Wikipedia: quality articles or quality vandalism precautions

Reliability and Vandalism
Wikipedia is a popular place to get some brief information about almost every subject you can imagine.
The wiki-based, user-generated content-sharing site, is governed by the Wikimedia Foundation. More projects of the foundation, supporter of the free culture and software movement, are: wikiversity, wiktionary, wikibooks and worldwikia. One of the main issues, concerning the user and owner goals and expectations, in a site where users themselves can take an active role, is the discouraging of vandalism (by users) in the content and, very important for the success of Wikipedia, prevent the display of unreliable articles.

“If enough users agree with them it becomes true” [Jimmy Wales, 2006.]

Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, held the opening speech at the Wikimania (August) 2006. He had a lot of interesting things to say, also about wikipedia’s main issues. Concerning the reliability issue: He knows the articles at Wikipedia are “pretty good”, they are written by passionate people, and Wikipedia users feel more and more the responsibility trustful and readable articles. Even scientific articles are, according to specialists Jimmy spoke with, correct, all tough not always very in-depth and up to date to the latest discoveries.

The right kind of barriers
I think it’s a good thing that despite the risk of vandalism, the barriers of editing (or vandalize) a Wikipedia article are still very low. You usually don’t have to sign in and you don’t have to do an intelligent test before you add your knowledge about a subject. Wikipedia always is in search for good quality editors, so even the slightest barrier, like code in the editor, can deter people and have to be eliminated. Take away the barriers so intelligent people can easily leave good and trustful content, is more important than precautionary measures against vandalism and incorrect articles. In an open system it’s also easier to correct mistakes than to make them.
Therefore Wikipedia uses soft security. Only after damage has been done, measures will be taken. Editors of articles can use several features to easily see recent changes and differences, receive modification warnings and revision history. When a user keeps on deleting content or adding nonsense to articles, eventually he or she will be blocked. That’s not the perfect solution, because people can use someone else’s ip-adress, so also legitimate users can be affected by this measure.

 

Design Patterns
I want to address a few Design Patterns that can be used or are used for Wikipedia. For screening of the content, but also for the mainly concrete goal the broad target group has, visiting Wikipedia.

First thing you need when you want to screen a particular article, is an Article Page Pattern. To, for example, easily see recent changes and check these, you will need the Highlight Pattern that highlights changes in a text field. To navigate back in time, I think the best opportunity to give the editor, is to enable him to go back to every point in time where the article has been changed. To view an articles history, Wikipedia works with the use of a List Browser, where list items are the states of the article, sorted by the date of change. The radiobutton of the displayed article is checked. Maybe even a Container Navigation Pattern can be used. The three panes contain a list of changed articles, per article a list of the states the article has been in (sorted by date or maybe by how big the changes were) and in the third pane the selected article. Of course there is also the place to edit the article or choose the article (-state) to display online.

All the precautions and actions (the use of “featured”, “locked” and “stable” articles, warning systems, etc.) of Wikipedia to eliminate vandalism results that incorrect articles are reverted in five minutes.

One thing about the broad target group of Wikipedia, and why I think the use of the Simple Search Pattern is suitable. People mostly know what specific thing they are looking for, and even if they don’t know the correct spelling, Wikipedia still returns some relevant search results. If people don’t exactly know what they are looking for, but do know a less relevant keyword, they can always go to the category-page, which one click further away then the search possibility.