Wikipedia talk:Provenance

message: This article has been moved here from Provenance at the suggestion of another Wikipedia user.--Pseudo Socrates 20:21, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: Let's call the above proposal author provenance.  There is another kind of povenance having to do with the time that piece of text was introduced into an article that could be called temporal provenance.
For example, temporal provenance could be implemented by providing a Provenance button which when pressed would display a dynamic page with the vintage of each interval of text indicated.  E.g., text less than 24 hours old could be displayed in red font, text older than 24 hours but younger than a week could be displayed in green, and older text could remain in black.
I would like to amend my proposal to be that we implement temporal provenance instead of author provenance.Pseudo Socrates 13:32, 18 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Temporal Provenance

message: There are no individual authors of individual segments of an article. I'm not speaking of some vague collective ownership. I mean to say that the entire text of each article is the entire responsibility of the last editor. 
Once I push "Edit this page" and do anything, and save the result, I have assumed responsibility for and authorship of the whole thing. If I don't endorse what existed before, I don't retain it -- I delete or rewrite it. 
I don't see that anyone is entitled to weasel out of this responsibility; the very furthest I might go in that direction is to say that, since section editing is allowed, then perhaps I only assume responsibility for the entire section in which I edited. 
But should anybody, anywhere ask "who wrote that" about any article, I say there are only three good answers, and none of them link to individual chunks of text: 
* Jointly, by the Wikipedian Community
* Jointly, by the editors listed in history
* Individually, by the last editor to touch the page
For purely internal purposes, I might notice that Somebody 7 edits back made such-and-such a change, and although it was retained by subsequent editors, if I wish to question the change, I might well contact that Somebody. 
But if the question is accuracy, credit, or blame in the outside world, I say that from one angle, we all share; from another, all share who edited; from yet another, the burden rests firmly on the last editor. 
Think about that when you touch a page. — Xiong熊talk* 23:35, 2005 August 22 (UTC)
*Interesting suggestion, but what about truly minor edits?  Suppose I'm reading an article on a subject that I know little or nothing about, and I notice a typo.  If I correct that typo then, under your suggestion, I am assuming responsibility for the totality of that article (or section,) even though it is a topic I don't know much about.  If you write an article and accidentally type "teh" instead of "the", and I fix your typo, should I really be blamed for inaccuracies in what you wrote?  Surely that would just discourage copyediting, which would make Wikipedia worse.  AJR 02:12, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: According to WP:HEP, that is the meaning of the minor edit flag: don't mind me, this is just a small copyedit; I really have no comment on the content of the article/section. Otherwise Xiong is correct -- you touched it, you bought it. The "provenance" of the article is the author of the last non-minor edit to each section. Fool 17:34, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Still, you not only flagged the problem on the talk page, but also plan to do further editing as time permits. This suggests that you have, in fact, taken responsibility, in the sense that I think is most important. Plus, all philosophy of collaboration aside, in the case of simple provenance below for example, I would still want your name on the section header. Fool 15:57, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Xiong's Goggles 

message: if I understand this correctly, the proposal is for nothing more, and nothing less, than a useful editing tool. Meaning that it will save you time when looking for vintage vandalism. For the reader, it wouldn't make any difference. For the reader, all that matters is WP:CITE, not which IP added which comma. The concept may be useful for some contexts, but with extremely frequently edited article, the concept breaks down. The diff algorithm is not capable to decide which stopword originated with which edit at some point. Baad 08:56, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: See the Controversies section of this article's project page.. Note that despite all that, I think source provenance is a great idea. Like you are saying, it would help Wikipedians find out vandals' usernames. --Unforgettableid | Talk to me 10:44, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

text: References and some sort of assurance that the references are reliable, relevant, and that the text of the article is in accordance to them. This is sort of the point, I guess. If the reader was going to go check up on the references emself, e wouldn't need Wikipedia in the first place. Fool 21:31, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: huh?

message: What about something like this:
----
TITLE          [ Last major edit: INTERVAL by AUTHOR ]
----
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
TEXT
TEXT
TEXT
SECTION HEADING   [ Last major edit: INTERVAL by AUTHOR ] [ edit ]
----
TEXT
TEXT
SUBSECTION HEADING [ Last major edit: INTERVAL by AUTHOR ] [ edit ]
----
TEXT
TEXT
----
AUTHOR would be the last one to submit an edit (without the minor flag) to the article/section/subsection, and would link to that user. INTERVAL would be something like "1 month ago", "3 days ago", or "23 secs ago" and would link to a diff of that change. Fool 20:56, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Simple provenance 

message: I find that when I'm editing a section, I'd like to know its history:  How did it get to the present state; will I be reinventing the wheel with my planned changes?  Of course I could toggle through the whole history of the article, but when there are 200+ edits, that becomes unreal.
What would deal with my problem, and with the provenance problem, would be an improved history page that could identify only those changes within sections (or ideally, within arbitrarily selected passages).  With that you could step from version to version of a section, identifying the changes with the diff function.
Of course there are real software problems here.  Following a section as it was edited, rearranged, divided into several parts which were later rearranged represents a real challenge.  (Consider how easily the diff function gets lost with just a single edit.)  Despite the problems (says someone who doesn't do programming) it would provide a valuable editing tool, and a way to identify the provenance of a crackpot (or brilliant) idea in that passage.  --SteveMcCluskey 22:06, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Passage Histories as Provenance 

message: The software world uses some very simple models for validation and trust:
versioning and review. It would not be hard to apply similar models to wikipedia articles. An author should be allowed to version her article and submit for review. Others in the field pertaining to the article's contents could review the article and rate the article's accuracy and leave comments for the author (or next author). There is a condition for this to work: others in the field must be trusted. Trust can be enforced in a number of ways: authentication and review. Authentication is in place already with Wikipedia's login (maybe not extremely strong, but usable). Review (or rate) is essentially what can be found on an online auction site. Users review (or rate) the expertise of a certain user. Users with higher ratings in that field have higher weights applied on their ratings. Credentials and credential verification could be another way to validate trust of an article reviewer.
Along with the aforementioned suggestion (a better passage history user interface), any user of Wikipedia would be able to find a versioned article and have less doubt concerning its validity.
--James.cary9 23:20, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Validation and Trust