Lessons for Children

Lessons for Children is (among other things) a well-written featured article on Wikipedia. Its editing demonstrates some interesting problems and opportunities for Wikipedia. wikipedia

Wikipedia has well-known rules and two of the most important are to "be bold" and "respect consensus". These rules are in obvious tension, and part of the miracle of Wikipedia is that writers still somehow manage to square the circle of these competing aims.

I became curious though, as to where the *best* articles came from - are they the bold reworkings of a single vision or the product of the unmatched hivemind?

Lessons for Children is my first attempt to look at this in detail. I chose the article because it is a featured article in a field I am familiar with. Featured articles are recognized by Wikipedians as being the sort of article that other articles should aspire towards, and should be a good subject for this study. I randomly chose the article from the featured articles in education.

Wikipedian "Wadewitz" produces the first draft of the article in 2007, with the first edit being about 4k of text. It's a pretty decent article to start: well-written, good tone, good bibliography.

So who is Wadewitz?

The answer, unfortunately, is "Who was Wadewitz?". She died in 2014.

She was a scholar of 18th century literature, and according to her obituary in the New York Times she became addicted to wikipedia a few years before she wrote the Lessons for Schoolchildren article, when she "punched up the intro" to the Jane Austen article to note Austen’s “masterful use of both indirect speech and irony.” nytimes

(One thing to note here -- that phrase, right there "masterful use of both indirect speech and irony" -- it's the sort of concise lyricism you don't see on Wikipedia near enough).

At the time she wrote this article she would have had less experience on Wikipedia, but by her death she had done nearly 49,000 edits.

The featured article wasn't a fluke, either. She created a string of featured articles, so many that at her death at 37 she received an obituary in the New York Times based primarily on her work in Wikipedia (although her activism was also undoubtedly a factor).

Her featured articles tended to center around her scholarly expertise, but she also contributed many small edits, and did major revision and extension of articles associated with other interests of hers.

As an example of her later work, you can look at the last article she edited, a wholesale revision of an article about rock-climber Steph Davis.

Note how little she feels constrained by the previous text, and how she takes a dull workmanlike article and turns into a pleasure. wikipedia-diff

Also worthy of note -- her page is linked to her real identity, discloses her expertise highlighted. And she was part of the FemTechNet wikistorming project -- she was one of those dreaded "activists". Here she is explaining the culture and idiom of Wikipedia to a group of feminists looking to improve wikipedia articles.

None of this matches our image of a Wikipedia editor. She's engaged, committed to a cause, credentialed. And a wonderful writer.

As noted above, most of the Lessons for Children article is composed by a single author over the period of a week or so. Here's a snap of the initial moves.

She comes in and on her first post puts up an extremely well written 4k article.

She comes back and does an edit later that October, adding a bibliography. The article is now 5k.

A week later, she makes a monster extension of the article. In three hours the article goes from 5k to 21k. Scattered edits over the next couple of days bring it up to 24k in OCtober 2007. (The current 2015 article is 26k).

Or not, in this case. Other do some cleanup on the article, and occasionally pose a question that prompts further revision from Wadewitz. But at the time the article is made a featured article in 2009, it is still 98% Wadewitz.

After it reaches featured status, the community activity becomes more interesting. But I still can't find much value in it in this particular case. Here's a typical edit, where an editor takes the lovely synopsis of Wadewitz and engages in overlinking, linking it to very broad topics not necessary for the understanding of the text. (see pic of diff).

Interestingly, that same community member criticizes the featured article status of the article, saying that not a single fact in the synopsis is is cited. The absence of synopsis links is a stylstic choice by Wadewitz, who has extensively linked/referenced the main text of the article which makes the claims. There is some truth to the idea here of creeping pedantry.

Looking at the talk page only confirms this issue. Wadewitz spends an inordinate amount of time explaining that "Some scholars believe" is not WP:Weasal Words if it actually is true that some scholars believe and this is back up by citation. The reply is that the scholars should be named in the text. A frustrated Wadewitz replies:

The problem with naming scholars every single time (and it crops up in this article) is that it then appears that only one person holds the view. I name scholars when views are theirs alone or when the idea I am citing "belongs" to them, in the sense that it is acknowledged in academic circles that they "own" it as intellectual property of some sort or other. Articles on topics such as this would be unreadable for a lay audience if they were constantly peppered with "Scholar X says", "Scholar Y says" "Scholar Z says". Some summary is necessary and this is the best way to do it. I am already unhappy with how many people I had to name in this article. The average reader does not care about the scholar - they care about the information. I am usually very meticulous about these kinds of attribution and I feel that this one is fair. It is not a wildly vague "some people" and there is, of course, a citation. Awadewit

At the same time the person raising the issue is pretty rational and *does* engage with Wadewitz's explanation, as well as state that he/she likes the article a great deal.

A more dismaying example is the Wikipedia editor that makes the bizarre claim that talking about Anglo-American evidence is too restrictive. Why not English-speaking? Wadewitz replies that no, that's what the literature says -- it had influence in the U.S. and England.

The person then replies that this is an odd use in academic lit, to talk about "Anglo-American" influence, to which Wadewtiz replies with this link, listing hundreds of thousands of scholarly books using the term. books

This is my first look at the history of a featured article, and I'm not assuming it to be representative. But what we see in this case is the work of a single person with a wealth of subject knowledge who in general loses more than she gains in the community interaction.

Would a federated system have produced this sort of article and let it become the dominant article? Certainly there is a lot of evidence here that people need to be able to fork off the main path for extended periods to produce good work.

On to the next random article!

Next up, Some Thoughts Concerning Education