How to give minor authors gratification that their edits matter

[tkjazzer]

I picture CZ attracting smart, intelligent people to write articles who were skeptical of many aspects of WP.  However, how do we keep the little author feeling like he, and not PhD level editors are writing the articles that people are seeing?  Who is actually going to look at the drafts page of an article when most people rapidly skim most wikipedia articles they read?  How do we let the world know where edits on the draft page are?  How do we show the authors that their minor edits, links, and improvements matter?

I'll answer that with a question,
How would a professor add a comment on a paper turned in that was single spaced and had no room in the margins for an easily written sentence?

I would guess the professor would
a) be upset that the paper was not turned in with double spacing
b) make a mark signifying that he wanted to make a comment at x location in the paper and then make a footnote for it somewhere else where there was room to write.

This is what I believe should be done on CZ.  So that the world knows that editing is going on in the draft page, little marks should be placed in the approved citizendium articles in the locations where changes have been made.

Now it would look silly to have an article like this:
The * bird *** flew ** away.

However something like this would be classy:

*                   The bird flew away.

This * , located in the margin of the article, would signify that an edit or edits has been made on this line in the draft page.  This * could be linked so you could see what edits have been made on this line.  You could even make the links work similar to ask.com preview of links so you could see what was in the link without actually even clicking it, just by hovering over an * in the margin of an article.

This would do 2 things
1) more people would look at the draft page edits
2) writers of the draft page would feel better that their edits matter.

Tom

[Zachary Pruckowski]

It's an interesting idea.  From a technical point of view, it might require rewriting the (currently rather flaky) difference engine, which is not an easy task.

[Mike3]

I picture CZ attracting smart, intelligent people to write articles who were skeptical of many aspects of WP.  However, how do we keep the little author feeling like he, and not PhD level editors are writing the articles that people are seeing?

BTW, "smart, intelligent people" do not necessarily have degrees, let alone Ph.D.s as their financial or other situations may have impeded them from getting them. Getting a Ph.D. is NOT cheap, by the way.

[Zachary Pruckowski]

I picture CZ attracting smart, intelligent people to write articles who were skeptical of many aspects of WP.  However, how do we keep the little author feeling like he, and not PhD level editors are writing the articles that people are seeing?

BTW, "smart, intelligent people" do not necessarily have degrees, let alone Ph.D.s as their financial or other situations may have impeded them from getting them. Getting a Ph.D. is NOT cheap, by the way.

Note that he said PhD-level.  And he directly implied that the authors (and if memory serves, he's an author) are also smart.

[David Goodman]

Mike, even those people who happen to be PhD are not trying to use this as a marker of dominant behavior. I think we  all know that nobody can expect to be dominant on a wiki. Let us work on finding structure to address those concerns where structure will help, such as the edit marker proposed here, realizing we will be able to devise more later..  But the best way to work on these concerns is to write articles.

[Gareth Leng]

I think it is an interesting idea. I think that for the moment, in this pilot phase, where we have very few approved articles we need to focus our energies on getting more articles to this state, so approval for us now is in part a flag saying - for now this is a good job done so let's move on. When the balance is different and we have a lot of approved articles we will need to think about how to make changing them easier.

In terms of authors/editors, my feeling is that it's the authors who will be adding substance and the editors using their experience to polish and buttress the edits that authors make - in other words I very much hope and expect that the editors will be adding value to the contributions of authors, not undermining them.~~~~

[Larry Sanger]

There are in short a zillion ways to improve MediaWiki and the processes we use to create articles.  Many of them are no doubt far more trouble than they're worth, but some of them will turn out to be absolutely essential and, when we start using them, we'll wonder how we made do without them.

In the short term, however, we have to focus on getting much more basic functionality working.  So, I would ask Tom to keep this in the back of his mind and dig it out again in six months to a year, after we have, say, images, and a more automated approval system.

[SebastianBreitschafter]

I wasn't sure if I should open a new thread about the following thing or if it's better to say it here, cause it has something to do with this topic.

In my view, the following is one of the most important things concerning CZ.

It's about contributing, it's about acquiring many competent people for CZ and it's about brandmarking CZ.


Now it's still difficult for people to find out, who has contributed to an article and by whom it has been approved. The idea is, to place a bar at the bottom of every article, embedded as a template. We need a template for every article.

The bar could be similar like one of these, either open by default or closed by default.

On these bars could be shown (for every article) which people did major edits, who did other kind of work and who where the persons who approved the article.

If anybody has done noteworthy work on an article, he was to report that on the template's discussion page, mabe with an link showing the difference (versions). In certain periods, the editors then put the names into the bars.


That way, Citizendum gets two imporant things:

1) Citizendium makes his major quality clear; you alwas know from who the content comes from. That plays an important role for teachers and lecturers and for the students when CZ is cited or knowledge gets taken directly from its contents (and that happens frequently with Wikipedia contents).

2) That will encourage all kind of authors and experts to contribute. It's almost like the difference of getting payed for one's work and working for free: having ones name in a high ranked standard-compendium's (or better the ultimate compendium's) article is a good kind of payment and will bring masses of experts to CZ.

 
Greetings from Germany - Sebastian

[Stephen Ewen]

I very much like this idea, Sebastian. 

[Paul James Cowie]

Why not emulate / adapt that which Wikitravel http://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page does most successfully? Automatically in the footer of each article appears a list of contributors to that article, highlighting the most recent contributor and saying when the most recent change was made. For CZ, this could maybe also be adapted to divide contributors into authors and editors, rank contributors by frequency or size of contributions and display information regarding the status of the article (approved / draft / CZ live)...

What do people think?

[Jason "Electrawn" Potkanski]

From a technical perspective...I would like to add plone style commenting to mediawiki.

http://gplv3.fsf.org/comments/gplv3-draft-2.html

The downside is this is very, very resource intensive.

Also, this idea is rehashed and old.

-jtp

[tkjazzer]

that is way too busy with all the yellow and colors.  We want our approved articles to look like a journal.  The drafts get updated rather quickly in this system so it might not be as big of an issue after all... at least for now.  Re-evaluate in a year.

[Stephen Ewen]

Wow, that's really cool, Jason! I can see that as very useful while drafting articles. It'd be a terrible eyesore for approved articles, however.

I continue to think that part of achieving critical mass with authors, when it is accompanied by a real names policyfor authors, is to devise a way to offer major authors credit for their work.

[MarkusBaumeister]

May I "me too" here by saying that I like the idea of listing authors of an article, Since getting your name on a published article is quite an incentive for many academic work that might really attract people here.

Of course the implementation might be quite a hassle especially if we want to avoid the "Edits just for the sake of getting at the top of the list" problem.