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Peter Damian
I said I would be back (well at least for a bit).

http://ocham.blogspot.com/2011/09/was-all-...efore-2008.html
SB_Johnny
QUOTE(Peter Damian @ Wed 7th September 2011, 2:10pm) *

I said I would be back (well at least for a bit).

http://ocham.blogspot.com/2011/09/was-all-...efore-2008.html

Perhaps I'm the only one not seeing it, but I can't help but ask "what's the point?" blink.gif

(Good to see you again!) smile.gif
Text
A prolific editor named Snowdog from a foreign wiki says:

QUOTE

Snowdog has been around here since 26 September 2003, has been administrator of it.wikipedia, it.wiktionary, it.wikibooks, and it.wikiquote. From June 2005 to about 2007 he was steward on meta.wikimedia. He was vice-president of the chapter Wikimedia Italia during its first year of existence.

Once it was like this:
Translate articles from the english wikipedia........... many other original articles written from scratch.......

Later it was like this:
Patrol! Patrol! Patrol! Hunting unlicensed images, complete unfinished translations, and other various things...........

Today it's like this:
Minimal patrol, some deletion, few edits. Every once in a while a visit to the pages documenting problem users, and when seeing certain users getting blocked and banned think "it was going to happen".....


QUOTE(Big quote on his userpage)

Reason's sleep produces Wikipedia


http://moneywatch.bnet.com/career-advice/b...?tag=shell;main
Peter Damian
You have to read it in conjunction with two previous posts. The links were given on the blog, but I will give them again here

The first http://ocham.blogspot.com/2011/09/masks-at-masked-ball.html links to a discussion on Giano’s page, between a few people including SlimVirgin and Malleus. Slim says “Certain people associated with the Foundation have been saying for years that it doesn't matter who makes the edits; we are all just masks at the masked ball, and what matters is numbers alone. I suspect they'll start to see the folly of that position, though it may take a few years". She goes on “when the history of Wikipedia is written, we're going to be astonished by the small number of people who created and maintained it”. Another (Malleus?) agrees that “crowd-sourcing is largely irrelevant, as most articles are edited by very few editors, often only two or three, which is hardly a crowd, and almost all of the content often comes from only one or two editors”.

The next post http://ocham.blogspot.com/2011/09/who-writes-wikipedia.html mentions a charting tool I developed to examine the growth in articles (in bytes) over time. If crowdsourcing were happening, you would expect to see no sudden jumps in size. Rather, random moves up (as edits stick) and down (as they are reverted), with a slow drift upwards. Rather it looks more like a staircase. A very small number of editors (often only one) produce the article in its final state (although there are exceptions, such as My Little Pony). A further finding was that most of the jumps in size occur before 2008. I forestall the objection that the article had reached its ‘ideal size’ during the growth of 2008. Most of the articles on major novels are small in comparison to articles on My Little Pony and comic books and TV series. Some are more substantial, but that is when someone with a particular interest has written a personal essay on the subject.

You may still ask “whats the point”. Does it matter that most of Wikipedia was built by a few persons, mostly before 2008, and that the building is far from complete? Well, some of us may rejoice. But if I were Jimbo, I would start worrying and try to manage it differently. The crowdsourcing doctrine holds that it doesn’t matter if good content producers leave. There are many molecules producing this upward Brownian drift, someone will soon replace good editors. But if crowsourcing is false, and the product relies on a small number of editors, you would think of ways of retaining them./

That was the point.
EricBarbour
Your tool is a great idea, and you deserve some kind of credit for it.

The hardest part will always be to prove that the WP "management system" produces good, usable articles.
Or not.

I still see them waving around the flawed 2005 Nature article about Wikipedia vs. EB.
They won't shut up about that, despite being hopelessly outdated. Because it's all they've got.

Preparing a decently comprehensive survey of Wikipedia article accuracy and quality will be a massive
task, better suited to a government project than any academic group. Since the WMF's fundraising
doesn't benefit from article quality studies, they won't pay for it. God forbid. Horrors. They might
learn something "unfavorable"! I've been looking into it, and without a focus group of well-educated
people to examine a random sampling of articles in-depth (and check the damn references!) this will
never happen. I could sit there and do it, but Kool-Aders would simply squawk, "you're biased, we
don't believe you".
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