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Wikipedia to Restrict Creation of Articles
cine writes "News.com reports that starting Monday Wikipedia will restrict the creation of new articles to members. Anonymous users will only be able to edit existing articles. This move comes after a controversial week for the free online encyclopedia" From the article: "Wales said the Seigenthaler article not only escaped the notice of this corps of watchdogs, but it also became a kind of needle in a haystack: The page remained unchanged for so long because it wasn't linked to from any other Wikipedia articles, depriving it of traffic that might have led to closer scrutiny."
"Anonymous" Wikipedia accounts are actually less anonymous than registered users. As an anonymous user, your IP is visible for tracking across the site and tracing to your physical location; but you have the ability to create as many username sockpuppets as you want.
As a formerly prolific contributor, I never really understood how registration was helpful for anything but tracking people who want to be tracked.
No, they aren't. There's this article or, for something more general, there's this one.
Andrew Lenahan http://www.starblind.com/
Jimbo Wales and John Seigenthaler Sr. were on CNN to debate this issue. There's a partial transcript being worked on now.
The high traffic warning is to new eyes, and to old eyes, for different reasons. It lets experienced Wiki users know that things might have ben changed with malice, and it lets new people know that things can be changed.
It's not saying that more eyes are bad, it just means that more eyes means more vandals as well as fixers too.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Actually, there were two cases mentioned. One was that an article was created with factually incorrect information that was inadequately checked after publication. The second was that an article was changed and this has led to problems. It is the former that has caused the change.
If I've read the article correctly, Wikipedia does a far better job of tracking changes than it does new articles. The second problem was noticed very quickly, reported and presumably corrected (after much comment on slashdot). The first problem stemmed from the fact that the article went unlinked and unedited for so long. All changes on Wikipedia appear to be tracked and checked by a number of people, so the article would have either been edited for correctness by a user or verified for correctness on each change. Because it got through the preliminary check (presumably by one person -- multiple people can register interest in an article after creation and will see changes, but I assume only one person verfies it initially).
The reason for the change is to increase the level of accountability. If an anonymous user changes an article and in some way "messes it up", someone checks that and can either undo it or correct it again. However, if an anonymous user creates a new article and somehow it gets through preliminary checks, then the incorrect information could be up for a long time (because there may be poor linkage) and there is no way for Wikipedia to track who made that anonymous article (remember, many people are on dynamic IPs that change regularly, so an IP is only valid for a short period). I assume that by registering, a valid email is required and therefore there is a semblance of control.
(Disclaimer: I'm a relatively active editor on Wikipedia, although under a different name than this.)
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The article in question is right here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seigenthaler_Sr
And yes, the IP addresses of (anonymous) people doing page edits are logged and publicised; but that still doesn't mean that people can be held accountable. If all you know is that whoever wrote a particular sentence in an article that's considered libellous or something else is that they edited from an AOL IP three years ago... good luck finding that person.
The big difference that Jimbo points out and that makes sense is that articles written by other users are likely on someone's watchlist, so that person would see the edit and check it out - I know I do that with articles on my watchlist, especially if the edits are by anonymous contributors or people I don't know. A malevolent user could still sign up for an account, of course, and get around the restriction that way, but I'd think it's safe to say that at least some trolls are gonna be deterred by that (although it's probably the low-level trolls who write things like "XYZ is a dumbass" in new articles instead of the high-level ones that write articles that look reasonable but are wrong in subtle but important ways); and if the problem persists, the system could just as well be expanded to people who have just signed up five minutes ago or who have not edited any existing articles yet etc. (Of course, that's just an idea of my own, and I'm not speaking for Jimbo, Wikipedia editors in general, the Wikimedia Foundation or anyone here.)
In the end, the lesson is probably that freedom also always means that people will be able to do bad things.
But look at it like this - even though there's almost a million articles in the English Wikipedia already, and even though Wikipedia is among the top 40 most popular sites on the entire Internet, as determined by Alexa, these are about the only examples of real controversy surrounding Wikipedia yet. I'd say we've been pretty successful at showing that the Wiki model *does* work - if the naysayers had been right, the whole site would've collapsed a long, long time ago. But it hasn't, not at all.
So we must be doing something right.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Wikipedia's success has come from people joining together and creating new articles, not just editing them. We need to be able to post new facts, new ideas, and new discoveries that are going on in the world. New users are the primary source of these articles.
Perhaps you didn't read the summary.
"Wikipedia will restrict the creation of new articles to members. Anonymous users will only be able to edit existing articles."
Members. Not admins, or moderators, or privileged people. Just members. All you have to do to create an article is sign up. Becoming a member is free.
Most people on Slashdot moderate/modify Anonymous Cowards into oblivion. If someone takes the time to register their name, there's a greater likelihood that what they have to say is relevent, from a purely statistical point of view (trolls obviously also register their name). I don't see how Wikipedia should be any different in its regard of anonymous postings.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Following this incident, a control system was begun that let project initiators have increased control over their Wiki. this appears to be working.
Wikipedia is a great resource, and a great idea. That said, I think the move to more rational control - to prevent malicious attacks or even inadvertant disasters - is a good idea.
I used to be a big Wikipedia proponent. I have well over 3,000 edits there. Now however I think the site has gone to hell. I do think that it remains a nice reference site when trying to find general information about a common subject, but its usefulness stops there. Trying to get involved in the process any further is an exercise in futility. The site is run by people with huge egos, and any change you do will most likely get changed back regardless what it is. The time of big contributions of factual information is over, and it's mainly revert wars, arguing and vandalism that are most of the current edits.
The News.com story did not report this: Jimbo Wales calls this an "experiment." Link to his email announcing the change.
Penny - plain text accounting
The situation with the Seigenthaler article was somewhat unusual. The article (according to the OP link) had no links from within Wikipedia, allowing it to escape the scrutiny of Wikipedians. The article might as well have been posted to someone's Myspace page, except that being on Wikipedia grants somewhat more credibility than just appearing on some random blog. In other words, Wikipedia is as much a victim here as Seigenthaler, as its credibility was usurped (presumably with contravention of Wikipedia's rules like NPOV and no original research) to post an unsubstantiated political point. If the article went unnoticed for so long, it's likely that the only people that ever saw it were people who got the link e-mailed to them by the article's OP, or people who actually searched for Seigenthaler's name. Given such minimal exposure, the damage caused to Seigenthaler's reputation is probably greater now than if he hadn't said anything publicly after he eventually edited the article himself.
But unlike Seigenthaler, Wikipedia gets it from both ends in this case. An anonymous user posts (allegedly) false information about Seigenthaler, and then, seeing that he has no recourse against the offender, Seigenthaler lambasts Wikipedia. Are there problems with Wikipedia's policies? Sure. Adding restrictions upon anonymous users is a good thing, especially given how prone Wikipedia is to vandalism, and I'm still surprised it doesn't require every contributor to post under an account (which would let them then focus their attention on weeding out sock puppets). But that doesn't make Wikimedia, as an organization, responsible for the incorrect content. In fact, the whole point of Wikipedia is that if you, the user, see something that you know is incorrect, you behave as any good member of the community would, and you contribute to making Wikipedia more factually correct. This is peer-to-peer information: the community as a whole suffers if you only take without giving back.
I work in a library. We provide free Internet access to literally thousands of patrons every week. Under state law, what you do in the library is confidential, so we do not keep any record of your Internet usage. Should an anonymous Wikipedia account be traced to a library IP, there is no possible way to determine who was using a particular library computer at a particular time on a particular day.
It might narrow you down to a particular physical community, or at least to being within driving distance of a particular community. But otherwise it sounds pretty darn anonymous to me.
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?