On Sat, Aug 28, 2004 at 04:16:43PM +0200, Marco Krohn wrote:
On Saturday 28 August 2004 06:06, Jens Ropers wrote:
If you doubt the standards of our editorial review mechanisms, go try and introduce some decidedly un-encyclopaedic (unproven, contentious and/or unacademic, etc.) information into an article of your choice. Then check back and see how long your contribution will remain in the article. My confidence is high that -- depending on how much this contribution falls short of encyclopedic standards -- you will find your contribution challenged on the respective article's discussion page (where you will likely be asked to provide references for your claims) or outright removed.
we just had someone on the de mailinglist who purposely modified four articles and introduced a mistake in each of them. He also told us which articles he modified and claimed that none of the mistakes was detected by now. I checked three of the articles he was right with his claim.
In the german article about "consumer surplus" the error was there for about 9 (!) days before I removed the nonesense. In other articles the errors were there for more than 9 days.
I agree with most of what you wrote, but I think it is a mistake to believe that we have any kind of review system which is on par (wrt error elimination) with a real peer review. At least my experience is that the probability for finding a mistake in Wikipedia is by far higher than for Britannica.
I'm seeing a lot of mistakes in Wikipedia too. It seems to be have a lot more mistakes than it used to.
Imagine a wiki without a Recent Changes page - the error can stay in it for days or even weeks before it gets corrected. Such a wiki wouldn't work well. But that's almost the situation in Wikipedia today - because the Recent Changes is so huge, very few people will check all articles, and as the topics of articles become more specialized, chances that non-trivial error will be spotted in RC are getting lower and lower.
Articles monitoring helps, but not that much.
I think we just have to divide RC into reasonably-sized parts. We should group categories into some related standarized sets (without standarization some of the categories would be much more likely to end underchecked), provide RC for each of those sets, and a huge RC for articles without categories, from which the edits in the articles would be categorized for later review by people competent in given area. RC in all categories could stay, but it would probably be only used for things like obvious vandalism and newbie experiments (not like it's much different today).
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
I think we just have to divide RC into reasonably-sized parts.
I think "filtering" is a more apropriate word than "division". Perhaps I only want to see changes in biology categories, perhaps you only want to see new articles, someone else only wants to see changes made on Wednesdays, a fourth person only wants to see changes made by a limited group of people (his traditional enemies). It should be one list, but with more ways to personalize the display.
Already, the "user contributions" is indeed one such filter applied to the list of changes.
On Sat, Aug 28, 2004 at 09:26:32PM +0200, Lars Aronsson wrote:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
I think we just have to divide RC into reasonably-sized parts.
I think "filtering" is a more apropriate word than "division". Perhaps I only want to see changes in biology categories, perhaps you only want to see new articles, someone else only wants to see changes made on Wednesdays, a fourth person only wants to see changes made by a limited group of people (his traditional enemies). It should be one list, but with more ways to personalize the display.
Already, the "user contributions" is indeed one such filter applied to the list of changes.
I think the filtering would only be a partial solution. The reason RC worked so well was that every change was reviewed by a few competent people. If we divide the RC (and provide a special RC for uncategorized articles, from which they will be moved to specialized RCs), this property will be restored. With general filtering it seems to me that there are going to be many changes which won't get into filters of enough competent people. The only idea I have how to cope with that group of changes is the division, but maybe there's some other way.
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
I think the filtering would only be a partial solution. The reason RC worked so well was that every change was reviewed by a few competent people. If we divide the RC (and provide a special RC for uncategorized articles, from which they will be moved to specialized RCs), this property will be restored. With general filtering it seems to me that there are going to be many changes which won't get into filters of enough competent people. The only idea I have how to cope with that group of changes is the division, but maybe there's some other way.
Yesterday I dreamt of a "review queue". There's a common situation: I check an edit on RC, okay, it's not vandalism, but it smells somehow fishy. The problem is, I have no knowledge of the subject (say, it is biology). Currently the only, very stony solution is to leave someone I know who knows about biology a message on his talk page to please have a look at the article. But most people don't do that.
Instead, I could - RC patrol mode switched on in my user pref - select in the diff view the biology-queue, and the edit would go in the review queue of the biologists where someone checks the edit and removes it from the queue (and takes the appropriate measures).
Dunno if that's too complicated, sounds like.
greetings, elian
At 11:44 PM 8/28/2004 +0200, Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
Yesterday I dreamt of a "review queue". There's a common situation: I check an edit on RC, okay, it's not vandalism, but it smells somehow fishy. The problem is, I have no knowledge of the subject (say, it is biology). Currently the only, very stony solution is to leave someone I know who knows about biology a message on his talk page to please have a look at the article. But most people don't do that.
Instead, I could - RC patrol mode switched on in my user pref - select in the diff view the biology-queue, and the edit would go in the review queue of the biologists where someone checks the edit and removes it from the queue (and takes the appropriate measures).
Dunno if that's too complicated, sounds like.
A few days back I proposed something similar to Recentchanges, in which every article would have a link or button that would cause the article to get placed there as a way of drawing attention to dubious content. Clicking the link wouldn't actually change the article, it would just put a link to it out in a prominent position for a little while. Sort of a one-click cleanup queue. I'm hoping that if something like it were implemented it would be used by readers who otherwise wouldn't go to the effort of correcting errors they saw themselves, and so wouldn't otherwise contribute to the project at all.
Something like this has been proposed before, a "Article_validation system".
See: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation And: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_feature And: http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etusiv
On Sat, 28 Aug 2004 23:44:44 +0200, Elisabeth Bauer elian@djini.de wrote:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
I think the filtering would only be a partial solution. The reason RC worked so well was that every change was reviewed by a few competent people. If we divide the RC (and provide a special RC for uncategorized articles, from which they will be moved to specialized RCs), this property will be restored. With general filtering it seems to me that there are going to be many changes which won't get into filters of enough competent people. The only idea I have how to cope with that group of changes is the division, but maybe there's some other way.
Yesterday I dreamt of a "review queue". There's a common situation: I check an edit on RC, okay, it's not vandalism, but it smells somehow fishy. The problem is, I have no knowledge of the subject (say, it is biology). Currently the only, very stony solution is to leave someone I know who knows about biology a message on his talk page to please have a look at the article. But most people don't do that.
Instead, I could - RC patrol mode switched on in my user pref - select in the diff view the biology-queue, and the edit would go in the review queue of the biologists where someone checks the edit and removes it from the queue (and takes the appropriate measures).
Dunno if that's too complicated, sounds like.
greetings, elian
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