FT.com: How Wikipedia is struggling to adapt
Journalism.co.uk (blog)
The number of 'editor' users of the site is no longer growing, despite an increase in articles, which will make it even harder for the site to monitor...

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Full article is here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/125f6be6-f70a-11...&nclick_check=1

Ultimately it concludes that, in order to develop, Wikipedia either has to somehow at least start classing constributors by past performance (how long their past edits have lasted) and also perhaps engage identified outside "experts," whose edits are specially tagged as being more knowlegable. Sanger weighs in with you-know-what.

Sue Gardener says they're working on it. Jimbo says he's "frustrated" at the current state.

Reading between the lines, any proposals where some quality-metric that shows up between editors is fed into the system somehow, will take a lot of programming work. Which nobody is willing to provide to WMF for free. After that, there's the problem that even with any such system in hand, any system which relies more upon hoi aristoi will be rejected out-of-hand by hoi polloi. It's all very reminiscent of the Federalists vs. the anti-Federalists, and Mr. Thomas Jefferson vs. the (unlanded, non-slave-owning, non-winedrinking, stupid) rabble.



If only they had some experts on history and politics and academics to guide them. I mean, like, SPECIAL experts.

Funny how it's been running just fine on the German Wikipedia for quite some time now.

What, flaggedrevs? It was also running on several other projects last I checked.

The quality-metric thing is something different than flagged revisions. The article says "In future, adds Mr Newmark, it may be necessary to track the identity of editors, or find ways to measure their reputations, then rank their work – ideas that seem anathema in the present culture."

Funny thing is some folks at UC Santa Cruz have already written software software that does that. It "computes the origin and author of every word of a wiki, as well as a measure of text trust that indicates the extent with which text has been revised."

What Tarantino said. Giving every editor a color-coded "Pay attention: this user's added text tends to stay put!" figure of merit, for anything they write, is another ball of wax altogether from flagging. Of course, it would require a very good editor ID system to avoid the same kinds of sock-games we have with the WP we know.

Such a rep system is one of the reasons behind human-led RfA's, you know. Though of course they're also testing for political views as well as reliability.

Yes, I heard somebody had a Wiki program that did this automatically, without the human political judgementalism. But saying you have it, and putting it out on a MediaWiki site that actually uses it, is something else.

And of course, getting WP to actually use such a thing would be yet another battle, even if you could actually now do it as a MediaWiki skin, just by flipping a bit. Which, AFAIK, you still can't.

But it's a nice thought. Isn't progress an odd thing? Here it is in the S.F. year of 2010, there is a videophone in my pocket, my house is wired for fiberoptics and all the TVs are flat, and yet my car still has the damned lead-acid battery. I've been reading about the coming death of the lead-acid battery for 35 years, since waaaaay before anybody suggested flat TVs or real-life Star Trek communicators. But things don't happen in the sequence you think they will. They always happen eventually, but it's always hard to say when.

So yes, we'll see real-time rep-based Wiki editing. Sometime. Maybe not on WP. But it's as sure as the eventual death of the lead acid battery. And the mechanical spinning platter hard drive.....

They had one. His name is Larry.

They fired him.

Anything they write? There are quite a few editors who write in more than one field. They may be excellent at say different types of bus but write rubbish when dealing with Latin poetry. Do they get ratings by subject or just an average across all their activities?