[Wikipedia-l] moving forward on article validation

Wed Jun 14 00:11:49 UTC 2006

On 6/13/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> (Mainly concerning wikipedia, but cross-posting to foundation-l because
> of some discussion of committees; see the end.)
>
> We've discussed on and off that it'd be nice to vet specific revisions
> of Wikipedia articles so readers can either choose to read only quality
> articles, or at least have an indication of how good an article is.
> This is an obvious prerequisite for a Wikipedia 1.0 print edition, and
> would be nice on the website as well.
>
> There is a lengthy list of proposals here:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation_proposals
>
> I wanted to try to rekindle the process by summarizing some of the
> proposals, which I think can be grouped into three main types, and then
> suggest some ideas on where to go from there.

.... <snipping out longish section so my puny reply doesn't look so bad>

> On an organizational level, it may be useful to have a working group
> sorting this out to focus the process. It may be useful, in my opinion,
> for the Foundation to make it an official committee of sorts and
> indicate at least informally that it'll support getting its
> recommendations enacted (e.g. paying another developer if development
> resources are the bottleneck). I would be willing to devote a
> significant amount of time to such a committee, since I think this is
> the single biggest problem holding back Wikipedia's usefulness to the
> general public, and I'm sure there are at least several other people
> with ideas and expertise in this area who would be willing to do so as well.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> -Mark

We should go all-ahead on #2, as fast as possible. It doesn't disrupt
our current system, and requires minimal effort (any system
contemplated for #1 or #3 intrinsically involve non-trivial effort and
modifications to software and systems and processes). While we hash
out 1 or 3, #2 could be cooking along nicely, and best of all, it
complements not supplants the others.  And it's a considerable
improvement over our ad-hoc system of warning readers of quality
issues through the many obscure improvement templates.

And of course, it could have side benefits; suppose each vote came
with an optional  edit-summary size box, where you could add a
comment? This would drastically lower the cost of getting feedback
(and since we're all wiki partisans here, we know exactly why lowering
costs of contributing is a very good thing), allowing people who would
never dream of adding to these weird and obscure "discussion" or
"talk" pages to give their feedback and quickly and easily point out
little things or problems. Are there any bugs requests for
voting/rating systems that I could add
this suggestion to?

But w/r/t gaming; I don't think we should worry about this too much.
One vote per IP/account per week (or arbitrary number of edits to an
article to allow for improvements or degradation) would take care of
80% of the problem, and unless we start a totally automatic Wikipedia
1.0 system based on blindly trusting the rating, there wouldn't seem
to be any incentive to game it; or to put it another way, if you can
game the ratings, then you could as well game other things, like being
a user or article content (which generally matter far more to
ne'er-do-wells than per-article ratings).

Of course, rating probably isn't the final, end-all be-all solution,
but we should nevertheless do something. (After all, [[Worse is
Better]], and we don't want Wikipedia 1.0 or whatever it is going by
to become the next [[GNU Hurd]]).

~maru