{"id":267,"date":"2005-12-16T15:35:51","date_gmt":"2005-12-16T19:35:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2005\/12\/16\/authority-an-idea\/"},"modified":"2005-12-16T15:35:51","modified_gmt":"2005-12-16T19:35:51","slug":"authority-an-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/2005\/12\/16\/authority-an-idea\/","title":{"rendered":"authority : an idea"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Joho wrote recently about distributed authority, providing trusted
\nviews of Wikipedia content.  An excerpt from my reply follows:<\/p>\n

Distributed authority — in the ‘stamp and seal’
\nsense — is not my idea.  And what I would like to see happen with research groups has
\nbeen suggested by others before me; there is simply growing interest in
\nit now. I want to make it easy for people who already work on and
\nreview content in a field to do so in a way that directly improves
\nWikipedia. <\/p>\n

At the moment, individual authors ‘adopt’ certain articles and try
\nto keep them fresh and free of errors. And various organizations
\nmaintain their own internal knowledge-bases with content that overlaps
\na good deal with relevant Wikipedia articles<\/p>\n

Rather than trying to hack an authority system into MediaWiki, you
\ncan do something simpler to encourage both of the above : have groups
\nthat maintain their own small clusters of articles — 10 or 20 or 100
\n— on a local wiki, with its own portal page. Give them an easy way to
\noffer their work for merging with WP, without requiring them to all
\njoin the site. The edits they make are implicitly ‘approved’ by them.<\/p>\n

This is not<\/i> a good verification method within WP, however
\nsoftware changes are required for that (and Seth’s suggestion is one
\nspecific path one might take). At the moment, Nature can link to
\nrevisions of 100 articles that they approve. But once you follow a link
\nthrough to a Nature-edited revision of [[DNA]], and follow a link to
\nanother WP article, you’ve already returned to the realm of public
\nediting. <\/p>\n

The motivation for this is a few professors and talented writers who
\nbegan editing on WP, but commented that editing Wikipedia directly can
\nbe offensive and off-putting (they are readily offended by trolling,
\nand have no patience for even trivial wiki-lawyering).\n<\/p>\n

We’re making progress towards Wikipedia 1.0, slowly but surely; I
\nthink along the way we will improve both the default view of content
\nand the selection of optional views suggested above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joho wrote recently about distributed authority, providing trusted views of Wikipedia content.  An excerpt from my reply follows: Distributed authority — in the ‘stamp and seal’ sense — is not my idea.  And what I would like to see happen with research groups has been suggested by others before me; there is simply growing interest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[213],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-metrics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/longestnow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}