Comments on: Can you get a bad grade on a Wikipedia entry?

By: My Wikipedia Contribution Lives On | C. David Gammel, High Context Consulting: Unleashing the strategic potential of the Web.

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 13:18:13 +0000

[...] Deane at Gadgetopia recently discovered the Unconference entry on Wikipedia. This is a topic I created on Wikipedia back in November 2005. It caused a bit of a kerfluffle with Dave Winer at the time, who slammed me indirectly for getting the attribution on the term wrong. [...]

By: xian

xian — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 19:01:57 +0000

Sounds like a great idea, in a spam-free world….

By: Raines Cohen

Raines Cohen — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 18:30:06 +0000

Kevin,

how about Wikipedia having a TrackBack tab and auto-flagging on a main page that an entry is being actively discussed on the blogosphere? That would provide another way to link this debate to the article.

By: Association Inc. » Blog Archive »

Association Inc. » Blog Archive » — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 16:50:23 +0000

[...] Whither Wikipedia: The blogoclump’s own David Gammel gets dissed by Dave Winer in the latest dust-up on Wikipedia: authority or gossip? My opinion: Winer overreacted. My thoughts on how Wikipedia can restore credibility, if not accuracy: in David’s comments. No Tags [...]

By: Kevin Holland

Kevin Holland — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 16:30:58 +0000

Interesting that this debate is taking place on blogs and not on the article’s talk page, which is blank — isn’t the point of the talk page to showcase this back-and-forth that eventually leads to (usually, despite its detractors) rather accurate entries in Wikipedia? I don’t think it should be viewed as “authoritative” but Dave has a point that it usually is. (However, I agree that he should have fixed the error, or at least registered his concerns on the talk page. He could have still blogged about it, but it would have been more useful to make the entry on the article in itself.)

Ways to fix the system to make it more credible, if not accurate:

1) Have a required log-in system that at least requires email addresses and names (not the most secure registration process in the world but better than what they’ve had).

2) Have the system require an entry on an article’s talk page when making a change in order for the change to be accepted, no matter how small.

3) When an article has only had one writer/editor, the system should say that on its page, so that people immediately understand that only one “viewpoint” is being represented.

4) Make the comments/talk page more prominent so that people immediately understand that they can view/add comments to an entry.

By: Raines Cohen

Raines Cohen — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 14:17:03 +0000

I already commented over on John Robb's post, but to answer Paul's question above, the tools are there that could make it very easy for a FireFox plug-in or other server-side tool layered on top of wikipedia to go look at the history and follow references to who's editing what and how much work has been done to edit/refine and entry and the relevance/reputation of the editors and rated rankings by other users / inbound web links/citations and could provide a quick read/score on the niceness/solidity of any given piece. Perhaps this is a job for ~~Superman~~ Opinity?

By: Donovan Preston

Donovan Preston — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 08:51:19 +0000

No. It is a good thing.

I think people who criticize Wikipedia’s accuracy are extremely short-sighted. All history is a shared hallucination. The past is no longer here, so what we have exists only in our collective conciousness. Factual errors get printed in books, and these errors morph into facts in the minds of those who read them. History is written by the winners.

Politics is the process whereby you get people to believe things that you believe (or things that you want people to believe). It’s a dirty game. Perhaps the best way to win is not to play, but then you shouldn’t be upset when others do.

By: Paul Montgomery

Paul Montgomery — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 07:07:21 +0000

I think the point is that if someone went to that entry before those mythical 20 people improved it to become perfection, then all they can see is a flawed entry. And who can tell when an article is a “nice solid piece”?