On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 8:43 AM, Andrew Cates <Andrew(a)soschildren.org> wrote:
Since you ask on "checking", the checking
was such a labour of love I
am not even sure we will manage it again. For the record, we had
volunteers who were a mixture of students, ex-schools teachers and a
few other professionals who went through the version histories of
articles, choose two versions by "credible" editors reasonably apart
(a month and edits by five editors) , checked the diffs for vandalism,
choose the better version, skim read the article, noted sections or
text strings for deletion if they looked dubious (do parsnips really
induce photosensitivity which is unsourced?). We also took a conscious
decision to remove most info about sexual orientation and scandal in
biogs, also reduce the volume in year pages of serial killers and
terrorist acts to try to get good news/bad news in kilter. A
reasonable sample of each volunteers work was double checked by one of
two office staff. In some cases (the year pages for example) the
volunteers were pretty thorough in checking facts at least for
consistency with Wikipedia biogs and we corrected WP a fair bit. In
others a recent version by a good quality editor with no vandalism in
diffs versus a month earlier was used without much challenge. We then
ran a rude word checker and re-choose or deleted where we hit c***
f*** p**** (except birth control and a couple of others) incest
(except Anne Boleyn where it was on her death warrant) and a couple of
other strings. The only problem with this is some quotations in biogs
are now inaccurate to the tune of missing redundant "f***ing". Such is
life.
I notice already one teachers discussion forum has a teacher
congratulating us on getting the difficult part of the Inca history
correct "unlike the main Wikipedia". Of course, that was just version
selection to a good editor.
Wow, that's pretty amazing! /me is highly impressed
--
Sam
PGP public key:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sam_Korn/public_key