[WikiEN-l] Future avenues of garnering participation; or, How Wikipedia is currently a crappy/crack-tastic game

[maru dubshinki]

On 8/13/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> maru dubshinki wrote:
>
> > Well, I was trying for a funny conclusion there. I doubt we could turn
> >
> >*all* of Wikipedia into a game - how would that even work, anyway?
> >You'd have people presented random paragraphs and asked where the
> >error is (in some cases added by computer, and in some cases not)?
> >That's the best I can come up with anyway, although it might be
> >interesting to have competitive article writing-based games - but
> >rather that we might as well formalize some otherwise tedious and
> >repetitve aspects of Wikipedia that do need to get done and put them
> >in game form so they can get done and free up editor effort for more
> >worthwhile things like writing new articles or rewriting old ones.
> >
> Why does the game need to be competitive?

Well, most previous examples are competitive, and competition
certainly is its own reward - I've noticed that cooperative games have
a hard time delivering whatever ther intangible reward is (like the
regard of one's peers) over the Internet. They work fine in person,
but online...

> A game that teaches co-operative skills in developing an article would
> be a very helpful educational tool.

Kind of like practice essays and articles, except your final product
goes on-wiki and you are graded by how much other editors feel needs
to be revised or added?

> Each student uses the Random article generator (perhaps with the help of
> a bot) to generate a list of ten articles that already exist on
> Wikipedia. He does not see the articles, only the titles. He then
> proceeds to write a first draft of an article on a chosen topic from
> that list. He uploads the article to a local wiki where the other
> students can view and edit the article. Marks can be allocated for
> different types of writing and editing, including big marks for
> achieving NPOV on a controversial topic and marks taken off for getting
> into an edit war.
>
> Ec

Meh. Edit wars are hard to generate on a small wiki AFAIK, and if the
other editors are fellow students, I don't see'em lasting long.
Wouldn't it be more effective to draw on the lists-of-missing-articles
like the Missing Encyclopedic Articles Project maintains, and get the
feedback from Wikipedia at large?  Feed'em through Peer Review, if
normal processes aren't enough.

~maru