[WikiEN-l] User Pages & Editing in Wikipedia

[Marc Riddell]

> From: "David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2006 22:28:26 +0000
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] User Pages & Editing in Wikipedia
> 
> On 28/12/06, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
>> OK - I'm learning. There is very much of the technical aspects of Wikipedia
>> I know nothing about. It may seem like grasping, but it's really trying to
>> wrestle with, what I see is a large problem.
> 
> 
> When you started this thread, I assumed you were an old Wikipedia hand
> who knew his stuff. That's probably a compliment ;-)

The material stuff in Wikipedia I can handle. It's the bots & blips and all
the behind-the-scenes computer stuff that makes my eyes cross and brings a
buzz to my brain that even Mary Jane can't match :-).
> 
> 
>> But, I believe, with all of the
>> human, intelligent resources within the Wikipedia community, a solution can
>> be found. I'm just not willing at this point to leave it at "there's nothing
>> that can be done".
> 
> 
> Mmm. I think that you may be asking the wrong question: that is,
> you're making the implicit assumption that a user page can be trusted
> to ascertain whether a contributor to a page knows their stuff.
> 
> In practice, I don't think that's the case. On Wikipedia, the
> contributors are listed in the history, and someone I don't know other
> than a two-page detailed userpage is not necessarily a better writer
> than an anonymous IP that puts in well-written statements of fact with
> good checkable references.
> 
> When a reader views a Wikipedia page, they need to apply critical
> thought to it, like they do to any web page. We can't take that
> requirement away from the reader (and become a "trusted" source). But
> with references, we can *enable* them to apply critical thought to
> Wikipedia.
> 
> So it's all about the contributions themselves and the source material
> that backs the contributions up. The contributors themselves are not a
> focus at all. That's "no ownership of pages."
> 
> 
> - d.

Sources can be checked. What I'm presenting to are the totally mindless,
malicious vandal edits by totally anonymous fools who have complete access
to the encyclopedia. Perhaps I am being naive, but I believe a named,
accountable User Page would go a long way to ridding Wikipedia of them.

Marc
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