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Would anyone miss "the edits" if they simply vanished tomorrow, like Geocities?
by mcyger 16y ago
Would anyone miss "the edits" if they simply vanished tomorrow, like Geocities?
- jerf 16y agoHistorians. Historians who aren't yet terribly interested in this sort of thing because the Iraq war still isn't very "historical", nor is Wikipedia. Fortunately, the historians of tomorrow will probably have better tools for analyzing this stream of text than we do, too. Sure, no human is going to simply read the changelog of Wikipedia, but I absolutely think historians will be able to extract a lot of data from it even so, things we can only dream of extracting from our historical record. (We're lucky to figure out what color something a thousand years old is.)
- celoyd 16y agoThis is why it annoyed me that so many people were outraged (or mock-outraged) that the Library of Congress would archive Twitter. It’s exactly the fact that Twitter tends to be topical, ephemeral, trivial, and faddish that make it worth a special effort to save. In our time, historians are obsessed with the relatively few sources we have for casual thought in the ancient world – graffiti and so on. Knowing what ordinary people were thinking on ordinary days is important. For various reasons, our time is one of the first that will be able to leave that to later times.
- camiller 16y agoI sometime go back and look at edits, especially if it is a controversial topic that someone might have vandalized. Of course I don't mean blatant vandalization but the more subtle kind.
- oiuygtfrtghyju 16y agoIsn't subtle vandalism what's commonly known as 'history' ?
- ErrantX 16y agoWikipedia; without the edit history the license of the information becomes problematic.
- abrahamsen 16y agoYes. Apart from the editorial aid mentioned by camiller, I use the history tab to get a quick sense of the trustworthiness of the article as a whole, and of individual claims.
- watt 16y agoThere already are tools that can colour the text of article showing how old or new (or change-resistant, or controversial, or important - if proper metrics are discovered) the section or sentence is... Basically all kinds of interesting meta-information could be overlaid with the article text, by examining article change history; and at some point - will be. The text-body of article is only a single dimension, but quite a lot of other information waits to be discovered and overlaid.
- corecirculator 16y agocould you provide links to the tools that do this?
- corecirculator 16y agoHi, I am still interested in the link to any tools that overlay wiki history.. can u point me to any of them? thanks.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Estragon 16y agoI've certainly found them useful and interesting.
- anigbrowl 16y agoI hate reading them...but they're essential if you're looking into something controversial (which may not be evident if you don't know the subject already) and you're worried about the accuracy of the current page. Some of the edit wars are mildly disturbing - it's like this nice social consensus on the topic page, but the history pages seethe with bitterness and resentment. A rather unpleasant reflection of our society and psychology, in a lot of cases :-/
- oiuygtfrtghyju 16y agoWould you like to have Napoleon/Wellington's thoughts of Waterloo minute-by-minute during the battle. Or only memoirs written 20-years later?