[WikiEN-l] "Articles of War" -- Wikipedia infographic

[phoebe ayers]

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 4:42 PM, William Beutler
<williambeutler at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm working on a blog post about this, but here's an infographic from David
> McCandless (who does some nice work, i.e. Information is
> Beautiful<http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/>)
> about Wikipedia edit wars. Full thing
> here<http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/08/wikipedia-edit-wars.png>
> .
>
> At least it acknowledges its source is
> WP:LAMEST<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars>,
> which is intentionally humorous, but sure wasn't made with statistical
> precision in mind. So he's done something else: it looks to the average
> reader like 11,000 edits were spent on the subject of Freddie Mercury's
> ethnic history in early 2002, but he's clearly taking the total number of
> edits and that's the oldest record of the article on Wikipedia. It also
> categorizes incidents glibly (or just inaccurately) listing Jimbo and
> Wikipedia-related subjects as "Religion" -- and the question over which
> Palin was more famous occurred in 2008 (which makes sense) not 2003 (which
> doesn't) as it's listed in there.
>
> Maybe I'm making too much of this, but while I think it's one thing for
> Cracked or Something Awful to joke about Wikipedia, I think if you're
> offering up visual representations of information, more care should be given
> to accuracy. Erik Zachte does some great work -- it would be nice to see
> more of that developed for visual interest of non-Wikipedians. That's
> something else I've been thinking about, but I'm curious to hear what others
> think.

Infographics are awesome, but many people rarely take the time to
investigate the data behind them; thanks for doing so.

I don't know if this is something that would specifically come under
the purview of the new research committee that is being formed
(http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-August/060306.html)
but I definitely think this is the kind of thing such a group might
facilitate -- putting out a call for designers to make infographics
out of various things that we need to be visualized, or helping
getting community review of various efforts. I'm not sure what the
best way for a researcher or designer to get quick Wikipedian peer
review of their work is now (to catch issues like you identify above);
maybe a post on the village pump?

BTW, do we have a *non*-humorous page about edit wars with *good*
examples? I'm not sure if there's a good set of example disputes with
their resolutions somewhere -- this would be great to have since it's
invariably one of the first things non-editors ask about, in my
experience, and having examples (beyond just the vague description of
process) helps convey what happens.

-- phoebe

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