Essays Low‑impact | ||||||||||
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This article has been moved here from Provenance at the suggestion of another Wikipedia user.-- Pseudo Socrates 20:21, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
I would like to propose a button on the history page of each article that would provide the provenance (i.e. author) of each section of text in an article. There are various user interfaces possible for this functionality. One simple way would be to have a quasi-footnote for each section of text that would link to a table of authors at the bottom.-- Pseudo Socrates 19:29, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
The name of each link above was derived from the second column source (login name or ip address) of the history page of the article for which this page was produced. Clicking on a link will produce a dynamic page that shows a version of the article in which the text following the link appears. Of course the source may not be the author of any of the text in a article that results from their edit.
One possbile way to provide provenance would be to place the link before the text. The name of the link would be the author name followed by a colon. The link would point to the version in which the text was introduced. Initially it might be better to place the provenance button on the history page for an article rather than on the article page.-- Pseudo Socrates 22:38, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
It doesn't matter where the links go, it would make the text hard to read. Above all things, this is a source for information. Are you saying making a different version of the page that could be obtained by clicking on one link at the top? Even if that is your idea, I really hate this idea. The information is important as a whole. And again I say, you are the only one who wants this. Howabout1 Talk to me! 23:37, August 19, 2005 (UTC)
Let's call the above proposal author provenance. There is another kind of povenance having to do with the time that piece of text was introduced into an article that could be called temporal provenance.
For example, temporal provenance could be implemented by providing a Provenance button which when pressed would display a dynamic page with the vintage of each interval of text indicated. E.g., text less than 24 hours old could be displayed in red font, text older than 24 hours but younger than a week could be displayed in green, and older text could remain in black.
I would like to amend my proposal to be that we implement temporal provenance instead of author provenance. Pseudo Socrates 13:32, 18 August 2005 (UTC)
Tom Cross' "Puppy smoothies" proposes measuring number of edits, not time. Obviously, the two approaches could be combined.
Providing provenance is likely to have important social effects--positive and negative. You might think that these effects could be avoided by simply voting down the inclusion of provenance in the Wikipedia. However, if some people strongly desire provenance and its inclusion is voted down then it is likely that provenance will be provided via a browser plug in. If this happens then there will be two classes of user of the Wikipedia: those with the plug in and sufficiently powerful computers to quickly compute provenance and those without. Also once one Wikipedia plug in is created it is likely that others may quickly follow. In this way the community could lose significant control over the user interface of the Wikipedia. Pseudo Socrates 01:42, 18 August 2005 (UTC)
There are no individual authors of individual segments of an article. I'm not speaking of some vague collective ownership. I mean to say that the entire text of each article is the entire responsibility of the last editor.
Once I push "Edit this page" and do anything, and save the result, I have assumed responsibility for and authorship of the whole thing. If I don't endorse what existed before, I don't retain it -- I delete or rewrite it.
I don't see that anyone is entitled to weasel out of this responsibility; the very furthest I might go in that direction is to say that, since section editing is allowed, then perhaps I only assume responsibility for the entire section in which I edited.
But should anybody, anywhere ask "who wrote that" about any article, I say there are only three good answers, and none of them link to individual chunks of text:
For purely internal purposes, I might notice that Somebody 7 edits back made such-and-such a change, and although it was retained by subsequent editors, if I wish to question the change, I might well contact that Somebody.
But if the question is accuracy, credit, or blame in the outside world, I say that from one angle, we all share; from another, all share who edited; from yet another, the burden rests firmly on the last editor.
Think about that when you touch a page. — Xiong 熊 talk * 23:35, 2005 August 22 (UTC)
if I understand this correctly, the proposal is for nothing more, and nothing less, than a useful editing tool. Meaning that it will save you time when looking for vintage vandalism. For the reader, it wouldn't make any difference. For the reader, all that matters is WP:CITE, not which IP added which comma. The concept may be useful for some contexts, but with extremely frequently edited article, the concept breaks down. The diff algorithm is not capable to decide which stopword originated with which edit at some point. Baad 08:56, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
What about something like this:
TITLE [ Last major edit: INTERVAL by AUTHOR ]
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
TEXT
TEXT
TEXT
SECTION HEADING [ Last major edit: INTERVAL by AUTHOR ] [ ]
TEXT
TEXT
SUBSECTION HEADING [ Last major edit: INTERVAL by AUTHOR ] [ ]
TEXT
TEXT
AUTHOR would be the last one to submit an edit (without the minor flag) to the article/section/subsection, and would link to that user. INTERVAL would be something like "1 month ago", "3 days ago", or "23 secs ago" and would link to a diff of that change. Fool 20:56, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
I think there should be a channel through which professionals in some fields could be recognized as such and noted experts could be recognized as such.
For instance, a doctor could request status as a medical professional. This would not give him any additional privileges, it'd only give other Wikipedians warning that this guy knows what he's talking about and his contributions should be respected. This can be written on a user page of course, but outside validation would ensure that it's true and I think would help control a lot of edit disputes. A similar system should be produced for "experts", noted researchers or something else in fields where there cannot be professionals; e.g., there are no longer any samurai, but if a Wikipedian has had his work published, he can be recognized as an authority on samurai.
The practicality of this, with the current setup of the Wikimedia Foundation and MediaWiki software, is questionable. It would probably require some implementation in the MediaWiki code to prevent unauthorized usage of tokens indicating one's authority, and unless we can find a way to perform validation through the internet, it would probably require some employees to investigate credentials. I'm not really sure if it's worth that hassle, but it'd be cool. Cookiecaper 22:41, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
Find it here —The preceding unsigned comment was added by The1exile ( talk • contribs) 12:51, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
I find that when I'm editing a section, I'd like to know its history: How did it get to the present state; will I be reinventing the wheel with my planned changes? Of course I could toggle through the whole history of the article, but when there are 200+ edits, that becomes unreal.
What would deal with my problem, and with the provenance problem, would be an improved history page that could identify only those changes within sections (or ideally, within arbitrarily selected passages). With that you could step from version to version of a section, identifying the changes with the diff function.
Of course there are real software problems here. Following a section as it was edited, rearranged, divided into several parts which were later rearranged represents a real challenge. (Consider how easily the diff function gets lost with just a single edit.) Despite the problems (says someone who doesn't do programming) it would provide a valuable editing tool, and a way to identify the provenance of a crackpot (or brilliant) idea in that passage. -- SteveMcCluskey 22:06, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
The software world uses some very simple models for validation and trust: versioning and review. It would not be hard to apply similar models to wikipedia articles. An author should be allowed to version her article and submit for review. Others in the field pertaining to the article's contents could review the article and rate the article's accuracy and leave comments for the author (or next author). There is a condition for this to work: others in the field must be trusted. Trust can be enforced in a number of ways: authentication and review. Authentication is in place already with Wikipedia's login (maybe not extremely strong, but usable). Review (or rate) is essentially what can be found on an online auction site. Users review (or rate) the expertise of a certain user. Users with higher ratings in that field have higher weights applied on their ratings. Credentials and credential verification could be another way to validate trust of an article reviewer. Along with the aforementioned suggestion (a better passage history user interface), any user of Wikipedia would be able to find a versioned article and have less doubt concerning its validity. -- James.cary9 23:20, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
Essays Low‑impact | ||||||||||
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This article has been moved here from Provenance at the suggestion of another Wikipedia user.-- Pseudo Socrates 20:21, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
I would like to propose a button on the history page of each article that would provide the provenance (i.e. author) of each section of text in an article. There are various user interfaces possible for this functionality. One simple way would be to have a quasi-footnote for each section of text that would link to a table of authors at the bottom.-- Pseudo Socrates 19:29, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
The name of each link above was derived from the second column source (login name or ip address) of the history page of the article for which this page was produced. Clicking on a link will produce a dynamic page that shows a version of the article in which the text following the link appears. Of course the source may not be the author of any of the text in a article that results from their edit.
One possbile way to provide provenance would be to place the link before the text. The name of the link would be the author name followed by a colon. The link would point to the version in which the text was introduced. Initially it might be better to place the provenance button on the history page for an article rather than on the article page.-- Pseudo Socrates 22:38, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
It doesn't matter where the links go, it would make the text hard to read. Above all things, this is a source for information. Are you saying making a different version of the page that could be obtained by clicking on one link at the top? Even if that is your idea, I really hate this idea. The information is important as a whole. And again I say, you are the only one who wants this. Howabout1 Talk to me! 23:37, August 19, 2005 (UTC)
Let's call the above proposal author provenance. There is another kind of povenance having to do with the time that piece of text was introduced into an article that could be called temporal provenance.
For example, temporal provenance could be implemented by providing a Provenance button which when pressed would display a dynamic page with the vintage of each interval of text indicated. E.g., text less than 24 hours old could be displayed in red font, text older than 24 hours but younger than a week could be displayed in green, and older text could remain in black.
I would like to amend my proposal to be that we implement temporal provenance instead of author provenance. Pseudo Socrates 13:32, 18 August 2005 (UTC)
Tom Cross' "Puppy smoothies" proposes measuring number of edits, not time. Obviously, the two approaches could be combined.
Providing provenance is likely to have important social effects--positive and negative. You might think that these effects could be avoided by simply voting down the inclusion of provenance in the Wikipedia. However, if some people strongly desire provenance and its inclusion is voted down then it is likely that provenance will be provided via a browser plug in. If this happens then there will be two classes of user of the Wikipedia: those with the plug in and sufficiently powerful computers to quickly compute provenance and those without. Also once one Wikipedia plug in is created it is likely that others may quickly follow. In this way the community could lose significant control over the user interface of the Wikipedia. Pseudo Socrates 01:42, 18 August 2005 (UTC)
There are no individual authors of individual segments of an article. I'm not speaking of some vague collective ownership. I mean to say that the entire text of each article is the entire responsibility of the last editor.
Once I push "Edit this page" and do anything, and save the result, I have assumed responsibility for and authorship of the whole thing. If I don't endorse what existed before, I don't retain it -- I delete or rewrite it.
I don't see that anyone is entitled to weasel out of this responsibility; the very furthest I might go in that direction is to say that, since section editing is allowed, then perhaps I only assume responsibility for the entire section in which I edited.
But should anybody, anywhere ask "who wrote that" about any article, I say there are only three good answers, and none of them link to individual chunks of text:
For purely internal purposes, I might notice that Somebody 7 edits back made such-and-such a change, and although it was retained by subsequent editors, if I wish to question the change, I might well contact that Somebody.
But if the question is accuracy, credit, or blame in the outside world, I say that from one angle, we all share; from another, all share who edited; from yet another, the burden rests firmly on the last editor.
Think about that when you touch a page. — Xiong 熊 talk * 23:35, 2005 August 22 (UTC)
if I understand this correctly, the proposal is for nothing more, and nothing less, than a useful editing tool. Meaning that it will save you time when looking for vintage vandalism. For the reader, it wouldn't make any difference. For the reader, all that matters is WP:CITE, not which IP added which comma. The concept may be useful for some contexts, but with extremely frequently edited article, the concept breaks down. The diff algorithm is not capable to decide which stopword originated with which edit at some point. Baad 08:56, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
What about something like this:
TITLE [ Last major edit: INTERVAL by AUTHOR ]
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
TEXT
TEXT
TEXT
SECTION HEADING [ Last major edit: INTERVAL by AUTHOR ] [ ]
TEXT
TEXT
SUBSECTION HEADING [ Last major edit: INTERVAL by AUTHOR ] [ ]
TEXT
TEXT
AUTHOR would be the last one to submit an edit (without the minor flag) to the article/section/subsection, and would link to that user. INTERVAL would be something like "1 month ago", "3 days ago", or "23 secs ago" and would link to a diff of that change. Fool 20:56, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
I think there should be a channel through which professionals in some fields could be recognized as such and noted experts could be recognized as such.
For instance, a doctor could request status as a medical professional. This would not give him any additional privileges, it'd only give other Wikipedians warning that this guy knows what he's talking about and his contributions should be respected. This can be written on a user page of course, but outside validation would ensure that it's true and I think would help control a lot of edit disputes. A similar system should be produced for "experts", noted researchers or something else in fields where there cannot be professionals; e.g., there are no longer any samurai, but if a Wikipedian has had his work published, he can be recognized as an authority on samurai.
The practicality of this, with the current setup of the Wikimedia Foundation and MediaWiki software, is questionable. It would probably require some implementation in the MediaWiki code to prevent unauthorized usage of tokens indicating one's authority, and unless we can find a way to perform validation through the internet, it would probably require some employees to investigate credentials. I'm not really sure if it's worth that hassle, but it'd be cool. Cookiecaper 22:41, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
Find it here —The preceding unsigned comment was added by The1exile ( talk • contribs) 12:51, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
I find that when I'm editing a section, I'd like to know its history: How did it get to the present state; will I be reinventing the wheel with my planned changes? Of course I could toggle through the whole history of the article, but when there are 200+ edits, that becomes unreal.
What would deal with my problem, and with the provenance problem, would be an improved history page that could identify only those changes within sections (or ideally, within arbitrarily selected passages). With that you could step from version to version of a section, identifying the changes with the diff function.
Of course there are real software problems here. Following a section as it was edited, rearranged, divided into several parts which were later rearranged represents a real challenge. (Consider how easily the diff function gets lost with just a single edit.) Despite the problems (says someone who doesn't do programming) it would provide a valuable editing tool, and a way to identify the provenance of a crackpot (or brilliant) idea in that passage. -- SteveMcCluskey 22:06, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
The software world uses some very simple models for validation and trust: versioning and review. It would not be hard to apply similar models to wikipedia articles. An author should be allowed to version her article and submit for review. Others in the field pertaining to the article's contents could review the article and rate the article's accuracy and leave comments for the author (or next author). There is a condition for this to work: others in the field must be trusted. Trust can be enforced in a number of ways: authentication and review. Authentication is in place already with Wikipedia's login (maybe not extremely strong, but usable). Review (or rate) is essentially what can be found on an online auction site. Users review (or rate) the expertise of a certain user. Users with higher ratings in that field have higher weights applied on their ratings. Credentials and credential verification could be another way to validate trust of an article reviewer. Along with the aforementioned suggestion (a better passage history user interface), any user of Wikipedia would be able to find a versioned article and have less doubt concerning its validity. -- James.cary9 23:20, 19 July 2006 (UTC)