Delirium wrote:
That makes sense, although I prefer to view it as
incrementally
improving what already works, rather than ditching processes and
bringing in new stuff. For example, "in the beginning", we just looked
at every edit on recent changes by someone we didn't recognize. Now
there are far too many edits, so we need some better way of organizing
them, and marking which edits have been checked and which still need to
be looked at. Not really a fundamental shift in how Wikipedia works,
just adding some tools to help us deal with things.
Absolutely. We agree completely on that.
Slightly more fundamental would be displaying to users
that a particular
revision has a certain level of confidence. This is already implicit
for experienced Wikipedians---I think most of us know almost immediately
whether a particular article is trustworthy or not, based on patterns
like what the prose looks like, how wikified it is, how many people have
edited it, what subject area it's in, etc. But formalizing that a bit
and making it explicit for newcomers and casual readers can't hurt---we
all know that an unwikified page just created by 1 person and not edited
by anyone else should be read with a grain of salt, but we can point
that out to others in some automated way. Again, just kind of
incrementally improving how things work.
The problem with this is figuring out how to do it in a way that doesn't
lead to game playing, karma whoring, etc. Any automated tool would
embody some a priori assumptions that might not match the rich fabric of
our actual experience.
For the most part, I think we're doing pretty
well, and there are lots
of good ways to incrementally improve what's already gong well, it's
just that period media frenzies kind of catch us when we're not yet ready.
David Gerard has a nice way of saying this... we've reached public
popularity when we're still barely out of alpha and into beta, if that.
With software this seldom happens.
--Jimbo