On 8/13/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@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