[Foundation-l] moving forward on article validation - Wikimedia-l

14 Jun 2006


      (Mainly concerning wikipedia, but cross-posting to foundation-l because 
of some discussion of committees; see the end.)
We've discussed on and off that it'd be nice to vet specific revisions 
of Wikipedia articles so readers can either choose to read only quality 
articles, or at least have an indication of how good an article is.  
This is an obvious prerequisite for a Wikipedia 1.0 print edition, and 
would be nice on the website as well.
There is a lengthy list of proposals here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_proposals
I wanted to try to rekindle the process by summarizing some of the 
proposals, which I think can be grouped into three main types, and then 
suggest some ideas on where to go from there.
Proposal #1: Fork or freeze, then bring up to our quality standards.
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Wikipedians would look around for articles that look reasonably good 
(perhaps starting with feature articles) and nominate them to be worked 
on.  Then either freeze them (by placing a notice or some sort of 
technical measure), or else fork them off to a copy.  The articles would 
then be checked for referencing, accuracy, grammar, and so on, possibly 
only by users who've met some bar for participation in the clean-up 
process, resulting in an article suitable for publication.  Forking or 
freezing is to ensure the cleanup process actually terminates rather 
than trying to clean up a moving target; there are of course pros and 
cons to forking vs. freezing.
Some pros: Fairly straightforward; follows successful methods of "stable 
release" management in the software-development world; allows a certain 
amount of editorial work not normally suitable for an in-progress 
encyclopedia (like cutting out an entire section because it's too far 
from being done to go in the print version); is easy to integrate 
"expert review" into as a last vetting step before it goes out the door.
Some cons: Either disrupts normal editing through a freeze, or results 
in duplicated effort with a fork.  Also is likely to result in a fairly 
slow process, so the reviewed version of each article may be replaced 
with an updated version quite infrequently; most articles will have no 
reviewed version, so doesn't do much for increasing the typical quality 
of presentation on the website.
Proposal #2: Institute a rating and trust-metric system
---
Wikipedians rate revisions, perhaps on some scale from "complete crap" 
to "I'm an expert in this field and am confident of its accuracy and 
high quality".  Then there is some way of coming up with a score for 
that revision, perhaps based on the trustworthiness of the raters 
themselves (determined through some method).  Once that's done, the 
interface can do things like display the last version of an article over 
some score, if any, or a big warning that the article sucks otherwise 
(and so on).
Some pros: Distributed; no duplicated effort; good revisions are marked 
good as soon as enough people have vetted them; humans review the 
articles, but the "process" itself is done automatically; most articles 
will have some information about their quality to present to a reader
Some cons: Gameing-proof trust metric systems are notoriously hard to 
design.
Proposal #3: Extend a feature-article-like process
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Extend a feature-article type process to work on revisions rather than 
articles.  For example, nominate revision X of an article as a featured 
article; improve it during the process until it gets to a revision Y 
that people agree is good.  Then sometime later, nominate a new revision 
Z, explain what the differences are, and discuss whether this should 
supercede the old featured version.  Can also have sub-featured statuses 
like "good" or "mediocre, but at least nothing is outright wrong".  In 
principle can be done with no code changes, though there are some that 
could ease things along greatly.
Some pros: Gets at the effect of proposal #2 but with a flexible 
human-run system instead of an automatic system, and therefore less 
likely to be brittle.
Some cons: Will need carefully-designed software assistance to keep all 
the information and discussion manageable and avoid descending into a 
morass of thousands upon thousands of messy talk pages
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These are not necessarily mutually exclusive.  In my opinion, something 
like #3 would be best suited to marking quality of revisions on the 
website, and then the best of these could feed into a process like #1 
that would do final vetting and cleanup before a print publication (in 
addition to print-specific things like editing for space, formatting, 
image resolution, etc.).
In any case, obviously proposals can come and go forever.  None are 
implemented, but that's partly because nobody wants to sink a bunch of 
time into implementing a system when there's no guarantee it will even 
be used.  My hope is to condense the discussion so we choose some 
high-level ideas on how to proceed before moving on to the inevitable 
details, and then move to implementation once we've agreed what we 
actually want.
On an organizational level, it may be useful to have a working group 
sorting this out to focus the process.  It may be useful, in my opinion, 
for the Foundation to make it an official committee of sorts and 
indicate at least informally that it'll support getting its 
recommendations enacted (e.g. paying another developer if development 
resources are the bottleneck).  I would be willing to devote a 
significant amount of time to such a committee, since I think this is 
the single biggest problem holding back Wikipedia's usefulness to the 
general public, and I'm sure there are at least several other people 
with ideas and expertise in this area who would be willing to do so as well.
Thoughts?
-Mark