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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.
Hey now, maybe a certain *other* site could take this opportunity to review the quality of its editors...
"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...
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.
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
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.
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
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 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.)
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.
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's been done, welcome to Uncyclopedia, and no, it doesn't keep trolls away from Wikipedia in the slightest, but is surprisingly comprehensive and always good for a chuckle.
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.
Which is, of course, the point of an encyclopedia.
But then again, I could be wrong.
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
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.
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
There are plenty of historical examples of ridiculous content, especially in Britannica which was originally written to glorify the British monarch and all his dominons...
The main problem with wiki is that there are contentious issues where the system does break down. But even there the content tends to be rather more useful than you would get in Britannica where articles are much more likely to only give one side of the argument.
I don't like the idea of freezing contentious content. Earlier today I was reading the Robert Novak page and found that someone had already updated it to describe the hissy-fit walkout he threw. That is good and something you cannot get from any other source. Some pages are locked for obviously partisan reasons.
I think that what they need to do is to introduce time delays for pages that are mega-contenious. So graffiti can be removed before it makes it to the main display page.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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.
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
- 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.