Vetting the cargo [LWN.net]

Vetting the cargo

Posted Jun 13, 2022 13:27 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Vetting the cargo by farnz
Parent article: Vetting the cargo

And your example of "eire", "failure", "error-chain" etc points out a failure even of a curated list - HOW MANY PEOPLE PUT A DATE ON THEIR RECOMMENDATIONS.

I don't claim to be a paragon of virtue, but whenever I update the raid wiki I try to remember to put a date against what I'm doing - not in the logs but slap-bang in the middle of the article or whatever, so anybody reading it is given a big clue as to whether it's up-to-date or further research is warranted.

Cheers,
Wol

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Vetting the cargo

Posted Jun 17, 2022 12:20 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

> I don't claim to be a paragon of virtue, but whenever I update the raid wiki I try to remember to put a date against what I'm doing - not in the logs but slap-bang in the middle of the article or whatever, so anybody reading it is given a big clue as to whether it's up-to-date or further research is warranted.

And this has downsides too: if it's not metadata, eventually the article turns into a morass of dates and modified-by-this-person notes, because nobody making a change later knows whether their edits have obsoleted *everything* some other date note related to, so they tend to stay around... (I've seen this in its extreme form in 30-year-old codebases that were religiously maintained like this. It's *awful*. /* DCH 1990-04-14 */ /* LMH 1991-02-22 */ *everywhere*, many lines having multiple notes and hardly any having none. This is what a version control system is for, guys.)

Vetting the cargo

Posted Jun 18, 2022 18:55 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I get that.

But when updating the wiki, I generally completely revamped each article (and move the out-of-date version to an archive page).

It takes discipline, but I try and treat it like a "revised and updated edition" - leave the old version for people running out-of-date LTS systems, and the new up-to-date version for those on the bleeding edge :-)

I've dealt with a few too many horror stories of people finding out-of-date pages and almost trashing their systems - fortunately in my experience people tend to ask for help before doing something stupid, but not always ...

Cheers,
Wol

Vetting the cargo

Posted Jun 27, 2022 17:48 UTC (Mon) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693) [Link]

I remember seeing an extension (for Firefox?) that would shade the background of the text on Wikipedia to indicate how recently a particular bit had been updated.

I thimk the authors were assuming new edits might be wiki vandalism that hasn't been spotted yet, but with known authors, you could invert the logic.

Perhaps a more sophisticated iteration could use colours that somehow represent both age and the authors' demonstrated reliability (based on how many edits they've made / over how long a period / what proportion of them get reverted etc.)

A naïve idea might have the strength of the shading represent age and the hue represent some trust score (amber for newbie, green for OG editor, red for somebody with questionable performance, shades in between accordingly) Obviously, these actual colours would be awful for somebody red/green colour blind, but somebody better informed on such things could suggest a kinder palette:-P