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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!
"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 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...
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
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.
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.
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.
And how, exactly, does one know what information is correct? It doesn't have to be something as obvious as a picture. Are you going to notice if a zero is missing from some obscure statistic? Probably not. And you'd also have bad information that you thought was right. Wikipedia is a fundamentally flawed idea. It simply can't work in the real world.
I don't respond to AC's.
And you'd also have bad information that you thought was right. Wikipedia is a fundamentally flawed idea. It simply can't work in the real world.
I think wikipedia works well, you just have the wrong idea of it. It is by no means a source I'd trust for anything important. It is, however, a source I'd use to get a vague possible idea of a topic, and use as a starting point to find reliable information from authoritative sources.
funny munging
(Yes, I know this is ironic in context.)
Well that article told me everything I needed to know, except where to get one.
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?
Let's say you are doing research on a two-seater variant of the f-16 foghter aircraft, and the "paper encyclopedia" puts the range at 2400km, and wikipedia puts the range at 2550km, who would you trust?
Now, if you came to the knowledge that the article on the trainer variant in question was edited by Captain John Miller, USAF, at the Point Ueneme Air Force base, the only base in the United States using this particular variant, and that he was the man in charge of all pilot training, who would you believe then, the "paper encyclopedia" printed in Taiwan in 2003, or Wikipedia?
Now, let's say that John Miller posted as JonM at 3 am, you might not know that he's the USAF trainer, but you might ask him how he knows, and he might tell you to call him at the base during his office hours. Then you might know. Try calling the Encyclopedia.
Assuming that information is correct is always asking for trouble, regardless of where the infomration comes from. What wikipedia allows you to do is more easily contact the authors to validate or invalidate, as the case may be, the factual nature of the information.
"Piter, too, is dead."
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.
Which is, of course, the point of an encyclopedia.
But then again, I could be wrong.
Not a bad idea, but maybe it could be based on page views instead of time. If a draft has been read a certain number of times without a modification, it could be moved to stable. Four hours may be too short in the early morning, or too long for current events.
Either way, there's a significant danger of a troll getting their edit into the stable version, then editing the draft frequently enough to prevent it from stablizing, thus preventing other users from fixing the edit. For that reason, I prefer a voting process. To make it resilient against targetted trolling, perhaps the articles each user can vote on should be selected at random, much like metamoderation here on slashdot.
Congratulations on your successful vandalism of a resource that people were trying to use. That certainly proves your point about the resource being without value.
The purpose of Wikipedia is not to be a repository of tremendously correct facts. That's not the purpose of a regular encyclopedia, either. The purpose of an encyclopedia is to provide a competent general introduction to a wide variety of topics, and pointers to further information. At this Wikipedia excels.
Many people find Wikipedia a useful resource, so the argument that it is inherently useless is pointless. To vandalise that resource, just to prove your point, is despicable.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
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.
You know this "someone" and havent done anything to denounce it or correct it?
Its you, right? You vandal!
No sig for the moment.
I think wikipedia works well, you just have the wrong idea of it. It is by no means a source I'd trust for anything important. It is, however, a source I'd use to get a vague possible idea of a topic, and use as a starting point to find reliable information from authoritative sources.
Exactly! This holds true for normal encyclopedias as well though. You should never use tertiary sources for any sort of good research.