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Wikipedia Announces Tighter Editorial Control
Daedalus_ wrote to mention a Reuters article reporting from Wikimania. "Wikipedia, the Web encyclopaedia written and edited by Internet users from all over the world, plans to impose stricter editorial rules to prevent vandalism of its content, founder Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying Friday." (Update: 08/06 23:45 GMT by J : But see his response here!) Meanwhile, kyelewis writes "WikiMania, the First International WikiMedia Conference is open in Germany, but if you couldn't gather the money or the courage to fly over, you can listen online in Ogg Vorbis format, or if you miss the talks, you can download them later. The WikiMania Broadcast page has more information, and the WikiMania Programme is also available, so jump in and learn more about the mysterious technology that is the wiki."
Not to be mean (I looove wikipedia), but doesn't more control mean less 'wiki-like'?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
"Hollabackgirl" will still be some term that Gwen Stefani just made the fuck up and tried to pass off as normal speech.
Have the Chinese censors taken over? Inquiring minds want to know.
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Hey now, maybe a certain *other* site could take this opportunity to review the quality of its editors...
There was more editorial control on slashdot
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
"There may soon be so-called stable contents. In this case, we'd freeze the pages whose quality is undisputed..." The question is, however, how do you determine when something is undisputed. A lot of politically driven pages are constantly edited until there forms a 'balance' between opposing views; that, however, takes time and is never 'undisputed'.
...it feels like if they do this, it won't be the Wikipedia we all know and love.
I wonder if this means that various Wikipedia forks will be gaining a lot of contributors?
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
It always seemed a little silly to me that anyone even without so much as a valid logon could change the content of these pages.
But I wonder what it will mean for people like me who post edits to maybe 4 or 5 articles a year, when we find an error?
I think the biggest problem is edits to 'contraversial' posts, like "Intelegent Design" or "Joseph McCarthy".
Of course the "real" trolls will simply poison the well by inserting subtle errors.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
We want total freedom from censorship and total creative control!
We want to be protected from malicious actions of both others and ourselves!
Profit!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
But I certainly hope that the changes are "you can't make a change without some kind of external board approving it" not "you can't make a change, EVER!". Like, let's say they lock the Pope Ratzlinger page to prevent vandalism, saying "this page is perfect! it doesn't need more changes!". Then then the Pope dies. Um... what now? Do we have to wait for whoever holds the key to the Pope page to wake up so wikipedia can be updated?
I also wish they'd have better/clearer rules for what to do when some kind of cartel seizes a page and consistently ties to impose an editorial bias on it. Groups like the one at littlegreenfootballs will occasionally descend on a page and attempt to twist its content by claiming anything that doesn't bolster their close-minded worldview is "biased" and must be "fixed". Change one of these pages and it will be immediately rv'd to what the cartel wants. What do you do in such a case? Well, maybe the people who hang out on wikipedia all the time know, but someone just passing through has no idea.
Maybe for the "frozen" entries, updates should be allowed to be submitted, but then there'd be a voting, where the update would only be applied if enough people accepted it.
Maybe they could even impliment a reputation system, where the votes of people with higher reputations count more, and/or where people with higher reputations can make changes without needing a vote...
I know this is Slashdot and someone is bound to call me a grammar/spelling Nazi for saying this, but one of the biggest problems I have with Wikipedia is that articles that have been handled by many people tend to start losing any semblance of decent grammar and coherent thought. I hope the editors take a closer look not only at blatant vandalism, but also ensure that the articles are written well. If Wikipedia is to be taken seriously by a more mainstream audience (I love it, personally, but many academics don't) it has to maintain appearances of academic quality, one of which, definitely, is attention to grammar and flow of the articles. Hell, in some of the articles I've read, you could actually be dumber after having read it. How embarrassing would it be for a little kid to submit a report based on the things they read in Wikipedia and, not having known any better and not having a good example from something they'd consider a reputable source, have it plagued with "should of gone"s and "where their going"s? C
The Sun is proof that we can't even do fire properly.
Personally, I prefer the former solution. Good luck, Wikipedia!
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I'm tired of seeing vandalized pages, pages for 14 year old kids who think their ability with Flash warrants their own page on Wikipedia (I shit you not, I deleted one of these), and other stuff that just shouldn't be there. Their "talk pages" seem to make a simple issue take a long time to resolve. With a little tighter control, I think that the article quality will be a little higher. I, for one, welcome this development.
A wiki is a web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content.
So this definitely goes against the spirit of a Wiki. That said, I think a little editorial control is probably justified, especially with mature/stable articles, which have reached a high level of quality and experience only infrequent updates.
Rather than having such articles targeted by vandals, it wouldn't be a bad idea to have an occasional valid update go through an editorial vote. Wikipedia already does this currently with "Controversial" articles which are likely to experience Edit-wars.
Extending the control a little probably would do Wikipedia good. The emphasis there being on "little", since overextending editorial content is likely to cause the same problems that regular encyclopedias do - biased content, inaccuracies due to limited knowledge of editors, outdated content, etc.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
When I first started reading /. the contents were completely wide open and free. At first, when changes were made to tame the wildness of it, I was skeptical. Such changes often kill off the spirit of the site. However, the /. changes have been good for me. I read only those responses that score a 3 or better, I meta moderate, I moderate, and all of that seems to work well.
The question I have with Wikipedia is how they will go about imposing stricter editorial control. Discipline is often a good thing, but almost as often it can be a very bad thing. I'll be watching what they come up with, commenting on it when possible, and trying to keep the site as one of the most useful on the web.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Wikipedia, as we all know, is based on the community modifying articles to be more correct/helpful. Taking away this right of the people just hurts its purpose.
On the other hand, today alone I got rid of 3 different advertisements for this resort in Honolulu from 3 totally different topics (tapioca pudding, salamander, telnet) so maybe the reason for this is that spammer. Seems like they are following the path that Planet Source Code started on August 1.
+1 funny, -2 overrated. Life isn't fair.
I have no idea if that was intentional, but either way it's sheer genius :-).
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Thanks, Wikipedia, for a wonderful resource.
My total contribution so far: One sentence (a very good one. grin) and two small corrections.
Ebay and Wikipedia. I thought neither of them had a chance in hell to work. Ebay was an intermediary broker and I figured would go down in flames from bogus sales, and I thought Wiki would be flooded with ass clowns who wrote a lot of silly joke pages.
I was wrong about both of them. Of the two, Wiki is an actual valuable contribution to mankind. The Wiki project, like the Gutenberg project, is about the proliferation of knowledge. It needs creative input from the whole net community in order to thrive, but as it gains status it becomes a bigger target for systematic abuse. I think this move is sound, Encyclopedia Brittanica and the World Book are bereft after the Internet. What Wiki needs is some sort of incentive system. If Gates wanted to buy some good will, he should give a billion or so to the WIki crew (despite the relationship with Google) and have the editors pay net citizens with Paypal for especially valuable work, or really excellent photos, etc. That is the next step in the evolution of the online knowledge center.
One of the fun things about Wiki is reading well-written and moderate view on some nasty subjects, like porn stars or the history of shock sites. The internet is full of 'shock' media and seeing juicy subjects dismantled into enclyopediese makes me laugh my ass off. I can't understand why people would want to hurt a 'good thing' like wikipedia.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
I've been thinking about this as well as I launch my own wiki. Probably the most logical thing is to have a karma like system a la slashdot (granted, perhaps more modular) tied with voting, and tie changes into articles into votes, then tie that karma to kinds of articles.
For example, news require low karma to post (since by their nature they are fast, and you want information now). Other items, such as definitions, etc, would require higher karma, and you could even tie voting into how high karma on a specific article can be. This way, during presidential elections the community could have voted to have the definitions of "John Kerry" and "George W Bush" very high, so up to a 10.
A person with a karma of 5 would need only 5 more "points" for the article to become accepted, while someone with a 3 would need even more. Unregistered users would be 0, so anonymous people could still register - but they'd just need more "votes".
Granted, this is just a brainstorm, and I'm sure people smarter than myself can find holes, but it's just something I've been considering as I work on my own wiki project.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I have no idea how they plan on implementing this, but if it was up to me, I'd have a "stable" and "draft" version of each high-profile page. Anyone should be able to edit the draft. Periodically, the draft version could replace the stable version (perhaps a voting system could be in place, not unlike the kuro5hin submission queue).
The importance of a page (to decide if a locked "stable" page is necessary) could be determined automatically either by number of hits, or computing the pagerank of each page given the link graph of the whole wiki.
How does having a "commision" who oversees when content is "undisputed" work? Do they rely on an expert in a subject area? If so, isn't that pretty much like most encyclopedias such as, say, the Britannica? You know, the ones /.ers refer to as antiquated or obsolete relative to Wikipedia? I think they should just make people log in to edit entries, so anyone can still edit stuff, they just need to make an account (i.e., give enough of a damn to create an account), and let it be. If you get pics of Palpatine as Pope for a few minutes then so be it, Jedi. Price you pay for a democratic info source, that's what I say.
I am a long time contributor and see that just the last year the number of vandalisms have increased sharply. Just pick any article, check the history and look for commenstr like "reverting vandalism" or just "rv" for short.
Moreover, and to me more serious, are the deletionists, whose agenta is to cull all they can on a darwinian principle. This annoys me in particular since they succeeded in wiping one of my articles. First attempt that it was "fan work" I managed to hold off, anohter attempt was made and I stopped that too. Then someone said it should be merged. So they agreed (quickly voted on), set up a redirect and did not merge. In effect the deletionists won the day, the article gone and I lost.
The issue is process. There is no good process (what passes for process has too many holes to qualify, as I illustrated above) and therefore no QA is possible.
Baselining is not available, so what once was a featured article can be hacked apart and lowered in quality, unless the deletionists get there first. Locating the once featured article is hard.
I believe the increased visibility and popularity has made the vandals creep out and attack.
Why couldn't they have done this several months ago, before my boss started looking closely at Wikipedia, and their method of allowing anyone - even users not logged into specific user accounts - to edit a given page? It's taken a bit of effort and time to reengineer our CMS to do the same, should someone desire the option.
Sigh. I fully expect to walk into work on Monday and see "One-button page locking" as the next feature to implement.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
Wikipedia is one of the most awesome things ever to come out of the depths of the internet. It provides up to date, accurate content from a variety of different sources and view points that is subject to the collective scrutiny of the community that maintains it.
It's something like democracy in that everyone has an active hand in it which inspires people to do their best because the wikipedia is as much theirs as anyone else's.
Of course there are always going to be asshats, internet trolls, and other fuckwads who spoil a good thing be being dicks. As with any society, organization, or project that is open and free in nature, there exists the possibility that someone can easily ruin it for everyone.
When this happens the common reaction is to take away some of that freedom in order to maintain what has been created. This is very similar to the US Patriot Act which is theoretically designed to protect the United States be limiting individual freedoms for the greater good. Whether you agree with the approach or not is moot.
Perhaps the best way to handle something so democratic as wikipedia is to have changed content be reviewed by several people who can reject or approve the changes before they go through. Another system akin to the /. moderation system would to give editors who do a good job at wikipedia more control over what they can change and how much they can change it. This means that the best editors will be able to quickly change content if necessary and provide new entries as necessary while preventing some jerk with too much time on his/her hands from doing a lot of damage.
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The culture at Wikipedia (regarding people that enjoy contributing) has impressed me the deeper I look into it. Even something as "trivial" as deleting unnecessary categories has its own open forum, discussion, and voting -- and anyone with a minority view can still leave their input and rationale. If government ran nearly this efficiently, it'd be quite a sight.
So I'm not too worried about the idea of 'locking' pages that tend to be vandalized.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
So you're standing on the shoulders of others who are willing to read < 3 and basically agreeing with them? This is something I've always had a problem with. I guess it's fine as long as there are honest souls who are willing to browse < 3 and mod up what you would consider relevant.
So there is a need to make some changes on our site and I would think it would be even much more important with Wikipedia. Maybe it could be as simple as having approved editors who scan changes before they take effect. While this might at first involve a lot of work in filtering out spam, in the end the spammers would likely quit spamming the wiki since they would learn that doing so doesn't get their crap onto the wiki pages.
Wikipedia also has another serious problem in that anyone who doesn't like what has been said can just remove it. What's the point in having something called a encyclopedia when one crackpot with a grudge against Darwin or a one-sided view on UFOs can delete any information that he doesn't like, and frequently will? It's unfortunate but true that some forms of content control need to be put in place to stop a few people who deal with disagreeing with previous input by deleting it.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Wonder if individual articles should have editorial boards, and if so, how those would be selected. Self-selection would automate the process, but would allow abuse by extremists.
Anyway, WP has little to gain by being "taken seriously by a more mainstream audience". People can use it if they find it useful or they can not use it if they don't. There are now enough people that do care about WP to pay the bills.
It will never be like Encylopedia Britannica - but it has the potential to be so much more. It just takes people like you to improve it.
Give each edit a month to be rated by:
- visitors
- members
- recognized dedicated scientists
Then have each page contain a history tree menu which shows you the ratings for all entries over a month old. Now just pick a revision of the article which has high ratings. Read it and learn.
Optionally check recent changes to see if anything worthwhile has been added, but remain highly skeptical.
Dennis_p
Dvorak was right!
s p
"Wikis and any public reviewing or consensus processes have to be regulated and closed to the public at large for them to work effectively over time."
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1835858,00.a
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
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The whole point of a Wiki is that anyone can edit it. Even if the page is factually accurate and up-to-date, someone can always decide that the text of the article needs to be reworded for clarity, because it'll look better, etc. Or things can change--like the Pope for example. Things can be accurate for the moment, and then something happens--he says something notable (and/or controversial), he retires, he dies, etc.
However, I think Wikipedia needs to crack down even harder on vandals. For example, there's one guy who constantly edits misinformation into various pages, and keeps on reverting them to his version, which involves terms that he made up, and a severe misunderstanding of words like Hertz, despite everyone constantly telling him he's wrong.
Yeah, I'm bitter. I actually want to see accurate information on Wikipedia, and asshats like him ruin things for everyone.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
We want total freedom from censorship and total creative control!
We want to be protected from malicious actions of both others and ourselves!
Defacing of informative wiki content by trolls is a form of censorship, where the troll objects to clear, informative content.
P.S. To anyone about to reply "only guvments censor!1!": I linked to a dictionary, go read it.
You can't take the sky from me...
I would prefer see a banner reading 'You're seeing the stable revision of this article. Click here to access the draft for the next stable revision (beware of vandalism).'. It's like moving a STABLE tag in a revision control system.
I decided I didn't like this new policy, so I went to WikiPedia and rewrote it.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
If an article has been posted to the world, and stood the the test of time, like a year or more, and nobody has anything to add/edit to it, then it can be frozen.
Nothing prevents someone from posting their own article on a similar subject.
I have been hesitant to reference WikiPedia as an authority in my university assignments because of the fact that it's not necessarily an authority. The article could have been written by a complete yahoo. You can't even attribute the reference to a particular author! Having said that, I do find it a great place to find authorities on various topics using the links that are gathered with each article.
You got any karma man? I really neeed it. Just a little hit! Come on!
They should have a period of delay between the edited version of a page and when the page is actually published. This gives the edits some time for review before they 'go live'. It isn't perfect but with that many eyes it should keep down on new users from being turned off because they came to the site the second it has been vandalized.
Yeah I'm much happier here in Europe:
where documentary film makers get shot for making anti-islamic films,
where neo-nazism is still a major problem,
where gay politicians get assasinated for being gay,
where there will be more mosques than churches in 22 years,
where holocaust deniers get equal air time in order to show "both sides of the issue",
where bombs go off on subways,
where the laws don't provide close to the level of protection for individual rights as in the US,
where xenophobic anti-immigration policies are higher than anywhere in the world,
where there will be only 40% of the current workforce in only 20 years (!!!)
We may have problems my friend, but Eurabia is f*cked. How does it feel to be conquered?
having a commission introduces a notion of an appointed authority: the great thing about Wikipedia is that there is no appointed authority, just loads of self-appointed authorities. what they need is a definition of a self appointed commission, so many editors, so many previous edits between them and allow them to add a tab to anything they regard as a stable version, different commissions, different tabs, with some commissions being general, some concentrating on certain areas of expertise. This way you could choose always to look first at the top version of an article with the option of clicking a tab by a commission you trust to see their stable version, or, you could choose a skin which would choose the version endorsed by certain commissions if there is one available. You could even set a preference list.
I used to like Wikipedia very much, but somehow along the line Wikipedia has become too politically correct and less concern of the truth. One can see this especially when it concerns world religion. it's alright to have anything perceived as negative in entries on Christianity, Hinduism, etc.. and links for more info to those entries, but when it concerns Islam, those are scrubbed clean. Questionable claims such as "Islam means peace" (it means "Submission") is allowed and things perceived as negative (taqiyya etc..) are not part of Wikipedia. Complains will get people banned. Attempts to include links to ex-muslim sites are not allowed. If you don't know Islam and try to get info on it on Wikipedia, you'd think that Mohammed did not marry a 6 year old girl and consumated the marriage at 9.
The problem is, when it comes to the truth, many people see things differently and Wikipedians certainly take sides subjectively. Whatever happens to accepting facts as facts whether they are "offensive" or not? Political correctness and moral relativity are ruining every good things.
How about some links? (I've already read the goatse entry...)
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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I think a better idea would be creating a system based on merit, in which users could 'rank' other people's submissions. Only registered users could submit work, and repeat trollers could be stopped by way of an IP block. That seems to be a far more common sense approach then radically changing the nature of Wikipedia. -skuz
~UltraSkuzzi
This comment is liscensed by SCO.
For years, we've been discussing having two versions of the articles, a 'stable' and a 'development', the stable version often being refered to as 'Wikipedia 1.0' (Google for that or for stable on the mailing list). I'm not sure if this is what Jimbo was talking about (I'm long out of the Wikipedia loop), but if so, it may not be too bad.
Yes, there are concerns over who gets to mark it stable, but I don't think it's that big of a deal. So long as it's easy to trigger a re-review to put the current development version as the new stable, Wikipedia will still be very dynamic and Free.
I would be shocked if this article is reporting things accurately. My guess is that Jimbo is talking about one of two things that have been being floated for a while. There's a proposal with code that is still generally unsatisfying to the developers to have an article verification system - basically, particular versions of articles would get rated as very good, so that articles that are the subject of continual edit wars between the sane and the crackmonkies could be read in the sane versions.
The other thing he might be talking about is the idea of a stable version, which would exist alongside the normal version, and just have the "good" versions of articles.
Or he could be talking about a combination.
What I do know is that if there is a major change brewing about how Wikipedia is working, it's not a change that Jimbo has told anyone about. And I don't exactly trust Reuters to know a whole lot about how Wikipedia works, so.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
We have a wiki for an online game that I help run, and it's become useless due to content spammers. It used to be one or two common pages that got hit once every month or two weeks with about 50 lines of links to quack pharmaceuticals. Now, it's 20 pages every day with the same number of links to porn and large blocks of explicit text apparently as filler. It's made the thing absolutely useless for what it's intended.
#include <disclaimer.h>
As I understand it, Jimbo was referring to Wikipedia 1.0, a proposal to mark articles as "featured", and possibly take the better articles and make a paper, DVD or other copy of them. It does not refer to actually locking the articles themselves.
Well, I hope you improved the articles that you are moaning about.
I don't. I don't want to see Wikipedia edited by people who don't know how to break their spewed out thoughts into paragraphs.
Slow Down Cowboy!
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No. Don't be such an ignorant dumb-ass, for God's sake. Besides, here at Slashdot, the court system is "bad". Jesus you brain dead Gamers seem to think because you know two or three fantasy words, you know "the law". Just amazing.
I doubt it's deliberate (I'm giving many OSS projects the benefit of the doubt). It's just what happens when idealism meets reality. Honestly, I think that Wikipedia is a nice, idealistic, Star-Trek-esque idea. Very nice. A real world implementation of it? c'mon. You'd have to be a very naive, sheltered 10 year old kid to think that something like Wikipedia would work in real life.
I don't respond to AC's.
It's not their fault we all have to sacrifice freedoms if we want to win the war^H^H^H struggle on terror.
If you object! The terrorists win!!
Times are a changin and the Open Source world is about to get a reality check/wake-up call.
This week alone:
Mozilla has formed a for profit corporation.
Novell has announced OpenSUSE, the Fedora-ization of SuSE.
Wikipaedia is officially becoming more restrictive.
The wild west days of total freedom/anarchy are coming to an end. RIP OSS
It's always the same thing. Build something nice, make it available, and somebody(s) will try to tear it down.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Phil (a Wikipedian whom I whole in high esteem) basically hit the nail on the head. This article is likely taking what Jimbo said *very far* out of context.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
They definitely have not stopped giving out mod points completely. I've had points twice in the last 3 days. They do seem to be more rare though, I agree. Which means that there are less +5 Insightful posts, unless they actually are insightful. Could be worse.
My UID is the product of 2 primes.
where gay politicians get assasinated for being gay,
:P
Is it better when politicians get assassinated for being... politicians?
where there will be more mosques than churches in 22 years,
Either is worthless in my eyes.
where holocaust deniers get equal air time in order to show "both sides of the issue",
You mean like how... debates.. usually work?
where bombs go off on subways,
Sure beats having airplanes fly into public buildings
where the laws don't provide close to the level of protection for individual rights as in the US,
Where we (most of the time) don't NEED laws to provide a level of protection (then again, it seems the US government doesn't really care about those aforementioned laws)
where there will be only 40% of the current workforce in only 20 years (!!!)
I sure intend to do my part! I'm working on being a millionaire within 20 years
You know, in it's own way this is funny! But it's also out of place.
What Wikipedia needs is a sister publication run by the same people called Fakipedia for people to post their best jokes and vandalisms on. And this way people looking for vandalisms will know where to look too.
A few years ago now one of my favorite restaurants started putting a full front page of each section of the current day's newspaper over urnials, and chalkboards w/chalk in the toilet stalls. And you know what, I never saw a single piece of vandalism there ever.
Cities create Graffiti Walls and zones to successfully channel otherwise destructive energies. Why not have a Wikipedia satire site? Run it off the same software and servers. I bet it would even be worth visiting just to see how clever Internet users can be.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
... Or I could correct the spelling of the word "encyclopedia"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush
usehttp://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_W ._Bush&oldid=20351953.
That way, you can ensure the page doesn't have any serious issues.It would be nice to goto Wikipedia and know that the data is correct rather than learning something and then having to verify that the data is correct especially when you are in a time crunch.
They need a moderation system whereby contributors can accumulate karma for good submissions. Each page can have an immutable karma threshold level set by WP "superusers". If you exceed this level then your edits will be added immediately. If your karma is too low for the page then your submission has to be approved by moderators. Accumulate too much bad karma and your account can no longer be used for editing. Edits by anonymous users can be given low priority in the moderation queue to encourage people to log in. This will weed out the automatic account generators that are used to continually deface the controversial pages since it will take work up front before those accounts are useful to those people.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
If they want to eliminate vandalism they should adopt the everything2 model: every user should be allowed to create entries on any given subject; multiple, independent entries should be allowed per subject; and no one but the author of a given entry should be allowed to edit it.
This way vandalism of other people's contributions is made virtually impossible, while reducing the need for censors... err... I mean "editors".
and hack it for fun during summer vacation, doesn't mean maybe they should do something about it.
Ya think?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
(Yes, I know this is ironic in context.)
Wikipedia = the Internet. Think about it. When someone advertises the power of the Internet, what are they talking about? They say that the Internet has information on every topic. That all human knowledge is on the Internet. Hell, you can go to Google and type "what is the meaning of life?" and get thousands upon thousands of results, including people trying to SELL you the answer in a pure example of shameless capitalism.
So, then, if we already have the Internet, what service does Wikipedia provide? I think it's clear: Wikipedia is a reader's digest of the Internet, searchable and organized. Their topics range anywhere from word definitions to summaries of historical events to debates of controversial issues (in a way that printed encylcopedias could never debate them), and including really meaningless articles like descriptions of cliche subcultures that populate discussion-based websites like Slashdot or Fark.
It's everything the Internet is advertised to be, only compact, digestable, and easily accessible to one and all. Forget going to Google and typing in search strings, only to get 99% of the results consisting of meaningless junk and people trying to sell you garden hoses. Wikipedia just has the facts and the opinions and the debates. That's it's purpose, and it accomplishes it MUCH better than the whole of the Internet ever did.
Wikipedia will never be a more trustworthy, academic source of information than any random collection of Internet websites on a particular topic. Anyone who advertises it as such is clueless. Anyone who tries to control or censor the content in any way needs to be stopped.
UNIX: A computer user is defined as a programmer. WINDOWS: A computer user is defined as a consumer.
How many here have ever tried to revert a page after vandalism has happened?
Try doing it *without* first searching for either "vandalism" or "revert" (The average visitor doesn't know these terms) for hints on how to do it.
The process is horribly complicated, unintuitive and timeconsuming. I am no expert on user interface design, I should add, so this is just my uninformed oppinion. Perhaps adding a "I think vandalism has happened here" link would help?
When an article goes unedited for maybe 4 hours it automatically becomes stable.
That way wikipedians can always view the draft version, but it's highly unlikely that vandalism will stay around long enough to be stablized.
People coming in from google or such like will automatically get the stable version unless they deliberately choose draft.
How about instead of freezing certain entries, you maintain a head or tip where all of the changes go and where, yes, Palpatine's image can end up where Benedict's should be. But you would also have the option of committing any specific edit. Then, folks who wish can pick which wiki to view, the head or the committed stuff only.
The fun starts when it's time to pick which is the default view.
its not an oxymoron.
Alternatively, might there be a way to introduce reputation/karma to the wiki?
Nothing to see here folks, move along...
Irony
(1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity
One would have to have been moronic to not have expected this outcome so, the situation is not ironic. But, the need to restrict something that was specifically designed to be completely open in oxymoronic as well as paradoxical.
Why not just implement some sort of buffer period for changes to be objected to or questioned? That way the pages could still be open for editing by anyone, but ridiculous changes or vandalism could be flagged as such before they have a chance to make it to the page.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The worst kind are the small ones that are hard to detect or just plain anecdotes that's just impossible to verify. For example, on many military related pages, there are also tibbits or stories that are just impossible to verify. Much like email stories, these "facts" are then passed around as truth especially since it was found on the Wikipedia. For example, on the article on the Russian special forces, there was a story about them being better than the Rangers and how they beat the Rangers in a competition in Alaska in everything except for weight lifting. Nice story but false. This isn't intentional vandalism but it is damaging to credibility and difficult to verify. If we demand citations for every statement, progress will be slow. Being aware of this has affect my view of the Wikipedia, despite my own contributions to me. I really love the Wikipedia and it is my way of contributing to the open source movement. But at some point you have to balance openness and credibility. Bad code won't run but false statements aren't always so obvious. I wish there are some standardized way we can use to test the credibility of an article like we do with programs.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
The problem is that it's hard to come up with a "little" more control. Either your whitelisting editors, or you're not. All of the usual "this approach to combating spam won't work because..." tick boxes apply, for precisely the same reason.
Freedom and accountability are inversely correlated, and there's no way to gain a little accountability without losing infinite amounts of freedom when your freedom is currently unlimited. Any loss of privacy is a total loss of privacy.
Good question, I don't know what the best solution would be. Perhaps draft pages could be periodically placed in a vote queue, which users could periodically visit and vote each draft up or down. (Preferrably, voters would be presented with a draft in which changes from the original are highlighted.) If a draft passes voting, it replaces the "stable" article.
For some idea of how this can work, head over to kuro5hin and sign up for an account. All their articles go through a community voting process, which mostly works (though the trolls seem to make up a significant minority of the voting users - this would undoubtedly be a problem for wikipedia as well).
If there are too many drafts in the voting queue, it could be split by topic into multiple queues, or users could be presented with a random subset of drafts.
And let's not forget that it's only forty years since you guys stopped treating blacks as though they were subhuman!
I think you misspelled "niggers".
Sincerely,
Billy Bush.
where there will be more mosques than churches in 22 years,
So what? Is a church somehow better than a mosque?
where holocaust deniers get equal air time in order to show "both sides of the issue",
That's fine. If broadcast companies want to give air time to idiots, there's nothing wrong with that. Change the channel!
Lots of your points are valid, but free speech and free religion are good things.
Rather than (the illusion of) more control, a better way to make Wikipedia more reliable is to increase its cross-referencing. Not just the content of "facts", with edit changelogs, but actual citations of the contents elsewhere, that readers can consult when deciding how much to trust it. Perhaps another tab of the interface, that shows every sentence (at least) linked to its (list of) citations. Truth is different from lies, because it is much more robust. Evidence of the truth is everywhere, while lies appear only in the places most important to appear: because lies are very expensive to keep consistent.
Another kind of corroboration is a "web of trust". People could accept, reject, or "question" any Wikipedia content. Maybe a few categories (yes/no/maybe), a 0-10 scale, a percentage, something easy to recognize in its common meaning. And people could assign the same kind of overall trust to each other. With a degree of how transitive is such trust: do I trust my friends friends? More than my friends? How about in combination? We could get a combination "web of trust" and "peer review" view of any Wikipedia article, which would help us decide how much to trust it. Which trust could be used by other people. In a large, decentralized, P2P system, it's hard to game such a system, and such gaming can be more easily detected, and immediately rejected.
In the meantime, the best way to deal with the "truth security holes" is just "don't believe what you read". We already do all these things "manually", with web searches, emails to friends, our own basic BS detectors. With the right extra features, we can make all that much easier, and all get to use the value that right now is being locked up, or thrown away every time we change the page without telling someone.
--
make install -not war
It has full regression capabilities. If a page changes, people can request email notification. They can compare the current state of the article to quite a few previous ones, and view only the differences, and then select any previous version to revert back to.
The idea that theres a huge dilemma facing practically everyone involved in wikipedia is somewhat of an exagurration. The destructive trolls, casual users, casual editors and the mods and admins of wikipedia itself.
In the past year, the growth of English language articles has been approximately exponential, the user (and especially administrator) growth will soon be outstripped. Over 50,000 new articles have been created in the past two months - and you can bet these new articles will be of obscurer and obscurer content. However an introduction of "stable" fixed pages will counter this - a single person accomplished in study of the Dark Ages could single-handedly create a couple of articles and request a stablization of said pages.
Wikipedia is self advertised free encyclopedia. This is evidenced by the extensive arguments on the talk pages. How can one prevent trolls and malicious users from screwing up wikis while allowing them to be constantly improved upon? Its a tough problem that only a complex system could fix.
If one looks at all the major articles, they seem pretty much complete. Eg. The article on marijuana is practically perfect and all encompassing. It could be rendered "stable". But what of its legality? Thoughtful editors have even created a "legal issues" page that can be edited once marijuana is legalized (while only a very minor mention is required on the stable page - easily obtained upon request to an admin). This sort of catagorizing could help more and more pages become "stable", thus preventing any trolls.
As somebody who has created about 10 articles, I've only once ran into a troll. A grammar troll specifically, who took a joy in subtly entering some typos in the article for "Earth 2160" a soon-to-be-released Polish game. I corrected his edit and all was well after that. Controversial topics (Ie. George W. Bush, War in Iraq, Michael Moore) will have a greatly increased amount of trolls, but reversals occur within minutes, even seconds, the editors have all this under control.
Stable pages are a fine idea, while sacrificing a minimal amount of freedom. Most minor, obscure pages should be rendered stable immediately, and some major pages too.
The idea of trolls overrunning wikipedia is invalid. I'd wager that the majority of trolls have already impacted the site (a lot of trolls are quite net savvy, and would be aware of wikipedia by now), though wikipedia's popularity is skyrocketing, the vast majority of new users will be there to help/use rather than to hinder - in the long run it seems.
Wikipedia is very close to becoming the finest encyclopedia in the world. Its much better than a lot of its counterparts already, and as time passes, the amount of new articles will inevitably stabilize. By 2008 the encyclopedia should have attained near-perfect status in all but the current events (which is a constant process obviously), and should be renowned everywhere for its content.
>Yeah I'm much happier here in Europe:
>where holocaust deniers get equal air time in >order to show "both sides of the issue",
>where the laws don't provide close to the level >of protection for individual rights as in the US,
Such as the right to free speech for holocaust deniers. Complain all you want, but you'll have to choose between free speech and protection against hate speech. Europe cannot provide both. Neither can the US.
>where xenophobic anti-immigration policies are >higher than anywhere in the world,
>We may have problems my friend, but Eurabia is >f*cked. How does it feel to be conquered?
"Eurabia"? And you are complaining about xenophobia?
Leo
TFA says it was fixed in ONE MINUTE, so what?
The photo of the pope was replaced with the evil emperor from Star Wars so it should be obvious to anyone who knows how Wikipedia works that it was a case of vandalism and it will get fixed very soon.
Information coming from a single source os often wrong or manipulated too, and often in more subtle ways than a replaced picture is.
I've been using Wikipedia daily for years and I have encountered vandalism of this sort about twice. Plus, the BJAODN (Bad Jokes and other deleted nonsense, a collection of sophisticated "vandalism") pages are pretty damn funny.
To me, the "credibility" of Wikipedia lies precisely in its openness and the general rule of "anyone-can-edit-anything". People right now are accustomed to the type of credibility of information that is controlled by a single institution. This kind of credibility is shattered if some obviously "wrong" content is distributed on the channels. But people could, and are getting slowly due to the web itself, get accustomed to the kind of credibility of information not controlled by a single institution. To deny that is to seriously underestimate the intelligence of "the people".
Of course, prevention of editing of some articles is not going to be the end of the world. But it is a dangerous tendency. To me, it jeopardizes the credibility of wikipedia more than any vandalism could ever do. Remember, you can just reload the page.
Reading at -1 requires wading through too much garbage, but you are right that reading at +3 or above filters out everything but the circlejerk. The solution? Configure your account to give "Flamebait" (and only Flamebait) a +5 bonus.
Some Flamebait-modded comments are without redeeming features, but a surprisingly large number of them are perfectly valid comments that just happened to eloquently express a position the Average Slashdotter dislikes. And many of the rest are simply hilarious.
Over at Plastic they have some great moderations like "-1 Incoherent" and "-1 Modappeal" that might improve Slashdot a bit if adopted here.
Here and there and other places. The History and Discusion pages are more interesting than the actual articles.
As one of Wikipedias most well known vandals, and also one of its biggest fans, there is more need for better control, to make sure that Willy on Wheels is kept on his wheels.
Do you play with your Willy?
"They're trying to curb the problem of malicious users before it gets out of hand, which is good, IMO."
I love Wikipedia too but THIS IS NOT A GOOD THING. Wikipedia doesn't need any credibility help as millions use it every day. Vadelism has always been an occasional problem and is nothing new not something that is unanticipated. This is why it is called "WIKI"-- pedia. Trust and freedom was the beauty of it
What it sounds like is perhaps Wikipedia was a tricky way for the public to be fooled into providing content for free. Now Mr.Wales "all of sudden" notices people can damage content? Please.
It should be interesting to see who and what process decides the final version of the "truth" and who will benefit the most from such a decision. Guess who I think.
Jimmy maybe you'll make some cash and fame from this and perhaps it doesn't mean much-- but if you go through with this you've completely lost my respect.
~Wikipedia (another media conglomerate in the making?)
Check out this entry. Seems pretty stable.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
I live in Canada which is in the Americas.
I see no reason a fifth-grader should find an article on bondage/sado-masochism when enquiring about sex or reproduction. While adults may play whatever games they wish without hurting anyone, we attempt to teach youngsters to respect each other and bondage is likely contrary to our criminal code so is way beyond community standards here. If it were just for high-school and there was no legal issue, I might have left such stuff in. Youngsters need information, but just the basics. That is what I meant by "too open-minded". I am pretty open-minded, but I work in small communities in publicly funded schools and have to consider paedagogical value and community standards. Any teacher or student who needs such material can find it on their own without me providing it.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
Have a main, verified version for stable pages, and a "wiki" one you have to click to see and edit. Over time, the stable can be updated without risking vandalism for users searching for accurate data, but also allow continued development of the article.
What they need to do is decouple the reason from the mod. There are quite a few flamebaits that are worth reading and a +1 flamebait might be a useful mod. as would -1 funny. There are far too many comments that are hillarious, but not actually relevent to the article. I want to see posts that are both funny and insightful and configure my account for +5 funny down the line to read all the funniest but irrelevant comments without context later if i so choose.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Great summary. Reuters has no idea how Wikipedia works.
What is this about? Terrorism? Plane crashes? It's said like it should be obvious but for the life of me I can't figure it out. Except for high tension areas (UK doesn't count) the chance of being in a terrorist act is incredibly low.
I first read "Slashdot Announces Tighter Editorial Control". What a joke !
...just last month:
s p
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1835857,00.a
Wikipedia does one amazing thing that Google + random web searches can't start to compete with.
Wikipedia provides overviews of things.
The problem is that when I want information about, say, USB 2.0, the Web *does* provide just about everything I might want (an improvement over writing letters to people requesting documents, for certain). However, I may have no idea what to request.
A Wikipedia article gives me a brief overview that is useful to a human, and provides me with enough information that I know where to go for further, detailed information.
It might take a long time to obtain this information normally, but Wikipedia allows me to get ahold of it almost instantly.
And one other point -- while I agree that to a security theorist, Wikipedia is horribly insecure, and can suffer many attacks, it is also inarguably *not* falling apart. So, clearly there are some important factors that we have not taken into consideration, like the fact that people may just like Wikipedia a lot.
I've mused many a time on whether a Wiki might be a good way to bootstrap an encyclopedia, but not the best once there is valuable information finished and present that one must simply keep from being vandalized. So an unmodified wiki approach might make sense for the early days of Wikipedia, but some sort of trust system might make more sense later on.
Also, for people who disagree with this policy change, remember that you can always "fork" Wikipedia.
If we can live with a bit more time to update things, there might be an "unstable Wikipedia" and a "stable Wikipedia", where editors have approved changes and dropped them into the stable release. [shrug] lots of possibilities. All I know is that Wikipedia is a great sign of the same fundamental value that drives open source -- that it is so phenomenally inexpensive to produce something that can then provide good for so many people that traditional market economics may not do a good job of serving us any more in an information age.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
So, if you run across a bogus Wikipedia entry, you can fix it.
How do you fix a bogus Reuters news report that's totally uncorroborated by the people it's reporting on?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
First of all it would be Wikimedia and not Wikipedia who would announce something like this, and second I don't see the announcement link to the Wikimedia Foundation. Do we have any official announcement here or is it just some editorial fun?
I remember talk in the past of creating a stablised fork - e.g. high quality articles would be copied to an authoritative version that is locked from editing, and only updated in case of significant improvements. If Jimbo is talking about that, then sure. It's the obvious thing to do.
But if he is talking about locking parts of wikipedia itself, then, erm, no. Firstly, it's unneccessary. Secondly, this is going to be so open for abuse. It just takes one borderline case to blow the community apart.
I know all about variable credibility, I watch Fox News! ;)
(Actually, just about all mainstream news outlets suffer from variable credibility these days... but that does not make it a desirable quality...)
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
This is a problem, which is why on occasion I have gone all Grammar Nazi on various articles. At the moment I'm completely rewriting one of the IT-related articles for just this purpose, in the process doing some severe culling of tangential points that obscure the ability to see the forest for the trees.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Wikipedia is plagued by miserable wikitrolls who hijack a controversial article, inject it with emotional garbage, then camp out indefinitely and pounce on any poor newbie who wanders in later and makes NPOV adjustment. For many articles, the situation is severe.
Early on, it wasn't clear if there would be enough people to create a Wikipedia, and opening edits to the world has made it astonishingly detailed. Now that they have lots of material, perhaps they need to tighten up. You can see this as a lifecycle -- early on, they need ANY material, later on, they need to get stricter about quality and accuracy.
It might even be possible to create that lifecycle inside the Wikipedia itself. E.G., articles that have been around for a while might have less-tight controls than ones that have been around a while. That might simply mean "if the article is more than 3 years old, anonymous users can't change it."
But allowing edits by literally everyone is part of the charm of Wikipedia. I hope and expect they will work to create the least limit possible.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
The articles are far more accurate than anything on wikipedia, give it a try today! http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
This is ammusing:
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncyclopedia
Popular pages (measured by a certain threshhold of hit count over time) are automatically put in line to be frozen. When frozen, two concurrent versions of the page exist, a "stable" version that is shown to visitors and cannot be changed, and an "unstable" version that anyone can edit. Periodically, trusted editors review the unstable versions and merge changes into the stable versions. Problem solved. Wikipedia's credibility (justifiably) skyrockets. (Since, this is the way open source development works, why didn't they think of it before? ^_^)
From the article:
Breaking news on big stories frequently makes its way into Wikipedia entries hours or even minutes after being reported.
Not only hours, but maybe even minutes before. Incredible.
The trouble with Wikipedia is, while it might be a nice idea it's only going to be useful up to a certain level. I liken it to a coffee-table book - pretty pictures, easy to read, but you wouldn't cite it in a scientific paper. How many non-peer reviewed scientific journals do you know that are actually respected by the community? Sure, they're a useful means of sharing information, but the articles published that way have far less impact than those in peer-reviewed journals.
I've reviewed the entries in my specialist field (which involves wildlife ecology, behavior and management) and I can tell you that the quality of factual content is on a par with an Animal Planet documentary - obviously written by those with a shallow depth of knowledge of the subject, but usually passionate. Common errors, misconceptions and myths are rife - real science is sorely lacking, and I don't know any colleagues in my field who actually use it.
There's a policy against personal attacks; there's a very strong policy against legal threats. What sort of harrassment were you talking about?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"Eh, when you read something in the media or in an encyclopedia in paper or something in a library, how do you know it's correct?"
I see you got an insightful. So we shouldn't trust anything. So let's bring out the real question. How was your day? Did you turn on the TV, or the Radio? How about read a newspaper, magazine, or even a pamplet? What about all those road signs, and street markings? Talk to any people? Exactly at what point do you realize that you can't have a life without a certain level of trust. Be a skeptic, and use your brain. But realize that failure is a risk we all take, and all the distrust in the world will not change that.
Either you end up having centralized control, and all the benefits of the wiki system go flying out the door, or you have a centralized validated version which ends up so far behind the original as to be useless (see Nupedia). Or you make moderators out of everyone who's logged in, and you end up asking who watches the watchmen, ad infinitum.
Funny thing is---this is a solved problem. Or, at least, there's been considerable work done toward solving it. Read about webs of trust---it's a scalable, noncentralized way of validating content. I think it'd fit in wonderfully with the Wiki.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
the fact that a wiki page is locked is more ironic than it is oxymorinic.
The problem with a purely voting method is that a minor change to a page about a minor subject may never get enough votes to move into stable.
A story about a current event will easily get the votes it needs to move without the stabilization time.
Also you could perhaps make it the case that rolling back to a previous stable version doesn't require going back through draft mode.
For what it counts, man am I ever sorry about that. (That article gets a lot of vandalism---I wonder why.)
Hopefully a web of trust-type solution would allow the casual browser to view only versions above a certain trust threshold. Thus, you wouldn't get the "butt" variant of the Moon article. Editors would get the actual "live" copy, and I suppose would have some way of giving their approval (as "not vandalized") to the articles.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Wikipedia is based on the old 18th century encyclopedia concept, but this isn't effective in the digital era of the Internet. Many Wikipedia articles are intentionally written for the common people, not containing specialist scientific or rare information you can find in specialist books. For example, Wikipedia's article on quadratic classifiers is a stub written in April (after I raised this issue on their mailing list in February), and their article on software agents, although much improved since I pointed that it was as short as a kid's poem some months before, is still inadequate if you consider that some people study agents for years in universities. Now, what will happen if we go there and improve these articles so much that they contain all the relevant information you can find in computer science and mathematics books, including detailed examples and HOW-TOs, to the extent that these articles become 300-page books? They will remove that extra "unencyclopedic" and "specialist" knowledge, since they believe it should not be part of an encyclopedia. They may move the information to their other wikiprojects, such as Wikibooks. That's bad, because some information will inevitably be duplicated, and duplication leads to ommisions and errors (someone may fix something in Wikibooks, but the fix won't show up in a Wikipedia article which may contain the same information). They believe in old monolithic ideas and they still think in terms of "books", "articles", "pages", something they write and the reader reads in the same monolithic form. They must proceed and understand what the future holds for wikis and the Web, and they must adapt to that future.
The future lies in personalised information. You can see that it's coming if you notice the rise of RSS and you understand why it's so trendy now: People want to control the information they consume. The don't want to read an HTML page which may contain markup and CSS errors, be incompatible with their browser, full of flashy f*cking irrelevant advertisements and whatnot. They prefer RSS which provides an easy-to-parse XML representation of the information they want. Similarily, people use free/libre open-source software because they want to have control over their PCs and their lives, they don't want their software to spy on them nor to control what they can do with their computer with evil technologies like Trusted Computing and stupid DRM. People want freedom and choice. Books and articles are like closed-source software: You cannot control with fine granularity what you want to read. You have a choice between different authors, but that's all, and this isn't true freedom. What if we had a magic piece of paper which could erase the words and phrases we dislike? We could then read exactly what we want to read, from any author. How many times have you bought a 500-page book only to find out later than 75% of its text is unnecessary pseudo-literary decoration? Some people have lots of time and like to read anything they can, others want to invest their time in reading only the absolutely necessary text which contains the information they urgently need. We need a way to have total control over the information that enters our brain, or else we are at the mercy of the author.
In wikis, we need a wiki that can build personalised wiki-articles based on our preferences, getting data and information from a flexible database. This is a multi-step process. We must first create a wiki database which contains all the data we can document, if possible a perfect copy of our brains I would say, then we must develop software to tag its contents and let the user to retrieve the information in any way they like, and if we use a good design there is no need to duplicate any data.
Special software needs to be developed in order to materialise my vision. This software should be based on the concepts of "co
if it were in the EB, then it might be ironic.
The 1.5 version of MediaWiki adds the ability to put users into group into which you can add varying degrees of article editing capabilities. This expands way beyond the already existing "White List" variable in LocalSettings.php.
This is especially useful for people such as myself who have introduced MediaWiki into corporate enviroments (for documentation purposes) and which to keep all the n00bs in their cubes to not fiddle with the Howto articles (no matter how "hilarious" some of their suggestions are) but at the same time, allow all the team supervisors the ability to edit the documentation without having to hold four meetings and endless conference calls beforehand.
Wikipedia is in good shape at the moment because of hordes of people donating their time to keep it that way, to act as a corrective force on the small minority of extremely energetic maniacs.
How long can they keep this up? There's a danger that at some point everyone is going to go "this is just bullshit" and let it go to hell.
Personally, I trust Jimbo Wales to do something reasonable on this front... wikipedia is most likely going to stay wikipedia, if he's in charge of the changes...
It is likely that the rate of change in pages will decline and the size of the page increase as the page matures/ages.
How about setting a threhold where edits to mature pages are randomly moderated by other Wikipedia users? This would not spot all abuses, but it would spot obvious defacement. If a small number of people agree that the edit looks OK, it goes live.
Some sort of karma system would also be a nice way of allowing authoritative sources (say who wrote the bulk of an article) to veto factual errors.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
The worst (IMHO) are the (forgive the political incorrectness) dyslexics, Aspergerists, and other "rainman"-esque editors who will persistently dump, re-dump, and perpetu-dump barely-legible, generally-useless garbage into otherwise-good articles, no matter how nicely and how often you ask them not to.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Why not make the original author of an article the only one who can control changes? (beyond Wikipedia system administrators.) The author could control a list of other users who can be authenticated to make changes because they're trusted if he wants to allow his own "personal editing team."
This would not necessarily limit the number of articles on a given subject. That's where user voting would come in. An authenticated user could give a numeric rating (say from +10 through -10, for extreme support to extreme non-support) of article quality and the current aggregate score could be used to rank/filter articles. The bigger/better an article gets, the more likely it is to get positive feedback and to be the one displayed, though people could see everything if they chose to.
If you could choose to display the top 3/4 articles by rank, it would also help to solve the "controversial topic" issue: why have just one view presented? Read several, in order of popular support (which won't necessarily equal the truth in terms of ranking.)
Ah, Reuters, today you've really cheesed me off. I was fuckin' worried.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
In that same fashion, I like wikipedia, hate its editorial system. I think this may help in certain cases, and I have an example (name of article not included... obvious reasons).
/. poster posted below, I am an expert on the item in question. I certainly was not the only one, but I was the only one that made major contributions to this item. This guy came along knowing shit-all about the topic. If he finds something out of bounds with relation to the rules, that's one thing (something anyone should be able to spot). But by god, if I'm the expert, I'm going to fight for the legitimacy of a page, as well as for the accuracy of its content. The problem is... I shouldn't have to fight edit trolls. If you know nothing about a topic, and aren't experienced in properly enforcing the Wiki rules, LEAVE IT ALONE!
I help maintain a few pages at Wikipedia. I only maintain those pages which I have direct knowledge of. Some people like to go around confirming stats, checking spelling, grammer, adding photos, whatever. I'm the other type.
So, one of the pages I look over was radically changed one day. I look at the diff comments, and get a lot of fluff about self-promotion. Of course, the promotion was not from a person, but from the item itself... about itself.
I looked through the changes, taking this person's view into consideration, and restored most everything that was unrelated to what I had assumed truly constituted any hint of self-promotion.
I come back the next day, and the guy is FREAKED OUT! How could I reverse all of his changes! I was a content nazi!
I explained on the talk page that his editorial view should only target specific examples, and not turn a 1 and a half page entry into 2 paragraphs (which is exactly what this guy did). I had restored it to about 1 page, removing most links at the bottom to related resources, along with extranious content.
What does the guy do? Puts the page up for a vote for complete removal. Alas, I had to contact the other related individuals who had previously editted the page to get them to help on this issue. It was resolved, with only a few minor changes the the revisions I had made.
The point is this. There are too many people on Wikipedia that don't care what they do (reducing 90% of the content on their own personal whim), but go insane if you reverse even only a portion of their edit... even if you keep some of their edits as having good cause.
"I can edit you, but how dare you edit me!" mentality has GOT to go at Wikipedia. In one of the examples a
This guy's first clue should have been that the page only changed a few times a year to update stats, and to "beautify" the page with reformatting of the content, and had never been the target of a vote of any kind.
I hope the changes at Wikipedia have a positive effect to reduce such headaches. I only overlook about 3 items, and it's still a pain. I'd hate to be someone who deals with dozens every day. The stress would cause my eyes to pop out of my head.
I8-D
I could create a webpage with this invalid statistic, I could use tools to register different sites, skin them, auto gen content, put this invalid statistic in and flood google with new definitions.
/. don't get a buzz of modifying something they are allowed.
Valid sites like the BBC may misquote the statistic.
So, given that the intarwebnet can contain many sources, why are you so worried that the ONE source that lets say, menace tod_miller can modify, be incorrect? Since I could modify my own version on my own site?
The issue is the brand/profile of the site: wikipedia.org. As a small project noone cares about - then it doesn't matter. But as the unwashed masses [maybe in IT hacking terms, we should call that the washed masses?] rush to find out what the latest buzz is, then it is a high profile site that may be open to have many of its statistics deliberately modified.
Again, I haven't actually seen any wikipedia vandalism, I think even the trolls on
Of course, some people can eek fun out of anything. And I am sure many l33t h3x0rz have found the 'edit page' exploit on wikipedia that allows them full edit control without 4uth0r1z4tion. l33t.
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Wikipedia's is owned by a millionaire who is a big fan of Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises and so forth. This should begin to give you an idea of where it's head is at. He has appointed people to positions of power like admin, bureaucrat, arbitrator, and mediator, more often of a like mind then not. One of these people is part of the far-right Moonie cult.
Then we have the natural bias of an English-speaking audience of people mostly from England and its former and current colonies (the US, Canada, Ireland, Australia etc.) On top of this, the editors tend to be male, white, professional and whatnot. That this bias exists is recognized at a high level. But what is done about it? Most editors who are of more of a say world-view than US/UK-centric view, left than right and so forth are persecuted. Most left-wing admins have been persecuted - Secretlondon (sent a nasty e-mail by Jimbo Wales), 172, and Everyking. There are a few more who are more moderate, some have privately told me more recently that Wikipedia is going bonkers in this respect, that the inmates are taking over the asylum.
I believe wikis can survive only with cooperation. A wiki, like Slashdot, can survive mostly good users and a few vandals. But when say 30% of Wikipedia is left-wing, with 70% being right-wing or what in the US would be called centrist, you have a problem that is not going away. It just gets worse, really.
My prediction is that since wikis need cooperation, the controversial categories (history, society, life) will break off into separate wikis - right-leaning ones like Wikinfo and left-leaning ones like Dkosopedia or the even further left Red Wiki.
This is inevitable. The edit wars over the Israel/Palestine pages mimics the actual war going on. The arbitrators are just becoming more and more overburdened over time, and these sections are becoming more and more chaotic and sectarian. On the other hand, articles about scientific and mathematic concepts like quantum mechanics are doing just fine. I think eventually, Wikipedia itself will see the wisdom of the Kahanists and jihadis leaving for their own respective wikis. It will be better for everyone.
Such as the right to free speech for holocaust deniers.
Sheesh. Free speech doesn't guarantee free audiences or any audience at all.
How many trolls could a true troll troll if a true troll could troll trolls?
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
I know a guy that put up his own Wikipedia page to promote himself. He is a dreadful author of a self published book that is really bad. He made up a full page about himself, making him look like the second incantation of christ. Those that knew him added the truth, he blew a gasket, the page got deleted, and now he actually wants to sue. He wants to sue an openended site that takes contributions. He is a dick, as you may imagine, and he won't win, because he has openly stalked and attacked and threatened all sorts of nefarious deeds (including looking up IP's), and acted like a creep. Ain't the net a blast?
We want people to impose structure and assess the credibility of the zottabytes of information out there. You can strive to eliminate editorial bias but can't escape it; 'tis the price you pay for not having to read every conceivable source of information.
What??
Just because it's undisputed doesn't mean it's anywhere near complete, and as a contributor, I don't want to be stopped from improving things just because maybe an admin not well introduced in the subject thought "that article is good enough".
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Wikipedia hereby formally announces tighter editorial controls on Reuters and Slashdot... ;-)
I spoke in English to many journalists yesterday and the day before (90 journalists registered to cover Wikimania). I spoke to one journalist about our longstanding discussions of how to create a "stable version" or "Wikipedia 1.0". This would not involve substantial changes to how we do our usual work, but rather a new process for identifying our best work.
I spoke in English, and this was translate to German. Then the German was translated back to English, and then translated again into the Slashdot story.
There was no "announcement". We are constantly reviewing our policies and looking for ways to improve, but we have not "announced" anything. We don't even really work that way... if you know how Wikipedia works, it's through a long process of community discussion and consensus building, not through a process of top-down announcements.
Wikia
Well, you are a bit late. For in-depth information there is WikiBooks (http://www.wikibooks.org./
And a few WikiPedia articles already have links to the relevant WikiBook where the reader can find out more about the topic.
Martin
Rather than stop people from being able to edit an article, it would be better to allow the user the option of reading a "stable snapshot" article or to go with the current version in flux.
There's no reason to take the wiki out of the wikipedia just so that people can see the last well liked version of an article.
If you really want creativity, you can have allow a voting system for "best versions" and allow the reader to various versions prefered differing constituencies.
If an article is to be freezed, ie. only for complete articles, why not only allow certified people to edit it ? The certificate could be simply a verified thawte (freemail) certificate, that should provide enough proof that the author is not going to vandalize the article.
Or let wikipedia make their own certification program. Through social contacts between wikipedia editors, all authors can be verified and allowed to edit those particular articles.
Ofcourse, for new additions no certification should be put in place ; that would only scare people off.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Everyone's in a twist and no one went over there to see what's what? I mean, I know this is Slashdot and all, and RingTFA is beyond the pale (much less actually digging around), but sheesh.
The situation is explained on the Wikipedia:Announcements page, thusly:
At least that's what it says as I write this -- earlier, there was a note about the whole report being, quote, "a giant steaming pile". (I'm not kidding. Check the history.)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
The name sounds good, but something is wrong with it ;)
- A version of an article can be validated through the article validation feature (now in beta stage). This validation is a voting by users on several topics, including how neutral, complete, accurate, etc. an article is (see proposal for the interface). This is useful, for instance, for burning certain versions of articles of the Wikipedia into a CDROM, to be used where internet access is expensive or nonexistent.
- There are measures for protecting a page, and it has been done before. Vandalism has been always kept to a much lower level than alarmists think. Please see replies to common objection
Most important of all, the Wikimania Conference is an ongoing event: (from the article) "Es gibt mehrere Möglichkeiten, die wir hier in Frankfurt besprechen": "There are several possibilities, that we are discussing in Frankfurt". I think the outcome will continue in the way of protecting some pages when it is estrictly necessary and validating some versions of the articles. It will never be something limiting the freedom for anyone to edit pages, which is at the core of Wikipedia's success, and very deeply established in the community of Wikipedians.The en.wikipedia.org has always been censoring. The majority (US netizens) are always removing info that is critical of USA. Only american-pinkglasses info can remain in en.wikipedia.org.
d eletion/Jackie_Noyes
For example they want to remove this short, on-topic, factually correct article I recently added about a mentally ill she-inmate who was impreganted in a Wisconsin prison by a guard and she got 1 year of solitary confinement as a punishment for this, after refusing to have an abortion. She was denied medical attention and telephone access. The guard walked away free. The AI organization fought big time to get her and her baby get out of prison.
Here is the article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Noyes
Here is the removal debate page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votes_for_
Someone tell me why detainee abuser PFC Lynnie bitch has article in wiki, but abused detainee Jackie Noyes cannot? Criminal is OK, victim is not? This smells censorship. Please vote if you can!
The more you tighten your crapflooding controls, the more it seems to invite the trolls. Best to just ignore them and let them go away. Wikipedia seems to have enough editors reverting vandalism to handle problems already.