Quality in an open edit wiki   

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Maintaining quality is a matter of both technological tools and social function. See Quality in an open edit wiki for more.

Contents

[edit] Is it a problem?

Yes and no. The surprising experience of wiki communities is that anonymous editing can actually increase the quality of the resource - this of course assumes that there is an active community building on good contributions and reverting spam and edits which are considered "bad".

This is the experience of Appropedia,[1] Also in studies that have been done on Wikipedia, anonymous editors have overall been positive contributors to the site.[verification needed] This kind of counter-intuitive result is one reason for the saying that "Wikipedia only works in practice, not in theory."

Often what happens is that new contributors will edit anonymously a few times, and only then go on to register. This includes people posting projects. Having the barrier of registration may make it less likely for that person to become involved.

Open edit does mean you'll need to put the effort in to make it hard for spammers and vandals (various MediaWiki extensions and settings can help, for example) and to monitor changes (Special:RecentChanges on a MediaWiki site).

[edit] Technology

[edit] Automated tools

Appropedia:Anti-spam and anti-vandalism measures #Restricting permissions for page moves

Protect against spam and other bad content before it can strike, through:

  • CAPTCHA - this is only necessary for anonymous editors and new accounts - an established account holder shouldn't be inconvenienced
  • Bad Behavior and/or other tools detect the behavior of bots, and block suspicious activity, without genuine visitors to the site being inconvenienced.
  • Move protection: page moves are harder to revert, so it's usually wise to set a delay of n days and x number of edits before page moves are permitted.[2]
  • Flagged revisions

Protect against spam and vandalism after the event:

  • Make trusted, competent users into administrators, so they have the tools for faster rollbacks and for deletion. Be sure that they understand this is not a role of editorial authority, but simply for making changes that have been agreed on, or which would obviously be agreed on.
  • Tools like those added to Wikipedia in (2008? early 2009?) for trusted users, similar to those enjoyed by admins.
  • Spam cleanup bots (there are some on Appropedia, not available here).

[edit] Tools for users

[edit] Community

You will need:

  • Community members with email alerts enabled. When multiple people have pages on their watchlist and have email alerts enabled, they can easily keep track of changes to pages.
  • People checking the RecentChanges page regularly. New pages are on no one's watchlist, so
  • Protection against misinformation - seek qualified people in the field to be a part of your community. (Trying to recruit a single person rarely works - spread the message widely, and keep spreading it, and see who responds.) This is less important than it sounds, i.e. qualified experts are not essential to creating a valuable resource, but it still has great value.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ↑ Based on personal observation --Chriswaterguy 13:03, 16 December 2009 (UTC)
  2. ↑ This is explained at Appropedia:Anti-spam and anti-vandalism measures #Restricting permissions for page moves. See also Help:Moving a page.
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