[Web4lib] The Wikipedia Gotcha

[Jakob Voss]

Roy Tennant wrote:

> Meanwhile, good luck with knowing who stands behind Wikipedia. Sure, you
> have Jimmy Wales but from there things get foggy fast. There are well over a
> thousand people with administrator rights on the site with privileges to
> dump your contributions, lock the page, etc. Finding out who these people
> are and what their credentials are is a hit or miss activity.

Yes, you hit the sore point - it's difficult to find out authors and
responsibilities. Wikimedia Foundation is going to establish a feature
called "stable versions" or "verified versions" where people can mark
specific versions as checke (or some other state) so you know that this
person stands with his reputation behind the article - but implementing
and adding such new features into Wikipedia is like the work of Sisyphus
- there are so many wishes to enhance the functionality and the
developers do their best to even keep the site running.

It's on you (the public) to push Wikimedia Foundation to finally
implement stable and verified versions. Articles from outside the
Wikipedia community sometimes have a higher impact than internal discussion.


Richard Wiggins wrote:

> And there is no version control.
>
> Thus you could cite the earlier, correct version of the article,
> and when people follow the citation link, they get the current,
> 100% wrong version.

There *is* version control, but people don't use it when citing
Wikipedia. There are two small links named "Permanent link" and "Cite
this article" in the "toolbox" left of each article, for instance

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Cite&page=White_House&id=109806282

I think many people don't know this, but maybe it's also an attitude of
"well my reader shoud get the newest version of the Wikipedia article" -
so you cannot complain that the newest version may be worse the the
actual version.


Will Kurt wrote:

> Likewise I think people underestimate how seriously many
> online contributors take their reputations, pseudonymous or not.

Yes - online reputation in general is not worth less then academic
reputation - but in Wikipedia the reputation (that I as a "zealot" may
be aware of) is less visible to readers then reputation of academic
scholars. This must be improved and stable/verified versions may be a
part of it.

Greetings,
Jakob

P.S: Stable version is currently pushed by the German Wikipedia
community so best documentation that I am aware of is in German:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Gesichtete_Versionen
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Gepr%C3%BCfte_Versionen

As I said, this feature is beeing implemented but unfortunately it's not
at the top of Wikimedia Foundation's TODO list.

-- 
http://wm.sieheauch.de