Politics & Current Affairs — January 11, 2011

Weeding Out on Wikipedia

What can we learn from visualizing the nature and shape of collective decisions about the inclusion of a topic in Wikipedia?

bigthinkeditor

What can we learn from visualizing the nature and shape of collective decisions about the inclusion of a topic in Wikipedia? Like a garden, an online encyclopedia needs constant weeding. Unlike a garden, an online encyclopedia has thousands of potential gardeners. Over years Wikipedia has developed guidelines and policies to help editors collectively decide whether topics are suitable for inclusion or not. We analyzed and visualized such Article for Deletion (AfD) discussions. …Delete decisions tend to be fairly unanimous. In contrast, we found many Keep decisions resulting from a discussion that leaned towards deletion.

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7 min

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with

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