All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Wiki Patterns

Shlomi Fish on 2007-06-11T15:20:16

I've blogged about wiki-ing anti-Patterns here before, and then when I went for a walk came up with several wiki-ing patterns and anti-patterns (which I cannot readily recall). But I decided to see if there was a previous effort. And indeed there is: Wiki Patterns - the meta-wiki for wiki-ing patterns.

It's not perfect. While browsing it, I noticed that they have a one big "Vandal" anti-pattern. However, I would separate Vandalism into several different anti-patterns instead of treating it collectively:

  • Spamming - standard wiki link spamming, usually done by bots.
  • Good-intentions' Disinformation - a person who thinks he's adding or correcting information that he thinks is right (like me thinking that the Iberians were an Afro-Asian people), while it is not in fact.
  • Bad-intentions' Disinformation - adding misleading information malevolently.
  • Adding Inappropriate Remarks - a person adds annoying or inappropriate remarks about the text, into the main text of the article. This is instead of using the discussion page. In some wikis such as the original WikiWikiWeb, where there is no discussion page, some types of these comments may be more tolerated.

While they are all vandalism, they all require different ways of dealing with.

I may end up contributing to wikipatters.com as it is world-editable, but requires registration.