Wikipedia administrator (more like fact cop) Duvora, who makes a habit of confronting naughty editors, has put together what might be considered the canon of Wiki-rep management.

Those who feel they have been the victim of malicious vandalism aren’t helpless, there are numerous ways to go about fixing the problem. The obvious answer is edit the entry yourself, but that can be, potentially, problematic, as it can get you flamed by users or land you in an edit war.

Duvora, in two lengthy posts at SearchEngineLand detailing cases where editing and counter-editing were both necessary, explains that there are numerous channels that those with online reputation concerns can go through.

The first line of defense, she says, is to email the Wikimedia Foundation directly or via the Open Ticket Request System.

After that, here are seven options search marketers and reputation managers should keep handy:

1.    Put the article on the Watchlist
2.    Notify the appropriate WikiProject
3.    Notify the Counter-Vandalism Unit
4.    Request Page Protection
5.    Contact Administrator Intervention Against Vandalism
6.    Refer to Biographies of Living Persons Noticeboard
7.    For urgent problems, notify Administrator’s Noticeboard/Incidents

Duvora goes into great detail in both her posts at SearchEngineLand.   

First the numbers, one of my minor obsessions: Wikipedia has currently an unknown number of anonymous contributors and 29,853 registered users of which 143 are administrators and seven out have developer rights. This plus one founder that plays the role of "benevolent dictator."

Unlike Slashdot, the prototypical example of an open self-organizing social software community with low administrative overhead, Wikipedia doesn’t use an explicit reputation system. Instead, it functions at two levels. The first level, that of proceedural authority, gives users the ability to contribute and edit (away graphitti) at low transaction costs. The second level, institutional authority, is given to administrators.

About 150 Administrators…there’s that number again — a ceiling of cognizance for a social network. The eight people, a core group with developer’s rights, is what some developers consider to be an optimal team size and within the boundaries of a creative network.

So behind the scenes of a successfully scaled community the empowers users (for horizontal information assembly…more on that later) is an active social network that relies on social practices that are not hard-coded or codified. The paper suggests that to scale further a reputation system may be required for this network, a major change to manage given the culture that reflects and drives its tools. Perhaps it should look for a set of new challenges to hand off to a new group of administrators to delay such a rash transition.

Comments