On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 8:28 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dal...@gmail.com>wrote:
> 2009/8/31 Brian <brian.min...@colorado.edu>: > > I would also point out that competition can be a very healthy thing and > it > > could very well be a motivating tool. Assuming an algorithm that is > > difficult to game editors might well be very interested in improving > their > > reputation scores. It could even give some credibility to the > encyclopedia. > > Yes, competition is a good motivator, but that is only useful if it is > motivating people to do something desirable. We don't actually want > people to try and avoid being reverted - WP:BOLD is still widely > accepted as a good guideline, isn't it? > >From the perspective of building an excellent encyclopedia you might want people to be bold. This is an inherently inclusionist perspective where we assume that bold editors who write awful, inaccurate or mediocre stuff are still making valuable contributions. They are either contributing cruft which is easy to get rid of, or they are contributing seeds for some future editor to improve, or seeds for conversations on the talk page that will in time result in high quality content. Or if we're lucky, they are not only bold but really smart and only capable of producing brilliant prose. In short, in the limit of time any contribution is a good contribution. Even the worst contribution you can think of (which is probably engineered to stick but blatantly false) is going to eventually be tagged as vandalism and will help contribute to future intelligent algorithms that automatically weed out vandalism. >From the perspective of an editor whose reputation is at stake, they are going to want to think more carefully about their contribution. On average they want all of their edits to remain in the encyclopedia for a long time. They might not want to be bold and thoughtless because that means they are simply planting a seed for another editor to improve on, making it easier for that other editor to improve their reputation at the stake of your reputation. You might want to start your seed of an edit as a draft and improve it over time, only finally submitting it to the encyclopedia after it is already high quality and likely to stick. I tend to think that the latter version is healthier than encouraging everyone to contribute every thought that they have. Similar to the [[Foot-in-the-door technique]], first we convinced you to edit this page, now we'd like to ask you to spend some time thinking about your edit before you submit it. If you do, your reputation will improve and your peers will respect your edits more in the future. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
