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

[William Beutler]

Thanks, Phoebe. I finally finished my post on this, now
here<http://thewikipedian.net/2010/08/12/wikipedia-infographic-lamest-edit-wars/>.
Although it's a little more rant-y than I usually get, I hope McCandless
finds this, takes it well and goes back to the drawing board. Getting
Gizmodo to post that if it happens... well, one can dream.

As I've alluded to, I am working on a visualization project involving
Wikipedia, so if there is any list or on-wiki group to know about, someone
please let me know!

And if there is not a more rigorous study or project about edit wars, I'd
love to see that, too.

Cheers


On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 10:33 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
>
> --
> * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
> <at> gmail.com *
>
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