On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 2:23 PM, avani@cs.umn.edu wrote:
We hope to get your valuable feedback on these interfaces and how Wikipedia article quality can be improved.
Given the older snapshots, I selected older articles that I had started, NuBUS and ARCNET.
The "time based" system from UMN did not work at all, every search resulted in a page not found.
The USCS system did work, but gave me odd results. Apparently I have a very bad reputation, because when I look in the History at the first versions, which I wrote in entirety, it colored it all yellow!
Newer versions of the same articles had much more white, even though huge portions of the text were still from the origial. This may be due to diff problems -- I consider diff to be largely random in effectiveness, sometimes it works, but othertimes a single whitespace change, especially vertical, will make it think the entire article was edited.
My guess is that the system is tripping over diffs like this, and thus considering the article to have been re-written by another editor. Since this has happened, MY reputation goes down, or so I understand it.
I don´t think this system could possibly work if based on wiki's diffs. If its going to work it´s going to need to use a much more reliable system.
Another problem I see with it is that it will rank an author who´s contributions are 1000 unchanged comma inserts to be as reliable as an author who created a perfect 1000 character article (or perhaps rate the first even higher). There should be some sort of length bias, if an author makes a big edit, out of character, that´s important to know.
Maury