Is Hillary Clinton a giant shape-shifting reptile? Do ghosts use cellphones? Does Smithville, Iowa have a “quaint little library”? And how should Wikipedia reflect (or not) each of these sincere, not trolling, beliefs. (Trolls create a whole new set of wiki-problems.)
A veteran of some of the most hood-filled neighborhoods of Wikipedia, “Filll” has created a Wikipedia quiz-cum-learning-tool, the AGF Challenge Exercises. The challenges, based on real Wikipedia problems, include all three of the above. “AGF” stands for the Wikipedia policy “Assume Good Faith.”
When Wikipedia is criticized externally or internally over its handling of assorted situations, they are often extremely highly charged and emotional affairs, and often ongoing. This [the AGF Challenge Exercises] is a way to see a sanitized collection of problems in abbreviated and sanitized form, where critics inside and outside Wikipedia can offer their advice and suggestions.
In surprisingly-closely-related news, Harvard’s librarian Robert Darnton has a great essay in the June 12, 2008 issue of the NYRB. Most relevant bit:
Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears pondering. It could serve as a corrective to the belief that the speedup in technological change has catapulted us into a new age, in which information has spun completely out of control. I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively‚ and even how to appreciate old books.
And with help from Wikipedians like Filll, we can learn our own ways to make bad bits better.