[Foundation-l] At school

[William Pietri]

On 02/16/2010 02:12 AM, Ziko van Dijk wrote:
> In general: "Never before people knew so little about something they
> use so often", as a German journalist said about Wikipedia.

In a strange way, that pleases me; as Danny Hillis says, "What people 
mean by the word technology is the stuff that doesn't work yet." That 
people use Wikipedia regularly without caring about the the inner 
workings is a sign that we've done something right. Of course, it might 
be too right; maybe we'd like people to pay better attention to the 
quality of what they're reading.

Interestingly, the people who make luggage X-ray machines have a similar 
problem: problems are rare enough that the operators get bored and stop 
looking. Their solution is something called Threat Image Projection: 
they randomly add pictures of bad things to images of real bags. When 
the operator notices something dangerous, they press the "threat" 
button. If they don't notice a projected threat, it's counted against 
them. That keeps the operators alert enough that they'll hopefully 
notice real threats.

I'd love to find some way to usefully apply this approach to Wikipedia, 
but haven't come up with anything yet. Perhaps someone here will.


William