I'm working on a blog post about this, but here's an infographic from David McCandless (who does some nice work, i.e. Information is Beautiful<http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/>) about Wikipedia edit wars. Full thing here<http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/08/wikipedia-edit-wars.png> .
At least it acknowledges its source is WP:LAMEST<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars>, which is intentionally humorous, but sure wasn't made with statistical precision in mind. So he's done something else: it looks to the average reader like 11,000 edits were spent on the subject of Freddie Mercury's ethnic history in early 2002, but he's clearly taking the total number of edits and that's the oldest record of the article on Wikipedia. It also categorizes incidents glibly (or just inaccurately) listing Jimbo and Wikipedia-related subjects as "Religion" -- and the question over which Palin was more famous occurred in 2008 (which makes sense) not 2003 (which doesn't) as it's listed in there. Maybe I'm making too much of this, but while I think it's one thing for Cracked or Something Awful to joke about Wikipedia, I think if you're offering up visual representations of information, more care should be given to accuracy. Erik Zachte does some great work -- it would be nice to see more of that developed for visual interest of non-Wikipedians. That's something else I've been thinking about, but I'm curious to hear what others think. ________________________________ William W. Beutler | Writer + Consultant FB: /williambeutler <http://www.facebook.com/williambeutler> | TW: @ williambeutler <http://www.twitter.com/WilliamBeutler> http://blogpi.net | http://thewikipedian.net _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
