We've been seeing some complaints about the new wiki in comments. Anon 6:00 presents a fairly comprehensive list of problems:
1. There is no stored history. If someone reports information, and someone else removes the information, there is no record of the report. I’ve reported application acknowledgements that have been removed, for no good reason (as far as I can tell). Someone else I know reported an interview request that was also removed.
2. There is no way to report requests for further information. A lot of schools do a first cut, and then request further information from the survivors. I’m sure many of us would like to know which schools have done this. I’m aware of two such requests, but I’m unable to post either.
3. There is no way to guess how many interviews a school has scheduled, nor whether they are scheduling all of their interviews at once or not. On other wikis, it is sometimes possible to work this out on the basis of the number of interview requests reported, and the dates.
4. There is none of the extra information that helps to determine how reliable a report is. For example: multiple reports of the same piece of information from different ip addresses, reports by ip addresses that have provided reliable/unreliable information in the past, et cetera.
There are four possible solutions: a) the administrators of the new wiki could modify it in a way that resolves the problems; b) someone could restart the old wiki; c) (a) and (b); d) neither (a) nor (b). I am actually somewhat sympathetic to the suggestion that these wikis are a net evil and should be abolished. However, it is clear that not everyone agrees (or is willing to stop torturing themselves with wikis), so I say, let a thousand wikis bloom.
--Mr. Zero
Update: Another new wiki has materialized at http://academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/PhilosophyPositions
0 comments:
Post a Comment