Delirium wrote:
That makes sense, although I prefer to view it as incrementally improving what already works, rather than ditching processes and bringing in new stuff. For example, "in the beginning", we just looked at every edit on recent changes by someone we didn't recognize. Now there are far too many edits, so we need some better way of organizing them, and marking which edits have been checked and which still need to be looked at. Not really a fundamental shift in how Wikipedia works, just adding some tools to help us deal with things.
Absolutely. We agree completely on that.
Slightly more fundamental would be displaying to users that a particular revision has a certain level of confidence. This is already implicit for experienced Wikipedians---I think most of us know almost immediately whether a particular article is trustworthy or not, based on patterns like what the prose looks like, how wikified it is, how many people have edited it, what subject area it's in, etc. But formalizing that a bit and making it explicit for newcomers and casual readers can't hurt---we all know that an unwikified page just created by 1 person and not edited by anyone else should be read with a grain of salt, but we can point that out to others in some automated way. Again, just kind of incrementally improving how things work.
The problem with this is figuring out how to do it in a way that doesn't lead to game playing, karma whoring, etc. Any automated tool would embody some a priori assumptions that might not match the rich fabric of our actual experience.
For the most part, I think we're doing pretty well, and there are lots of good ways to incrementally improve what's already gong well, it's just that period media frenzies kind of catch us when we're not yet ready.
David Gerard has a nice way of saying this... we've reached public popularity when we're still barely out of alpha and into beta, if that. With software this seldom happens.
--Jimbo