The “Open Data” article on WP has already had useful attention from Wikipedians. Some minor typo corrections (and many WPians devote much energy to this, including developing bots). My reference numbering was a mess since I didn’t know WP had a reference tool, and this was edited by Gurch to create a page with automatic references.
A nice thing about WP is that everyone who has registered has a “Talk” page, so I left a thankyou message on Gurch’s page. Gurch replied on my page
No problem. I was reading your blog post here (I have a habit of reading Wikipedia-related blog posts just to get an idea of Wikipdia’s reputation) and thought I’d check the article to see if anything else needed doing
I hope this gives an idea of the immediacy of the collaboration that exists on WP.
As I have said already, this is not MY page. It’s important to start a page with enough for others to add to, but not enough to preclude NPOV (neutral point of view). This is a very important point on WP where contributors must avoid bias (non-NPOV). This is quite difficult for Open Data as almost all the discussion is from advocates. A neutral page will report arguments for and against a controversial issue and try to be objective. Open Access has seen its share of minor hyperbole – here is an example of a revert:
One motivation for authors to make their articlea openly accessible is research impact factor. Since Lawrence’s methodologically weak ) cross-sectional study (with no adjustment for confounders first suggested the Open Access citation impact advantage…
was reverted to:
One motivation for authors to make their articles openly accessible is research impact factor. Since Lawrence’s landmark study first suggested the Open Access citation impact advantage …
The NPOV sometimes gets to the stage where someone challenges the neutrality. This happened in the last day or two in Open Source
where “Mikeblas” added a tag stating that the page was not neutral. This tag was soon removed, only to be re-replaced. This is an “edit war” and could go on for ever, destroying the page. WP has several effective mechanisms to solve this. Each entry has a Talk page, and here is the discussion on this point:
NPOV:
There’s nothing negative to say about open source? — Mikeblas 02:52, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
- No, there’s just nothing that anyone’s written on the wiki page. Why do you ask? DMacks 03:46, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
- I’m asking because Wikipedia needs to be NPOV, and this article certainly isn’t, since no critiques of open source are mentioned. I’ve marked the article NPOV for this reason. — Mikeblas 14:59, 28 October 2006 (UTC)
- oh let’s troll open source people lol ^___^ — and two POV does not somehow magically make NPOV, unless you’re the mainstream media covering the U.S. elections. The article, as it stands, is unbiased towards either side. Go away, troll. Tag removed. —70.108.92.221 18:34, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
- I’ve replaed the tag as the article remains POV. There’s no coverage of the problems in the open source community, nor any discussion of the negatives in the practice. Your ad hominem attack doesn’t convince me that the article is balanced. Here’s a couple of references to help us get started: [1] [2] — Mikeblas 22:26, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
Lack of negativity does not make an article POV. I’m removing the NPOV tag. Please feel free to add criticisms to think article though. —Pengo talk · contribs 12:11, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
Well at present the POV tag is off. If it goes back on, then an official WP process comes into effect the three revert rule
Do not revert any single page in whole or in part more than three times in 24 hours, except in the case of obvious, simple vandalism.
(Or else an administrator may block your account.)
Another rule of WP is No Original Research.
Articles may not contain any unpublished arguments, ideas, data, or theories; or any unpublished analysis or synthesis of published arguments, ideas, data, or theories that serves to advance a position.
I was slightly worried that “Open Data” might be seen as my promotion of a personal crusade, but research on the Internet has convinced me that it is now a widely used term, of considerable importance so I am relaxed about this.
WP is necessarily an expreiement in virtual democracy and from what I have seen over a year or two works pretty well.
Hi Peter,
Looks like your article is missing a closing tag, rendering the entire page (including Planet Blue Obelisk) in italics.
BTW, I really like this series on Wikipedia. Interesting to think of how it could be applied to chemistry and what might result.
(1) Sorry – this is largely due to WordPress. It can be quite hard to get the formatting correct using their tools. I think they have designed this for very rudimentary text. It is almost impossible to use code, even if it is done beforehand.
(For non-planet people – Plane aggregates blogs and this is for BO. My article opens a tag which isn’t closed and so screws up later articles.)
(3) I have mended the published article but it hasn’t helped Planet Blue Obelisk which I assume takes a static copy of the feed. (Does anyone know how Planet works?)