[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia: the Journal

[David Goodman]

The assumptions that support the use of such polls elsewhere do not
hold with this:
a. for true mass media, polling viewers on their views of news events,
the assumption is that the number of readers is high and diverse
enough to prevent manipulation
b. for professional topics on professional lists or blogs, the
assumption is that the resource is unknown except to the initiated
c. for polls over Wikipedia questions, the assumption is that only
regular editors will get involved at all, & that if it is an issue
subject to votepacking, non-aligned editors will make a point to
participate
d. for political elections, that the view of the majority must be
followed, whether for practical or ideological reasons, regardless of
prejudice
None of these are actually all that accurate assumptions, but , but
they're better than the situation here.

David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 4:05 PM,  <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:
> I have to modify my comments, because after toying around at
> wiki.answers.com the voting system doesn't work.
>
> It's the same issue at Knol in general.  I get over a thousand "views" a
> day of my knols and very very rarely does anyone "vote" my articles either up
> or down.  There has been suspicion among knolians that those articles with a
> high vote count are some form of fraud (for example by creating a hundred
> accounts and voting with all of them).
>
> So in order to use the whole idea of "the best articles get voted" to the
> top we'd need both a way to combat vote-fraud, and a way to intice readers to
> vote at all!
>
> Will Johnson
>
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