I think it would be a good idea to have the information in a tab called "Metrics", which could have those numbers, as well as the number of unique authors, and number of edits. (And of course some heuristic to filter out effects from edit wars, etc.)
BTW, this is the recent experiment that has caused the latest buzz: http://www.frozennorth.org/C2011481421/E652809545/index.html
Note that each of the five articles used in this person's experiment are very low traffic - one had only three authors and four edits, another had two authors and two edits. Certainly it was not Wikipedia's finest hour, but he certainly chose (and if an appropriate word, cherrypicked) the right ones to highlight the weaknesses.
Articles were: Layzie Bone; Magni; Empuries; Philipsburg, PA; Bernice Johnson Reagon
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
On Sun, 5 Sep 2004 11:20:05 -0400, Alex Krupp amk63@cornell.edu wrote:
On the top of each Wikipedia article should be two things: The time since each article was last edited and the average number of views that article gets per day. This would form a rough system of accountability for every article. For example, a page that hasn't been edited in twenty days and gets over a hundred views per days would be likely to contain fewer errors than a page that was last edited three days ago and gets four views per day.
This way one could even come up with a simple heuristic combining the two statistics so that editors could surf through articles looking for the ones most likely to contain mistakes. One could also surf through the articles least likely to contain mistakes as an admittedly imperfect although useful way of finding articles to nominate for 1.0. I know you can check all of the edits and their dates through the edit history, but there is no easy way for the average user to check how many views any given page gets. This could potentially go a great way for increasing the amount of faith the average population has in Wikipedia.
Also, I should mention this has been inspired by the recent controversy involving the article by Al Fasoldt and the subsequent discussion on this list and now slashdot.
Alex Krupp _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On Sun, 5 Sep 2004 23:37:44 +0800, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
I think it would be a good idea to have the information in a tab called "Metrics", which could have those numbers, as well as the number of unique authors, and number of edits. (And of course some heuristic to filter out effects from edit wars, etc.)
BTW, this is the recent experiment that has caused the latest buzz: http://www.frozennorth.org/C2011481421/E652809545/index.html
Note that each of the five articles used in this person's experiment are very low traffic - one had only three authors and four edits, another had two authors and two edits. Certainly it was not Wikipedia's finest hour, but he certainly chose (and if an appropriate word, cherrypicked) the right ones to highlight the weaknesses.
Articles were: Layzie Bone; Magni; Empuries; Philipsburg, PA; Bernice Johnson Reagon
I would see a much bigger problem with this and that is that the story was posted on Slashdot. This is going to encourage many more people to try similar experiments.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/05/1339219&tid=146&tid=1
On 09/05/04 16:51, John wrote:
On Sun, 5 Sep 2004 23:37:44 +0800, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
BTW, this is the recent experiment that has caused the latest buzz: http://www.frozennorth.org/C2011481421/E652809545/index.html
I would see a much bigger problem with this and that is that the story was posted on Slashdot. This is going to encourage many more people to try similar experiments. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/05/1339219&tid=146&tid=1
More, it was submitted to Slashdot by the vandal in question.
"In this experiment, I painted graffiti on the walls of the local school. It's not vandalism, though, as I'm blogging about it. It was just to test the response times of the janitorial staff. I suggest you all try what I did to prove it for yourself."
- d.
David-
More, it was submitted to Slashdot by the vandal in question.
"In this experiment, I painted graffiti on the walls of the local school. It's not vandalism, though, as I'm blogging about it. It was just to test the response times of the janitorial staff. I suggest you all try what I did to prove it for yourself."
While I'm not too happy with what he did, I do hope that it breathes some fresh life into the peer review discussion. The two core weaknesses of Wikimedia are people acting like assholes and people who don't know what they're talking about. If we systematically review and flag particular revisions of articles, we can create a space within which they do not exist.
The validation system which is currently in CVS is only a rating system and doesn't really help in sorting out individual facts. I'm afraid that as a sole measure, it would contribute to the problem rather than solve it, as people grow eager to push articles through quality control and choose high ratings. These articles then attain a false notion of being authoritative. Similarly, controversial articles might never gain such status because some people don't like their content.
There's an interesting project going on here: http://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check
Like the participants in this project, I've been thinking a bit about ways to mark-up individual facts in articles. Essentially, I want to take a text like
The inscription is approximately 15 metres high by 25 metres wide, and 100 metres up a cliff from an ancient road connecting the capitals of Babylonia and Media (Babylon and Ecbatana).
and mark up parts of it, like so:
??The inscription is approximately 15 metres high by 25 metres wide??
"??..??" means that this part of the article needs a source. Using CSS, all passages marked with "??" could be highlighted or not, depending on personal preferences.
or like this:
^+The inscription is approximately 15 metres high by 25 metres wide [[Source:Behistun, p.84]]
The part starting with "^+" would be referenced by the [[Source:]]. There could be different markup for different quality citations, e.g. ^- for a general encyclopedia or Google citation and ^= for a secondary source citation.
The [[Source:]] namespace could be a magic template-type namespace that would load the bibliographical data from a page and insert it into a footnote, so we don't have to keep inserting the same information.
Using a method like this, we have real semantic information about individual facts and can easily make statements like * 80% of the facts in this article have sources * 40% of the sources we cite are of high quality * Source X is used in Y articles
Of course these claims themselves could be faked. But together with stable-revision flagging and a consensus-based peer review process associated with every page, we could try to do for quality what we've done for quantity. If you wanted to, you could view only articles that have been reviewed and that are deemed 100% accurate.
Regards,
Erik
On 09/06/04 09:26, Erik Moeller wrote:
While I'm not too happy with what he did, I do hope that it breathes some fresh life into the peer review discussion. The two core weaknesses of Wikimedia are people acting like assholes and people who don't know what they're talking about. If we systematically review and flag particular revisions of articles, we can create a space within which they do not exist. The validation system which is currently in CVS is only a rating system and doesn't really help in sorting out individual facts. I'm afraid that as a sole measure, it would contribute to the problem rather than solve it, as people grow eager to push articles through quality control and choose high ratings. These articles then attain a false notion of being authoritative. Similarly, controversial articles might never gain such status because some people don't like their content.
That would be the sort of thing that worried me about a rating system.
There's an interesting project going on here: http://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check Like the participants in this project, I've been thinking a bit about ways to mark-up individual facts in articles. Essentially, I want to take a text like The inscription is approximately 15 metres high by 25 metres wide, and 100 metres up a cliff from an ancient road connecting the capitals of Babylonia and Media (Babylon and Ecbatana). and mark up parts of it, like so: ??The inscription is approximately 15 metres high by 25 metres wide?? "??..??" means that this part of the article needs a source. Using CSS, all passages marked with "??" could be highlighted or not, depending on personal preferences. or like this: ^+The inscription is approximately 15 metres high by 25 metres wide [[Source:Behistun, p.84]] The part starting with "^+" would be referenced by the [[Source:]]. There could be different markup for different quality citations, e.g. ^- for a general encyclopedia or Google citation and ^= for a secondary source citation. The [[Source:]] namespace could be a magic template-type namespace that would load the bibliographical data from a page and insert it into a footnote, so we don't have to keep inserting the same information.
Oh, I *do* like that. Has this been experimented with? Has a protocol/ language guru sanity-checked these additions to MediaWiki syntax?
Of course these claims themselves could be faked. But together with stable-revision flagging and a consensus-based peer review process associated with every page, we could try to do for quality what we've done for quantity. If you wanted to, you could view only articles that have been reviewed and that are deemed 100% accurate.
This sounds absolutely wonderful :-)
- d.
On 06 Sep 2004 11:26:00 +0200, Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
David-
choose high ratings. These articles then attain a false notion of being authoritative. Similarly, controversial articles might never gain such status because some people don't like their content.
Yes, an abiding problem with ratings. I think ratings / flags are mainly useful as a tool for isolating targets for cleanup, and as a distributed vehicle for VfD-style comments (it would be nice to separate out as metadata the review/VfD/controversial status of an article) . As for source annotation and fact checking :
There's an interesting project going on here: http://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check
Indeed!
"??..??" means that this part of the article needs a source. Using CSS, all passages marked with "??" could be highlighted or not, depending on personal preferences.
or like this:
^+The inscription is approximately 15 metres high by 25 metres wide [[Source:Behistun, p.84]]
Or [[Source:Behistun-1992|p. 84, see image caption]], where the source: reference produces the base of the footnote/reference, and the rest is specific information to be added at the end of the reference.
Using a method like this, we have real semantic information about individual facts and can easily make statements like
- 80% of the facts in this article have sources
- 40% of the sources we cite are of high quality
- Source X is used in Y articles
also * 20% of articles with <<NPOV>> tags reference more than one source * average # of (marked) significant verifiable facts per article
Of course these claims themselves could be faked. But together with stable-revision flagging and a consensus-based peer review process
Well, this gets us closer to a zero-knowledge proof of article validity and user reliability, as one can very directly and specifically check the accuracy or sincerity of another's work.
+Sj+