At 10:27 AM 9/3/2009, OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson wrote:
There is an amusing cnn.com VIDEO entry listing several notable (and quite erroneous) Wikipedia entries, along with the organization's attempt to rectify the problem. Wikipedia plans to implement more stringent record keeping methodologies. Wiki hopes to better track authors making entries, making the process more transparent. Hopefully, Wiki users will be able to determine more quickly if the author making a new questionable/controversial entry has made other erroneous or questionable contributions.
Yeah. You could already get this info in the History, but I can't tell you how much time I've spent trying to find who added something to an article. I rather doubt that this system will totally solve the problem, because edit histories can be extraordinarily conplex. But for recent changes, it should be good.
The story doesn't note that most of the totally silly changes they talk about are caught within as little as a minute. I've done Recent Changes patrolling there, and if I saw a piece of vandalism, and got to it within a minute or two, it had already been fixed, was the norm. Using the more advanced interface already allows an editor to look at the list of changes to all articles, and by hovering the pointer over "diff," see the change, and by hovering it over "contribs" see the editor's contributions. So what they have added, apparently, is a review of history and where the text in the article matches a recent edit, they highlight it and embed links to history and the editor's contribs. Fairly simple.
For the life of me I tried to cut & past in the URL to this specific Wikipedia CNN video clip but was unsuccessful. I can only suggest going to CNN.COM, click on the "video" link (Upper right hand corner) and scroll down 75% - 80% of the way through the video entries. Eventually, you should come across the specific clip titled: "Wikipedia's credibility search"
They make it rather difficult. Use the Share button and email it to someone. I tried emailing myself directly and it didn't work. But emailing to another address cc to myself did work with the other address. It's HTML code that requires an HTML viewer. They don't make it simple. This is the link to that video: http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/tech/2009/09/01/nr.levs.wikipedia.changes.cnn
