Andrewsahawneh

Introduction

Founded in early 2001, with over forty-two million users and over one thousand administrators, Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia written and monitored through an open collaboration model. Anyone with access to the internet can add their thoughts and knowledge to the over fifty-four million wiki pages. As helpful it may sound to have a database this large providing information on an infinite number of topics, Wikipedia is known to have a negative connotation when it comes to using it to as a supporting source whether it be for a presentation or a paper. Ownership of what is written on wikipedia site is a question that many people have when they begin to contribute to a page. Many people wonder who is the owner of the page, and who is allowed to edit and take information from these pages. The differences between plagiarizing someone's work, and copyright violations of pieces of work. In addition, there are several other sites very similar to wikipedia but have different regulations

Wikipedia Logo

Ownership

Plagiarism is when you use someone else's work or ideas without giving them rightful credit to the original work. Copyright protects people's original works from being copied and claimed as their own work. Although these two types of work ownership seems to be the same, the difference is that fact that plagiarism is not illegal, but is in violation of academic norms and can lead to trouble in an academic environment, while copyright is illegal and can have very serious legal consequences. Each collaborative platform has a different way in which they view the ownership of the page. Wikipedia states that no one "owns" any of the content posted on the page. When you create a wikipage or edit an already established page, you can not prevent other people from making these changes. All work posted on this platform has the ability to be edited, used, and redistributed for any reason by anyone.

Volume sixty-two, Number one of the journal ETC: A Review of General Semantics, Nora Miller discusses what she calls the "disappearing author" of wikipedia. Miller states "we no longer say we "are" authors. Instead we periodically author, read, and share information."

Problem

Yang, Diyi, and Aaron Halfaker. Identifying Semantic Edit Intentions from Revisions in ... https://aclanthology.org/D17-1213.

One of the largest problem with wikipedia, and other collaborative websites is when people want to use it as a source of information to support their own work. This is most commonly observed in a classroom environment. Most students use wikipedia because they find it very convenient and easy to understand.

Another large problem that persists on wikipedia is since anyone has the ability to edit information on a page, there is the ability for people to remove accurate information, and vandalize people's works. A study at Carnegie Mellon University, titled Identifying Semantic Edit Intentions from Revisions in Wikipedia was conducted in order to identify the intentions people have when editing a Wikipage. The intentions that were observed ranged from editing grammar, clarifying confusing sentences, to vandalizing people's works. This study was broken into two newcomer groups, survivors and non-survivors. "newcomers are defined as surviving if they performed an edit at least two months after their first edit session." It was concluded that survivors tend to do more copy editing and wikification as their intentions when editing a page. Copy editing included rephrasing and improving grammar, spelling, tone, or punctuation. Wikification is the way in which the formatting of the text meets the style guidelines such as adding and removing links on the page. Meanwhile, non-survivors seemed to perform more vandalism and other work that seemed to get reverted a majority of the time.

Other Collaborative Websites

It is important to always look at other websites that are similar to Wikipedia and how they run their pages. One example is a website called Everything2, which was launched mid 1998 as a collaborative web-based community and is monitored for quality meanwhile having no formal policy on subject matter. The authors of the pages maintain the rights of their work in the public. Users have the ability to build their own reputation and earn experience points which they use in order to level up in the ranks. Users also have the ability to send private messages to each other regarding their writing or anything else they want to talk about.

Another example is a website called Citizendium which was created by one of the co-founders of Wikipedia in 2006. Similarly to Wikipedia, this website allows people to create and edit different pages. The difference is that Citizendium requires you to be a certified expert in one or more fields, to be able to edit a page. This requirement will allow only people who carry truthful and accurate information to post and create more reliable and accurate pages. This website also requires its users to resister using their real name in order to reduce people signing up under alias and vandalizing people’s works.

How can we Improve Collaborative Writing Sources

There are many methods that can be implemented into these collaborative writing websites in order to create a safer and accurate source for students to use. One method would be to implement a verification process in order to verify you are not an automated bot, and to be able to track everything you edit and create. A good way to do this is by using phone number verification because everyone has one cell phone number and you can't easily just go on to create multiple accounts to edit with. If you are vandalizing or doing anything not for the benefit of the information being presented your account should be disabled and since you only have one phone number, you will be unable to create more accounts to mess around with. There are some scenarios where maybe your account could get disabled while your intent was to better information but by accident it did the opposite which is why there should be an appeal process if this occurs to your account and you believe you had the right and good intentions.