Thursday, August 24, 2017

Wiki Collaborators HATE This:

By Randall Munroe (en:User:Xkcd) - http://xkcd.com/285/, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2817512
Wikipedia is a fantastic collaboration tool for people to share and gain knowledge, most of the time. I say most of the time because wiki contributors can generally be placed into two groups: those who meaningfully add to the largest crowd-sourced database of human knowledge in existence, and those who just want to troll. Collaboration works when a group of people strive to complete a shared objective. However, it only takes a small number of people with malicious intent to muck things up. For example, the Wikipedia page on Hillary Clinton was locked after many different users attempted to vandalize the information on her page. The only people who can edit her page now are those with template change permissions, and those who actually work at Wikipedia. This brings up an interesting question, how much should companies who build collaborative tools like Wikipedia be allowed to restrict users' ability to change or provide information? If there is no oversight, I can only imagine something like Wikipedia turning into a pure anarchy. With total oversight, Wikipedia wouldn't be much of a "Wiki" anymore. It's obvious there needs to be some kind of balance, and as long as there exists a large number of users with access to the same resource, there's gonna be politics involved. The point is collaboration can be a good way to get lots of content online fast, but with great power comes a great need for maturity.

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