Slashdot Mirror
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.
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'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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Which is, of course, the point of an encyclopedia.
But then again, I could be wrong.
I'd like to think I know how to cope with variable credibility, but I'd really just rather not have to waste time digging through edit histories and discussion pages to figure out whose revision comes closest to the "truth" I'm after. Give me a source I already know and trust to be reliable, and I'll even be willing to pay you for the time I save.
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.
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
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.
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