avoiding forks (was Re: [Wikipedia-l] public service ads in Wikipedia?)

Tue Feb 15 15:30:40 UTC 2005

On Feb 15, 2005, at 9:29 AM, Andre Engels wrote:

> On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 01:26:55 +1100, David Gerard
> <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
>> I use my full name (rather than a net handle) on Wikipedia because it 
>> seems
>> more proper, and also the credit clearly then goes to ME ME ME ME ME.
>> Have they seen the history pages? It's usually clear which two or 
>> three
>> editors are primarily responsible for an article text.
>
> Less clear than it might be. On a minor page you have to check about
> 10 edits to see that there are 1 or 2 people who wrote almost
> everything. On pages with much traffic it's more like checking 50 to
> find 5 of them.
>
> Andre Engels

And in  a few months the major edits will be buried under small changes 
a few revert wars over whether to include a particular link etc. More 
over, this is still article ownership, and creates an incentive to keep 
bits the same because they were "yours". Contribution doesn't equal bit 
persistence, but concept persistence, and while technical tools can 
help us find this, they cannot define it.

This is one reason why organizations in the analog world hand out 
awards and give out honorary posts, because they are a means of 
recognizing contribution without attaching it to present ownership or 
control, and without creating a perverse incentive to stop other people 
from doing work. There are already informal networks of recognition on 
wikipedia, what is needed is some way of making them more formal, and 
thus more transferable to the author's credit.

What we don't want is people trying to keep articles the same because 
the bits are "theirs", what we do want is people contributing material 
that the wikiprocess then goes to work on to produce "finished" 
product.