browngeek

It appears that Wikipedia is testing color-coding as a method to flag potentially false content. I think its a stupid idea. Here is why.

• Take a look at this example page. All those bright red markers make me want to *focus* on the dubious content rather than the factual. Bleaah!
• The idea is that the colors turns from red to white as the contributor’s reputation increases. To increase your reputation you need to have a history of edits that “stand the test of time”. Er, what about the Long Tail? Isn’t the beauty of Wikipedia that it taps into a large number of editors with average expertise on a small number of fields. These are your everyday people. And they hardly make more that a few contributions. How will they have a “history of edits”?
• Based on 2, an unusually large number of articles are going to have more that a few red markers. Good luck trying to improve your trustworthiness.
• And whatever happened to Wikipedia’s claim that the median time for spotting mistakes is 14 minutes? You surely don’t need red markers with that kind of reliability.
• A while ago, the chief of Encyclopedia Britannica equated Wikipedia to a public toilet - you never know who was there before you. And thats the beauty of it. Ignorance. I’d rather think that the toilet was disinfected by the janitor just before I used it. And now, with the red markers, Wikipedia is going to tell me that it was not.