[Foundation-l] At school

[Magnus Manske]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 4:32 PM, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
> 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.

De-admin for failure to pick up simulated vandalism?

/me hides