Comments on: Who Should Edit Wikipedia and Where Should they Do It?

By: etbe

etbe — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:03:48 +0000

Bruce: Fair point. However the majority of Wikipedia references appear to be online. Also for the majority of Wikipedia readers the only real benefit they receive from references is from online ones. I have never looked up an offline reference from Wikipedia, but I regularly read online references.

However it does seem that some Wikipedia pages could be significantly improved by using more offline references. So a Wiki reader/editor that supported convenient offline use would do some good in that regard.

By: Bruce Fields

Bruce Fields — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:10:37 +0000

“Any time that you need to use an offline Wikipedia reader it seems that it will either be impossible or unreasonably difficult to gain the net access necessary to find the reference that Wikipedia requires.”

Not all references are online!

(Example: I’m looking something up in X University’s law library, but don’t have access to the X.U. network.)

By: etbe

etbe — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 10:01:43 +0000

Homer: If there are references but they don’t cover the content of the article or if they contradict the article then again you can’t verify this. So it seems to me that statements that are not supported by the references can only be discovered offline if there is an entire lack of references.

It would of course be possible to ship a copy of Wikipedia along with static copies of the pages it references, there may be some copyright issues in that and also it would take a huge amount of space – not as much as the full database but more than you could reasonably fit on current flash storage.

James and Don: Thanks for that information.

By: Homer

Homer — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 06:41:17 +0000

“One of the issues with this is that you can’t (or at least shouldn’t) make corrections based on your own knowledge of a subject, you need to cite references.”

Shouldn’t you be able to remove the incorrect statements by pointing to them not having a reference? (or are they by chance pointing to references which are incorrect?)

By: James

James — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 06:34:20 +0000

There are quite a few people who copy-edit Wikipedia articles, but I don’t think it’d be useful to do that offline, since articles can change a lot the corrections might be hard to integrate of could have been already made. I think the killer app for the WikiReader (and WikiReader offline editing) would be a Wikitravel dump – when you’re travelling you often don’t have net access, and it’s also the perfect time to add information.

Wikipedia has a rating system – check out the talk page of many articles to see how it’s been assessed by the relevant WikiProject(s). This is done as part of Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Work via Wikiprojects, which helps both the individual WikiProjects (which are the real engine of Wikipedia contributions) assess their work and the overall project select articles for the CD-ROM versions.

If you have a Wikipedia account, you can display the ratings on the article page enabling the “Display an assessment of an article’s quality as part of the page header for each article” gadget in your preferences.

By: Don Marti

Don Marti — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 05:51:29 +0000

Portland State Aerospace Society keeps the wiki in git, so that members who are out launching rockets can do offline updates while other people edit the web copy, then they do a merge and fix up any conflicts. (see ikiwiki.info for more on DVCS-backed wiki possibilities.) Might scale better if you had a prose-aware “diff” program.