[WikiEN-l] purpose served by anonymity / unmoderated edits

[George Herbert]

On 3/20/07, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> The WP way has been to be free-wheeling and pick up the pieces afterwards.
> That's obvious. Something less obvious to most people, apparently, is that _discussing
> WP article by article_ misses the basic point that we write hypertext, not self-enclosed
> essays. You don't really 'improve' a knowledge network by stabilising it. I hear almost
> nothing from this angle.

The value to end users of a knowledge network is a combination of the
value of each piece on a standalone basis, and of the network
interlink count and quality and quality of the linked information.
Article quality shows up in both terms.

Different users will have different use patterns - some will come in
via Google or another external search, or a very direct Wikipedia
search, to a single article, and then be done or leave.  Others will
spend all day hopping around wikilinks expanding their horizons.

We mean too many things by quality.  Among other things, we don't
really have a quantatative description for the overall value of
Wikipedia, to be able to look at usage patterns and say "Oh, we need
more links over here" or "This section of Wikipedia is mostly accessed
one article at a time, we need to encourage article quality growth on
a standalone basis".

I think that we have widespread agreement on long-term direction, but
we're essentially random-walking all the individual components vaguely
in that direction.

Based on articles I pay attention to, I would have to say that
vandalism and spamming are more of a problem than "bad edits".  I see
a very few good intentioned edits that I want to edit back in a weeks'
time.  I see several hundred vandalisms.  Stable versions would
clearly help with vandalism problems.  It would remove incentive for
people to do it, and would make managing that which did happen much
easier.  I am guessing that some form of vandalism fighting takes up
between a quarter and a half of all senior user time, including admins
and arbitrators and staff.  How much worth do we get from getting all
that time back for other useful pursuits within the project?


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com