Thanks for initiating this interesting conversation with your paper, Darius.
As a retired professor and researcher and now active Wikipedian, I have a foot
in both camps.
Wearing my academic hat, the concerns I have are the ease of vandalism, the
risk of subtle vandalism (I agree obvious vandalism will be recognised as such
by the reader), how quickly a Wikipedia article can change from good to bad,
neutral to biased etc. Although as an insider to Wikipedia, I know about the
Cluebot, the Recent Change Patrol, watchlists, etc, but to the outside world
there does not appear to be any system of review, and I would have to admit
that our methods of detecting vandalism are far from perfect. When I go away on
holidays, particularly if I don't take my laptop, I stop watching my watchlist.
Then when I get home and try to catch up on my watchlist (an enormous task), I
am stunned to find vandalism some weeks old in articles. Am I the only active
user watching that article? It would seem so. We have a tool (left-hand tool
bar when you are looking at any article in desktop mode) that reports how many
users (but not which users) are watching an article but for privacy no value is
reported if there are less than 30 watchers (it says "less than 30"). Yet what
difference does it make if there are 51 or 61 watchers or "less than 30" if the
users are inactive or are active but not checking their watchlist. Since none
of us (except developers) can gain access to the list of users watching any
page, we have no way of measuring how many articles are being checked by others
following changes, how quickly are they checked or are they checked it all? So
I think we need a better "reviewing" system and one more visible to the reader
if we want to gain respectability in academic circles. We also need to prevent
as much vandalism as we can (why do we have "5 strikes until you are blocked"
policy?, let's make zero tolerance, one obvious vandalism and you're blocked).
My 2nd point of difference is this. When I publish an academic paper, I put my
real name and my institution name on it, and with that I am risking my real
world reputation and also that of my institution. That's a powerful motivator
to get it right. What risk does User:Blogwort432 take to their real world
reputation? Generally none. The user name is not their real name. Even if
blocked or banned, we know they can pop up again with a new user name or be one
of the myriad IP addresses who contribute. One of the reasons I edit with my
real name is precisely because I put my real world reputation on the line
(assuming you believe my user name is my real name of course) and that's a
powerful motivator for me to write good content AND to be civil in discussions.
It's easy to be the opposite when you hide behind the cloak of a
randomly-chosen user name or IP address. Also real world identities are more
able to be checked for conflict of interest or paid editing ("so you work for
XYZ Corp and you've just added some lavish praise to the XYZ article, hmm"). I
think we would have a lot more credibility if we moved to having real world
user names (optionally verified) and were encouraged to add a short CV (which
is currently discouraged) so your credibility as a contributor could be
assessed by readers.
3rd point. Many academics have attempted to edit Wikipedia articles and got
their edits reverted with the usual unfriendly warnings on their User Talk
page. When they reply (often stating that they are an expert in this field or
whatever claim they make), they usually get a very unfriendly reaction to such
statements. I can't imagine that academics who have tried to contribute to
Wikipedia and experienced hostility or seen their edits reverted for reasons
they did not understand or did not agree with are likely to run around saying
that Wikipedia is as good as the academic literature.
I think if we want to turn around academic perception, we need to:
1. make academics welcome on Wikipedia (apart from the usual conflict of
interests)
2. as many contributors as possible should be real-world verified and invited
to upload their CV or link to one on another site (if we don't want them on
Wikipedia User pages)
3. demonstrate we have a comprehensive, fast and effective review of
changed/new content -- wouldn't be good if we could point to an edit in the
article history and see who reviewed it and how quickly that happened (and have
gross statistics on how many reviewed, how quickly, and tools that tell us what
articles aren't being properly reviewed, etc),
4. eliminate vandalism (well, reduce it substantially)
Or at least demonstrate we are moving towards these goals.
Personally I think some of the "norms" of Wikipedia may have served us well in
the early 2000s but don't serve us so well today. To my mind moving towards
real-world named accounts and then real-world verified accounts as a "norm"
will make us better contributors and if we rate-limited pseudonym and IP
accounts, we would at least reduce the amount of vandalism we currently have to
deal with from IP accounts and new user accounts, and make it harder for the
sockpuppets to return, etc. I think we can find ways to do this without
eliminating the privacy needed by a small number of contributors with
legitimate fears about persecution.
Kerry
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
