Wiki Life: Ownership and Credibility

One of the differences between a blog post and a wiki article, is the extra credibility a wiki article has, just because it belongs to a wiki. An assumption is made that a wiki article is generally more credible, because a wiki has multiple authors and moderators, and a governance model in place, to ensure articles are of a high standard.

If we take Wikipedia as an example, most articles are (at least perceived to be) fairly credible. Articles with inaccurate, missing or ambiguous information are highlighted or removed quickly.

With this in mind, let's all do a couple of things;

  1. If you see an article that is inaccurate, either fix it, or add the needs work or For Review, or stub tags.
  2. If you're working on an article over a number of days, add the Work in Progress tag
  3. If you find an article that is clearly spam, completely irrelevant or inappropriate, tag the article with Candidate for Deletion
  4. Routinely search for articles tagged with needs work or For Review, and improve the articles that are within your knowledge domain!
  5. Take ownership of the wiki! It's a resource for all of us, and something we should be proud to contribute to, and improve!

The definitions of tags referenced above (and others) can be found in the Wiki Common Tags article. The definitions of the tags used above, are:

Candidate for deletion
"These are articles that are queued up to be reviewed and then deleted. They are often spam, but they can also be duplicate articles, test articles, etc."

For Review
"This tag might help to mark articles that may need some improvement suggested in the comments to the article. See more about this tag in this article"

needs work
"The article is incomplete, and needs additional information or work. If you do not want people to contribute to the article, use the Work in progress tag instead."

stub
"The article has little or no content, and is a placeholder until more content is added.'

Work in progress
"The article is actively being worked on, and is not ready for additional contributions. You can find a message template for this type of article here: Wiki: Message Templates."

The wiki is ours! Let's all take responsibility to make it a great resource full of high quality and credible articles.

See Also