On 8/13/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)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