31–40 of 56 posts
http://www.christopherwoodall.com/blog/?x=entry:entry101221-...
A key takeaway for me is that you can't just take crude metrics, make some inferences and run with them. Jimmy Wales has been running his organization under a wide reaching and completely wrong understanding. That's because he equates number of edits with importance of contribution. It's a basic psychology 101 concept, but one thats easily missed: don't equate your operationalized variables with the phenomena you are…
Out of curiosity, how many HNers write on Wikipedia? I do it every so once in awhile, but only only on a few topics I'm intimately familiar with, or to fix obvious vandalism.
Out of curiosity, how many HNers write on Wikipedia? I do it every so once in awhile, but only only on a few topics I'm intimately familiar with, or to fix obvious vandalism.
I started doing so, until I realized the only way you could really contribute an article was to enlist for a lifetime of janitorial duty. Otherwise, whatever work you did quickly degenerates into run-on sentences and trivia. The article's point resonated with me, because it seems that the whole process is based on the assumption that you're a no-lifer who spends all day patrolling Wikipedia. They advertised themselve…
Adopting the concept of forking, distributing the whole thing, and making it easy to push and pull in changes from any source would be a great goal.
Someone already started hacking on a tool for converting the dumps to Git repos, which may or may not be a suitable base to build upon: https://github.com/scy/levitation
Newly-added bytes may be true or false. They may be useful or not useful even if true --- readers do not want every byte about a given topic, they want a few tens of thousands of the most useful ones. (This is entirely orthogonal to the inclusionist-deletionist debate about what topics should be included. Some bytes may be useless in the context of a main topical article about Alan Alda himself, but they would be very relevant to a subtopical article about Alan Alda's dental health).
For a popular topic, you'll have dozens of people adding bytes of varying quality. Insiders subtract the false or useless bytes (an action easily captured in statistics and then maligned on the internet by pundits), but also look at the true and useful bytes, fact-check them, and then leave them in place. This contribution --- curation --- is not captured in any statistics, but it is an important part of the mechanism by which you can have 1 expert and two enthusiastic amateurs stop by every few weeks on their lunch break to expand an article with no centralised notice or approval, without having have the place turned into a mess by the 97 vandals and well-meaning incompetents who came by in the meantime.
The real problem Wikipedia faces is in the long tail of topics, where there is only one person adding the bytes, and that person is either grinding an axe, self-promoting, or afflicted with incurable "nerdview". The well-meaning, harried, underinformed Wikipedia insiders inevitably screw up when they try to distinguish useless vs. useful bytes on these topics, but I wouldn't call the outsiders who added the bytes in the first place "experts". Unfortunately both sides' conduct may be scaring away the people who are actual experts on those long-tail topics ...
So, in the article it's claimed that Wales wanted to do a study using this method, and (implied) if appropriate, revise his conclusion. This is four years ago, anyone knows if that happened? Edited to add: One thing that has been annoying me a little, is when articles, regardless of their quality, are deleted because they lack notoriety. If these deletes adhere to the conclusions in this article (written by an outsid…
Of course he didn't. Do you remember when anonymous page creation was disabled after Seigenthaler? The Foundation promised us a study of the effects. Years later: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/20... They never bothered.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started doing so, until I realized the only way you could really contribute an article was to enlist for a lifetime of janitorial duty. Otherwise, whatever work you did quickly degenerates into run-on sentences and trivia. The article's point resonated with me, because it seems that the whole process is based on the assumption that you're a no-lifer who spends all day patrolling Wikipedia. They advertised themselve…
They advertised themselves as the "open source encyclopedia", but they have not adopted any other concepts from the software development world, such as "quality assurance" and "stable releases". Adopting the concept of forking, distributing the whole thing, and making it easy to push and pull in changes from any source would be a great goal. Someone already started hacking on a tool for converting the dumps to Git re…
Also, how would forking be useful in any way? It's not like someone can work on a feature that later gets merged into the mainline, right? Could you explain the advantages ?
Out of curiosity, how many HNers write on Wikipedia? I do it every so once in awhile, but only only on a few topics I'm intimately familiar with, or to fix obvious vandalism.
Out of curiosity, how many HNers write on Wikipedia? I do it every so once in awhile, but only only on a few topics I'm intimately familiar with, or to fix obvious vandalism.