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."

Comments

Re:Interesting, but...

[Skyshadow]

"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'.

While there are a fairly small number of hotly contested pages, the vast bulk of the Wikipedia is comprised of short entries about fairly unremarkible subjects. These also tend to be the best pages to vandalize (especially in nonobvious ways) because they generally don't get looked at all that much.

So while, say, the Robert Novak page is going to see a lot of dispute between now and whenever someone finally drives a stake through his heart, the page on the Byzantine Emperor Basil I (811-886 AD) probably isn't going to see a great number of worthwhile changes anytime soon.

Then base stable on a time period

[grahamsz]

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.

Re:Isn't that an oxymoron?

[kngthdn]

I couldn't believe Wikipedia could do this to us. The idea, of anyone being able to edit anything, is more important than the possiblity of Tiger Wood's page being replaced with "oMFg!! tIgeR WOODs sux". The only reason I have ever contributed to the site was because I am so amazed that it works. Yes, I have had my user page replaced with porn as a Troll's revenge for cleaning up vandalism, and egomanics have rolled back changes that I made.

But it *always* gets fixed, very quickly. It's easy to imagine vandalism sitting undetected until it's "found", but that isn't the way it works. As soon as changes are submitted to an article, all the information (# of bytes changes, user or anonymous, article name, and a link to the last diff) is output on an IRC channel anyone can join. Using CryptoDerk's Vandal Fighter, a handy java program, makes it even better. Trolls are blacklisted, shared between peers on the network, and shown in bright red. All you have to so is watch it for a while, wait for an anonymous user to make a big change (always to the same articles, Bush, Homosexuality, Anus, etc.) and...you click the link and roll it back. That simple. People do this all the time, which is why there is so little vandalism that survives.

At any rate, this article is totally 100% bogus. This is off the Wikipedia Announcements page:

Numerous news outlets are quoting a Reuters report that Jimmy Wales has stated that there will be a "freeze" on editing. This statement has not been corroborated by any of the Wikimedia board, nor by any present at the Wikimania conference. General agreement among long-time Wikipedians is that Jimbo has been misleadingly quoted, and that the report is a giant steaming pile.

Makes me feel better. ; )

To all the doubters, Wikipedia works, and millions of people love it. If vandalism bothers you, download Cryptoderk's program and get to work.

What I think of Wikipedia and the future of wikis

[wikinerd]

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