And the high plains too

Tom comments on this post from last year:

Thoughts: (1) Pledgebank is about increasing the perceived effect of ones actions by connecting it to a larger purpose (2) Wikipedia already seems to have that mechanism but (3) I like the idea of building social processes alongside wikipedia a lot...

Yes and No to point 2. Wikipedia already has social reinforcement/reputation feedback effects built in, but they only really work once you're on the inside. If you're on the outside, the fabled dedication and energy of the Wikipedia community is actually a barrier - not least because, if you're unlucky, all that dedication and energy will be applied to reversing your edits. (Think of Thomas Vander Wal's discovery that he disagreed radically with Wikipedia's definition of 'folksonomy', and his subsequent struggle to get the definition changed - the point here being that Thomas actually coined the term, and not that long ago.)

This isn't a new discovery: reputation-based regulation inevitably creates a barrier to entry, as anyone who's tried to get noticed on Usenet can confirm. Reputation adds a bit of friction to the weightless process of making your mark online, and adds a bit of glue to the shapeless aggregate of people who do it; the fact that you have to build up a bit of reputation before your words gain traction is, mostly, feature rather than bug.

So is the Pledgebank idea reinventing the wheel, simply trying to use reputation-based peer pressure to mobilise a group who could have been subjecting themselves to Wikipedia peer pressure all along? I don't think so. Compared with a Usenet newsgroup or a Web board community, Wikipedia has a couple of curious and atypical aspects. Firstly, the currency of Wikipedia reputation-building is work, and plenty of it. I've known people make a reputation on Usenet with a single post. The size and complexity of Wikipedia makes that highly unlikely. Secondly, Wikipedia is unusual in parallelling areas where people already have reputations, built up through domain-specific conversations. As always, issues of authority and reliability come into sharpest focus when the area's one that you know personally. I can say that, if you're interested in processes of consensus-formation in an area of hotly contested political debate, the Wikipedia page on the Lega Nord makes fascinating reading. If you're interested in getting some reasonably authoritative views on the Lega Nord, it's no substitute for reading the literature. This isn't to say that Wikipedia is wrong - but it's less right than it could be. And this is partly because Wikipedia's informal reputation management mechanisms are orthogonal to the mechanisms which produce subject area experts, and partly because Wikipedia's mechanisms operate to repel anyone who isn't committed to building a Wikipedia reputation - perhaps because they're more interested in building one within their subject area.

Hence the proposed Wikipedant posse. If - like me and Tom and Thomas - you've seen something on Wikipedia & thought That's just wrong, but it would take a long time to fix it; and if you not only (a) know stuff, but (ii) know when you don't know something and (3) know how to find stuff out; then this could be your kind of thing. The idea is simple: we compile a list of wrong-but-timeconsuming Wikipedia pages (usually involving simplistic or tendentious renderings of a subject); we dish them out, presumably at random; and, when we get assigned a page, we take ownership of it and try to put it right. This wouldn't be a lifetime commitment, but it would almost certainly involve a couple of months of checking back and reverting unhelpful edits, on top of the researching and writing time.

I'll be appealing to pedants, autodidacts and (OK, I admit it) academics rather than Wikipedia enthusiasts, and I'll be appealing on a strictly time-limited basis rather than trying to create new Wikipedians. It will, unavoidably, involve quite a lot of work, which is why I'll be calling in aid an external source of peer pressure in the form of Pledgebank.

And I'll be doing this... some time soon. This year, definitely. (Terrors of the earth, I'm telling you.)

Update I wrote:

I'll be appealing to pedants, autodidacts and (OK, I admit it) academics

and

Wikipedia's mechanisms operate to repel anyone who isn't committed to building a Wikipedia reputation - perhaps because they're more interested in building one within their subject area.

Which perhaps isn't precisely the impression I gave last September, when I wrote:

I'll just reiterate that I'm not talking about people with expert knowledge, so much as perfectionists with inquiring minds.

What a difference a few months' full-time employment makes. (I was a freelance journalist from 1999 to 2004, and kept it up on a part-time basis until last summer.) Let's split the difference: subject experts will be welcome, just as long as they're also perfectionists with inquiring minds. (Which of course they will be, what with being subject experts and everything.)