Wiki Community/Reputation

In order to help the Wiki Community deal with users who only leave one comment, only negative comment or only positive comments we need to have some mechanisms in place.

Pages like Bistro 33 and Davis Family Dentistry have been hit by users who have made no other positive contribution to the wiki.

I like the system that Puzzle Pirates uses; new users names are colored green until they've spent enough time at which point they progress to another color.

Another possibility is to have another include macro that lets people know that the page has edits from sockpuppets, one hit wonders and negative nellies.

Another possibility is to have a macro that can be added after a users name at the end of their comment that has a threshold. Until a certain number of edits are made, or some other status change the macro displays a message like [[Reputation("Users/Mary", "<2","This user has only made one edit")]]

JabberWokky has started tagging suspicious comments with: ''(This review is the ["Wiki Community/Reputation" only edit] this user account has made on the wiki. While it does not invalidate this review, please keep this in mind)''. Since that links here, a overview as to why we are concerned might be a good idea to open this entry. People new to the wiki or internet communities in general probably don't realize the nature of single shot account abuse or sockpuppetting.

see also Identity

2007-06-08 11:44:28   I like the idea of a macro for just a few posts/edits to identify the people who are only one hit wonders. It would be best if this macro was unable to be subtracted except by an admin-gnome, though if they reach some introductory threashold maybe it changes to a "welcome new member" sort of message. Another task for the admin-gnomes would be to review these periodically to see if they are also negative nellies. —RocksandDirt In addition I appologise for taking 4 edits to put in the comment box, slow brain time i guess.

2007-06-08 13:09:03   another thing to take into account is negative comments made from legit users, IE Acadian. The owners literally hate the wiki because of the percieved anon format. —StevenDaubert

2007-06-08 16:36:49   Bah. You shouldn't have to devote time to working on a wiki to leave a review. Why is it surprising that people who post on either apartment pages, or restaurants, make no other edits? Because to the vast majority of people, especially students in Davis, they use Davis Wiki as another resource, just like RatemyProfessor, Yelp, ApartmentRatings, etc. They go "where should we eat? Check the wiki". Is that placegood? Oh crap, it stunk, Imma make a comment. The way these pages are set up, and how they've *always* represented in the wiki is as reviews. People post good/bad. They're not here to look up Mrak Hall, or find out more about a park bench and who it's dedicated to. People see DavisWiki as a resource, period. And just like in those other rating/review websites, people are more likely to leave a negative comment, or a very good comment if they were impressed. There's very few "I liked it here. It was good, fair" type comments on those pages, and we see the same thing here Just not the same kind of resource you see it as. I think expecting them to contribute and somehow join in is sily, and not realistic. Sorry mate. —EdWins

2007-06-08 18:22:05   I'm not so sure the issue is so much people only posting single comments and not editing as much as it is—potentially—a business or organization trying to pad their stats. If I'm reading this correctly, the problem raised with Davis Dental was that three new accounts—two logged in from the same computer—separately posted glowing reviews of a place where previous experiences were poor at best. This might not be so big a deal with pages where dozens of comments have been made (both negative and positive), but three fake good reviews would balance three authentic bad ones in a way no one would really think twice about. . . and not everyone would bother checking the sources to see how reliable they might be.

The idea of color coding (or other indicator) would at least give the casual readers (read: me) a small heads-up to take a given comment with a grain of salt, and we can decide for ourselves afterwards. —KevinChin

In a way, this is already built in— user signatures are dashed (dead links) if a user page doesn't exist. I'm less inclined to trust a review of a user who hasn't created a page yet. —CraigBrozinsky

Very true, but part of the problem with the Davis Family Dentistry page was that a user made a decision to leave the dentist based on a mix of reviews that included one hit wonders and users with pages. They then told the dentist that this was the reason that they were leaving and then there were some new one hit wonders leaving glowing reviews. There are also a lot of low content user pages, and some userpages get created to ask questions about reviews that don't make sense, like second floors of one story restaurants, or drive-thrus for places that don't have them. —JasonAller

2010-01-21 22:37:03   I think it's time to revisit this. I like the color system suggested above — something automated that doesn't require editors to go around tagging comments. —CovertProfessor

2010-01-21 22:52:50   http://stackoverflow.com/ and other sites that use their system have a really good way of dealing with establishing reputation. Unfortunately it doesn't map over to the wiki really closely and leaves a lot of questions about how such a thing would be handled here. Even if there were a macro or system it still wouldn't be a magic solution that would suddenly prevent problems. In the end the most workable solution may still be a human one of having a large number of editors all applying common sense on a case by case basis. —JasonAller

• Well, I'm not familiar with the code so I can't speak to implementation. If you say it isn't doable then I'll take your word for it. But looking at some of the comments on the BW page (one of which I just deleted), I see other one-hit-wonders that look suspicious — let's just say from both sides of the aisle. As I think you'll agree, after you've been after this for awhile a lot of things look suspicious, and you've been at it for longer than I have. The truth is, though, that customers can gush about a business, and it can be their only edit. (Same goes for bashing comments). So, it's hard to judge the one-hit-wonders. But if they were color coded, then at least everyone who reads them could see for themselves that the editor has made only a small number of edits, and interpret that as they saw fit. We still need the judgment of many editors, but it would help a bit with some of the unclear cases. —CovertProfessor

2010-01-21 23:06:47   LOL I was just looking at this page half an hour ago and thinking about how good an idea it was. In theory, anyway :) Unfortunate that it isn't all that practical. —TomGarberson