On 11/14/06, SJ 2.718281828@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/12/06, theProject wp.theproject@gmail.com wrote:
Well, I know I personally don't have the patience to wait a few days and then add my contributions. The way I see it, anon comes around --> sees
he
can't edit without registering and waiting four days --> decides it's
not
worth the hassle --> perfectly good contribution lost, maybe more --> Wikipedia suffers more in the long run.
Absolutely.
I don't know if semi-protection is generally discouraging to new editors or not, and without good user studies none of us will ever know for sure. As far as I know, we are very much lacking in good data both about the experience of new editors and of "ordinary users" who don't edit, which is something I hope the research community will be able to someday remedy. It's all very well to have individual, qualitative impressions (sure, the place seems harder to navigate and less friendly than when I signed up three years ago) but those impressions don't mean much overall unless collected widely, counted reliably and aggregated.
I also disagree with anything that presumes bad faith about anonymous editors. Wikipedia built itself by being as open as possible. Can we
diverge
from that path of openness as little as possible?
And agreed again. To expand on GMaxwell's comment about limiting visibility of newbie edits: we should be as liberal as possible in taking in new text and information from contributors, and as careful as possible in how we display it. Each view should very clearly identify, filtered up to the first screen of the main display, the history, community trust, level of discussion and monitoring, and referencing put into an article (especially its last dozen edits).
SJ
I agree, and with what Gmaxwell & Ray have said. Presenting the best possible view of an article -- the vetted and referenced version, the version that's flagged as being "ok" by three people, whatever it takes -- is a service to our users, who are using the site to find information. These people are and should be our primary audience. It's important to remember that Wikipedia is a complicated system, it is difficult to figure out, and that most readers likely don't bother. I've talked to a number of people this year who had used Wikipedia but didn't realize it was user-created; many other people know what it is but are massively fuzzy on the details (someone once asked me if I had worked on all the science articles). If readers like this are in fact in the majority (more data to collect!), we should behave accordingly, and work behind the scenes to ensure better, unvandalized content (as well as mounting education campaigns).
This presentation of course needs to be balanced with openess; but if something doesn't significantly impair the ability to edit but does significantly improve content it seems like a good modification to make. Again, we need data to know if semiprotection, for instance, significantly impairs or significantly improves (or both, or neither).
It's also worth remembering that people's ability to read disclaimers, whether related to liability limitations, article reliability, degree-of-vettedness or anything else is not something to be relied on, and hence presenting good content (not questionable content tagged as "this content may be unreliable, read at your own risk, but here it is anyway") should be our goal.
I also wonder what happened with the de: pilot study. Anybody?
-- phoebe