might even be beneficial to do so as a trial balloon.
I have no problem with others creating forks into more specialized Pedias either. I'm sure we would also be happy to share our vandals with them. :-) For us we would still need to maintain a fluidity between the projects. I would leave it to the techies to comment on which would work better on that level.
(The downside is that it's much less high-profile... but the *upside* is that it might actually happen. Major changes to the publishing structure of enwp proper, especially a credentialled editorial-control system, are rather unlikely to ever actually get in place...)
Agreed. It's one of those ideas that only succeeds in uncovering new problems.
Ec
On 3/20/07, Bennett Haselton bennett@peacefire.org wrote:
- Can we really present this in a useful way to the public? "This
article is unverified. However, 3 months and 280 revisions ago, an expert from a university you've never heard of verified it as accurate." Um...
In the Citizendium model, once an article is approved, that's the version that people see by default, and the next one in the pipeline only replaces the current version after the assigned editor has signed off on that too.
Yeah. Which is also bad: "Welcome to Wikipendium, the encyclopaedia that's being edited in real-time. This article is 92 days out of date." Not as bad as Britannica. Not as good as Wikipedia.
Steve