I often blog about Wikipedia, but I have recently started to contribute to Wikinews. One thing that immediately struck me was that Wikinews’ community was much warmer than Wikipedia’s, but naturally it is much smaller.

As communities grow larger, generally more disputes arise. As more disputes arise, ways in which to resolve them must develop.

With thousands of active (and highly vocal) editors, Wikipedia finds itself with a plethora of arguments.

Wikipedia’s dispute resolution process can be described as notoriously bureaucratic. There’s requests for comments, third opinions, a mediation cabal, a mediation committee and an arbitration committee. Complex, don’t you think? The arbitration committee is the highest source of authority on Wikipedia (bar Jimbo Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation Board, who barely ever give an opinion). They are currently dealing with 14 cases I believe, and remember these are only the most severe/important disputes on the entire encyclopedia.

Wikinews, a community with only 50 admins, also has an Arbitration Committee with a similar role. They, however, have only fully dealt with 2 cases since 2006. In fact, the last case they had to decide whether or not they would take on was back in 2008, when they made a proposal to abolish the committee. One editor described it as ‘nothing but bureaucracy… with exactly zero point’, as there’s so few disputes.

So, bigger communities argue more. Smaller communities like Wikinews seem to have no major feuds inside them and all of their users are working towards a common goal, whilst in Wikipedia I feel that different editors want different things out of the project.

Working in a small community is much more rewarding than working in a large community with a lot of in-fighting. Things are also done quicker; I know Wikipedia can take several years to tidy up articles whilst on Wikinews, they’re fixed in hours.

I stumbled across an interesting open letter on Wikipedia today, in which Larry Sanger claimed that Jimbo Wales co-founded Wikipedia with him, rather than being the sole founder. n.b. this letter may no longer appear on the current version of the page, as there are several editors constantly removing it. Larry Sanger has mirrored it on his project’s blog.

The argument is very long and complex, and requires a lot of explanation and opinion, but I am often puzzled as to why Jimbo Wales receives so much credit for Wikipedia.

What is the cause of my puzzlement? Is it Larry Sanger’s disputed role in its foundation? No, it is not. The reason that I am often puzzled is that Jimbo Wales is not really the person we should be thanking for this amazing resource, instead we should be thanking the thousands of editors who voluntarily spend their time maintaining, expanding, correcting and check it.

Jimbo Wales has made a total of 4429 edits to date from when Wikipedia was formed. Editors like me have made more edits (although mine were often very minor) and, to be honest, most active editors will have. Perhaps the idea of a wiki encyclopedia was his, or Larry Sanger’s, but the work has not mainly been put in by them. Still, they are the ones with whom the media are interested.

ReadWriteWeb suggested editors should get paid. I, and most editors, would disagree. We, just like Larry Sanger, want credit. The benevolent dictator is not the only person who warrants it.

I am a big fan of Wikipedia and for some reason, I chuckle everytime I read the media report about it. The old media appear to often have a negative bias towards the Internet, seeing it as a threat and a corrupter of morals. However, coverage of Wikipedia is always particularly negative.

Amazingly, The Observer deemed it newsworthy to report that Wikipedia had been edited to show Robert Kilroy-Silk (a controversial British MEP) was a member of the Monster Raving Loony Party. Whilst libel is definitely an issue and is wrong, most instances of blatant vandalism like this are fixed in minutes, if not seconds! That, though, doesn’t make a captivating headline or read!

Reporting on Wikipedia’s inaccuracies, libel and vandalism is old news. By now, the public should have realised that ‘WIKIPEDIA MAKES NO GUARANTEE OF VALIDITY’ (to quote their disclaimer). It’s perfectly easy for any journalist to find lies or vandalism on Wikipedia articles through purely clicking on the ‘history’ link on the article and seeing which edits have been reverted.

I found everything from local newspapers to major national news stories criticising Wikipedia (or information within it).

I hope the media begin to move away from blaming Wikipedia and begin to blame the editors who make the misleading edits. People, children and adults, still find it amusing to vandalise articles and it seems to even be considered acceptable amongst the populace.

The beauty of the whole matter is that despite the fact the media criticise Wikipedia’s reliability, they use it for quick research and occasionally even quote it as some sort of definitive resource!

Whilst I’m sure 100s of other blogs have covered this before, something I feel invaluable are Wikipedia user scripts. These aren’t Greasemonkey scripts, but rather changes you make at the Wikipedia end. User scripts allow things ranging from previews of links, provide rich text editors to changing the links of ISBN numbers to your preferred site.

Once you have a Wikipedia account, you can install some pre-chosen user scripts by logging in and going to your ‘my preferences’ page and then clicking ‘Gadgets’ and selecting the ones you want.

An alternative way to install scripts, or scripts which aren’t supported by the automatic installer, is by typing in Special:MyPage/monobook.js in the search box and clicking ‘go’. On this page, go to edit and in a separate window/tab go to the list of scripts at Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts. On this page, choose the scripts you want and follow the installation instructions. To see the scripts, you might need to do a hard refresh by holding shift + refresh in Firefox or control + F5 in IE and/or purging the Wikipedia cache.

Some user scripts are specialised for Wikipedia power editors, but others like Navigation Popups are useful to pretty much everyone and once you’ve installed it, Wikipedia won’t seem right without them!

If you’re not using the Monobook skin, firstly you’re mad and secondly you’ll have to use the .js pages listed at this page as opposed to monobook.js.