4 ms·
> Any errors reflect poorly on the contributors, and someone who spots a slip-up can talk to a real person about it—neither of which is true with Wikipedia. Ma
by cooper12 11y ago
> Any errors reflect poorly on the contributors, and someone who spots a slip-up can talk to a real person about it—neither of which is true with Wikipedia.
Maybe I'm not understanding this statement properly, but Wikipedia has a history page and uses version control so all content can be blamed to someone. And there is also a talk page to bring up issues.
- hyperpape 11y agoI spent a little time working on some smaller philosophy articles. No one is really watching.
- ars 11y ago> so all content can be blamed to someone Do you know how hard it is to track down who authored a particular word in an article? You literally have to click next, next, next over and over and manually scan the diff for your change. A binary search sometimes works, but if there is an intermediate version that removed and re-added your search term you can fail at that if you get unlucky.
- cooper12 11y agoBy binary search I'm assuming you mean via the "Revision history search" tool that can be found in the history page right? Yeah there are a bunch of cases where it doesn't work so well, especially if the change happened hundreds of revisions ago, but like you said you can always resort to looking at individual diffs. Regardless, someone can be held accountable for the edits, it's just a matter of having to do more work because of the multi-contributor nature of Wikipedia. And in 90% of the cases, the offending statement is the last edit made; people and bots are usually really good at watching pages and recent changes for vandalism.