[CITASA] Wikipedia Expertise

[Yuri Takhteyev]

What are you trying to achieve with the quiz?  And what level of
experience are you interested in?

A few thoughts on expertise in wikipedia:

I did a few interviews with wikipedia users in 2006/2007 and one of
the most interesting things that I came across was the concept of
"wikilawyering".  The current wikipedia article on Wikilawyering
describes this as a pejorative term, but the guy who mentioned the
term to me used it more positively.  His point seemed to be that at
some level Wikipedia becomes a rather political affair, especially
when you are dealing with controversial issues.  In order to get your
point of view represented you need support of Admins.  This means you
need people among Admin's who share your perspective.  (In this
particular case it meant having Russian admins to be able to
successfully represent the Russian point of view in articles touching
on Russia and its neighbors.)  This also means stopping wrong people
from becoming admins.  This in turn requires getting into complicated
politics during Admin selection and arguing about the methods for
identifying sock puppets.  And this all requires good understanding of
wikipedia procedures, to avoid getting pushed around on procedural
basis.  In other words, "wikilaywering."

Working on a much much lower level, what I personally have found most
important as a contributor is a knack for identifying which changes
are likely to stick.  This requires paying attention to whether
someone "owns" the page.  Editing a page that is "owned" is a waste of
time, because the "owner" will revert your edits unless you put lots
of effort into defending them.  Other pages, on the other hand, are
pretty much on their own.  You can vandalize them even and nobody
would notice.  (But those tend to be boring.)

At yet another level, I think there a certain set of skills that is
required for _reading_ wikipedia.  I read wikipedia quite often, and
I've been finding that over time it takes me less effort to judge
quality of the information on the paragraph by paragraph basis.  I
think part of it is that I can often guess the history of the
paragraph (the discussion and revisions that went into it) from the
combination of phrasing and the subject matter.

Perhaps this could be somehow converted into a quiz. :)

  - yuri

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 6:23 PM, Judd Antin <jantin at ischool.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> CITASA,
>
> Hello! As part of a class I'm helping to teach this semester, I'm looking at
> what specific knowledge is part of 'expertise' on Wikipedia. For pedagogical
> purposes, I'm creating a kind of 'Wikipedia Quiz' that contains simple
> true/false or multiple choice questions about things that more experienced
> users on Wikipedia might know.
>
> For example, one question I've thought of is:
>
> How far back in the edit history of a Wikipedia article is it possible to
> browse?
> a.      The last six months
> b.      The last year
> c.      Since the last major revision
> d.      Since the creation of the article
> e.      I don't know
>
> Anyway, I thought there are many knowledgeable CITASA folks out there who
> might share their thoughts, brainstorm a bit on other nuggets,
> nuts-and-bolts type pieces of information that one might learn through
> experience with Wikipedia.
>
> Thanks in advance for any and all ideas!
>
> --Judd
>
> --
> Judd Antin
> School of Information
> University of California Berkeley
> jantin at ischool.berkeley.edu
> web: http://technotaste.com
> blog: http://technotaste.com/blog
>
> _______________________________________________
> CITASA mailing list
> CITASA at list.citasa.org
> http://list.citasa.org/mailman/listinfo/citasa_list.citasa.org
>



-- 
http://sputnik.freewisdom.org/