Thanks, Phoebe. I finally finished my post on this, now
s/>.
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(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 4:42 PM, William Beutler
<williambeutler(a)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
Beautiful<http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/>)
about Wikipedia edit wars. Full thing
here<
.
At least it acknowledges its source is
WP:LAMEST<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars>rs>,
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
--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at>
gmail.com *
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