Suggestions to improve Wikipedia's workflow

The importance of improvements

More sophisticated communication/collaboration tools will get increasingly important the better the articles get. Early-on people predominantly work alone, collecting data and composing paragraphs. They depend on each other almost exclusively in how to stich those pieces together. Once the quality of an article reaches a certain level, however, more and more controversies will be about *how* to say something, instead of just what. It'll result in a greater discussion/content ratio, which has to be dealt with.

Work-flow meta-wiki-page

Defining the problem

I heard it was a recent topic in the mailing list, how wikipedia could ensure the quality of its articles. Commercial encyclopedias do this by paying those people to write for them, in who they trust to have the necessarily knowledge and/or research capability. Essentially they rely on systems like the scientific community and the media to help them judge those capabilities. The user trusts in the image of the encyclopedia to select the right people.

As an open platform this is obviously not viable for wikipedia. The problem is to provide alternative means to judge the quality and the amount of the work that has been done to create an article. In order to make this more practical than googling relevant terms (assuming that people won't all be wrong in the same way), it has to be quick and reliable. The current methods, i.e. analysing editing history and trying to get clues from the discussion page, are not.

Suggested solution

I believe that in principle the engaged wikipedians can/could judge what the current state of an article is, there just isn't yet a place to express that opinion.

I thus suggest either a second page page like the discussion page, or a section in it, which is dedicated to the wikipedians most engaged in this page. It holds information on things like

• who is most active in writing what parts of the article
• what kind of interest they have in the article
• from what kind of perspective they approach the topic (academia, personal experience, work-related)
• what they think about the current quality of the article
• what they think to be the current most important discussion topics
• where they think most of the information in the article came from or why they think the current selection of references is appropriate
• how the most active wikipedians work together to make the article even better

While the discussion page is a room for debate and argument, the work-flow page would be like a discussion summary, a discussion introduction, an edit history overview.

Expected improvements

This way, somebody interested in the topic can get a quick idea about how much she can rely on the information present. This is not only important for somebody reading the article, but also somebody who wants to contribute to the page, and has to judge how likely it is, that the article is wrong and he is right (or the likelyness of the article understimating the importance of something), considering the amount of expertise she has on the subject.

Last but not least, it makes people aware of the workflow that is already happening, encouraging improvements and making it a topic in the discussion page. Perhaps it would also motivate people to stay aware of what currently is being debated, inspiring reconsideration of thread priority and structure.

Euronet di Fabrizio Rossi