Belated Readings: Week 8

Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations

What are the main problems of the Wikipedia as described by the authors, and how does the community deal with them?
Vandalism: Mainly consist of Mass deletion; Offensive copy; Phony copy; Phony redirection, Idiosyncratic copy. The authors of this paper used their history flow to visually show when a mass deletion occurred. From the version histories, it was noticed that the average response time to correct this was approximately 3 min. across 3574 different articles.

Anonymity vs. authorship: There exist different opinions pertaining authorship and anonymity. Some users prefer to stay anonymous even while contributing substantial information to the available articles. Authorship allows an improved credibility rating where new users contribution could be checked, either for vandalism or perhaps assistance when they are unfamiliar with the community rules and standards.

Negotiation: This occurs when users disagree upon the content and users continuously revert to previous versions. This is resolved with an addition talk meta-page linked to each article which allows users to discuss and resolve their differences regarding the specific article.

Temporal Patterns and Content stability: Due to any user being able to edit the content, there is usually a notable growth in the size of a wiki article. There exist situations where the article size shrinks between edits, and in these cases text has normally been transferred to a new article and is accessed through a redirection link.


A content-driven reputation system for the Wikipedia

What different notions of reputation in Wikipedia do the authors discuss?
Content-Driven Reputation: This is a system where the “Text life” and the “Edit life” of your contribution determine how your reputation is affected. If your contributions last while other users of with high reputation edits around your contribution and leaves the main part intact, then your reputation is increased with a factor of the co-contributors as well as the age of your contribution. Alternatively, if your contributions are quickly reverted, your reputation is reduced with a factor of the reputation of the user that reverted your contribution.

This reputation system reduces the possibility for users to unfairly affect the reputation of another user. The only way that you can increase or reduce another user’s reputation is when your contribution respective to their contribution withstands the test of time. In effect, you put your own reputation on the line whenever you add or remove content.

Prescriptive, descriptive, and predictive reputation:
This system has a prescriptive, descriptive and predictive value. Prescriptive value is gained when the user follows the prescribed behavior within the system, which is built up by contributing lasting content. Descriptive value implies the quality of the contribution, which is used as guide to the trustworthiness of newly contributed text. And finally, a predictive value, where the future contribution of a user will be rated by the number of recent valuable contributions.