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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."
But wasn't the Siegenthaler issue about an edit of his article, not creation?
In any case it's not that hard to register, and it's not hard to lie about your personal details. Nor is it hard to do this by proxy. So not quite a free-speech issue since prior to this your IP was published anyway. Thumbs up for a decent resolution.
Perhaps the problem is that high-traffic pages attract all the vandals and trolls. But even so, according to Wikipedian doctrine, any suspect edits on a high-traffic page should be discovered and corrected quickly enough to be of negligible impact. Why, then, the need for Template:High-traffic?
If anything, Wikipedia should include a Template:Low-traffic to warn that fewer eyeballs make an article less reliable. That there exists only Template:High-traffic as a minor concession to reality suggests myopia at best, and a willful doublethink at worst.
Creating an account takes before creating an article adds about 5 seconds for a user. I can't see how this will help prevent this scenario again. However, I could imagine that this idea ("Best approach?") would help a lot.
It was only a matter of time before this started happening. its hard to keep objectivity in a service like wikipedia when ANYONE can say what they want. this also hurts the reputation of wikipedia for being a reliable source of information.
The second story is interesting too. On page two they talk about Adam Curry deleting references to other people's work on pod casting and bogging. He deleted Kevin Marks's accomplishments and largely credited himself more. A way to weed out conflict of interest is needed for wikipedia. Over all the author of the article makes wikipedia look bad and almost malicious. Why can't people accept this as an information source?
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As an ex-vandal of Wikipedia, I see this is as bad news. First of all, it only takes a few minutes to create an account, so vandals can still create vandalism. Consider this, Wikipedia restricted page-moves from new users due to page moving vandals, but vandals just created accounts, left them to mature for a few weeks and still got through. It will stop idiots performing toolbar vandalism, but it won't stop the professionals.
To give an example, we had a user who created lots of new articles, then claimed he created lots of hoaxes. They banned him, but they still haven't repaired all the damage. There are over 12000 articles tagged for clean up, how many hoaxes are there? This list for example has tonnes of hoaxes, and they have been kept there for over a year!
The Willy on Wheeels is no longer a threat to the Wiki, entropy and admin ignorance is!
Do you play with your Willy?
How about making the IP addresses visible for every edit, not just for (supposedly) anonymous contributions? As things stand, a registered user is less traceable than an unregistered user, simply because the latter leaves a trail with his or her IP address publicly visible, while the former may have many other aliases. Thus it's a little misleading to call unregistered contributors "anonymous," since registered usernames actually provide greater anonymity both for mischief and for good.
I think appending the IP address in parentheses to each username would go a long way towards fixing the balance, like so:
(cur) (last) -- 2:40 PM, Monday, December 5, 2005 -- pomo monster (127.42.29.101) -- minor edits
imho, i think something like the trust system should be used to gain credibility points. I'd be happy to see an assurer or something in order to post or even edit articles, because I'm willing to sacrifice a minimal amount of time to make a better site.
What I discovered one day - because i dodn't visit the Wiki every day - was that the whole thing had been co-opted by some anarchistic fool who simply thought that *his* take on my project was a better one. That person literally stole my Wiki URL, erased what I and many others had constructed, and started putting his content on it. That, instead of simply starting his own project under a different name. I had to find an intermediary to help me negotiate with this person, just to get him to cease and desist. In the interim, I lost the promise of help for the project that I had received from several people who could have made the project move along faster. they were afraid that their work could/would be wiped out.
The entire incident caused immeasureable harm to my project, and to the project's self-image. The project lost viable contributions from nearly 100 contributors that really cared about what I was doing.This has since been repaired. I had to reconstruct everything from scratch. This disaster happened simply because there was no proper control designed into the process. Thiings are noe getting better on Wikipedia
If you want to see the project- the California Open Source Textbook Project [COSTP] now almost fully back from near-decimation, go to http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/COSTP_World_History_P roject
http://www.opensourcetext.org/
So now the Siegenthaler article, previously an admirably libelous piece, is now singing castrato and sounding like a press release from 1984.
"He's a hero and saved a suicidal guy! He worked for civil rights. Oh what a great guy. Controversy, and criticism, is for bitches."
If I wanted just articles on what the people in charge thought was worth having them on I've got Encarta for that. I go to Wikipedia for the article on a small-time foreign singer whose one obsessive fan was able to write a great bio via his public library's net connection. I *want* there to be articles on everything. What makes wikipedia so great is the anonymous stuff. Has anyone actually counted how much of the good contributions come from anonymous people? I know I never went to the trouble of making an account. There are three pretty good articles (they were barely more than stubs when I started them, but the internet has worked its magic and they're pretty darn good now) that wouldn't be there if this policy had been effect in the past.
I am trolling
Since anonymous users can still edit articles, it is perfectly possible to log in using a legitimate account, create a new page with minimal content then log out and put whatever crap you want into it using an anonymous account.
Perhaps a better approach is to somehow disallow access to disconnected pages. When the last link to the page goes away, the article is put into hibernation until someone again links to it.
www.sjbaker.org
The point is no records are kept. It does not matter how much the Secret Service jump up and down and shout, there is no record for them to find. The best they can hope for is that a CCTV camera is pointed at the library entrance and a member of staff can give a reliable description of who used a particular computer at a particular time. They might be able to track you down from that but it would be a tall order. They might also be able to employ DNA and fingerprint evidence to narrow it down a bit as well, but with such a contaminated "scene of crime" and a bit of a disguise you can throw them off the track.
As I have said before on Wikipedia, on the top of the front page of Wikipedia, it breaks almost all articles into eight master categories. On the Mathematics and Science categories it does fine. On the History and Society pages, it does an awful job. As far as the History and Society pages, they have just gotten worse and worse over time. Jimbo is lucky Seigenthaler is a free speech advocate and is raising the issue in the press instead of suing the hell out of him and Wikipedia. I foresee alternative wikis springing up to handle history and so forth. The left-leaning Democratic Underground has started Demopedia, although I'm unaware of Free Republic or any other conservative site starting a conservative counter to Wikipedia yet. Anyhow, I'm sure that's the route it will go down I'm sure, a balkanization of certain categories.
Go ahead and wail, you stupid ACs. My settings eagerly ignore your replies. One of the best little-known features of /., if you ask me.
Returning to the Wikipedia context, I can actually imagine a SINGLE case where anonymity would be justified. That is the case where someone wants to expose an important truth to the public, but would be subject to attack for telling that truth. However, in that case, Wikipedia is obviously the wrong place, since the same person or organization that wants to conceal that truth could just edit the Wikipedia article in question to remove or obfuscate the data.
This is actually the same kind of case where in the old (pre-Reagan) days you could have tried to find an actual journalist to pursue the story. Look at Bob Woodward to see how things have changed, eh? These days, I guess we just have to hope that the glut of data will allow enough of the truths to leak out? (But look at Iraq to see how well that works.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I have about 4,000 edits over the last 3 years, and I more or less agree with you. There is definitely a phenomenon that once an article hits a certain high level of quality, it then tends to get worse over time, as various people come along and make low-quality, disorganized edits. It's amazing when you look at a mature article and do a diff between the versions on, say, Nov. 1 and Dec. 1. You see that there is essentially no difference, and yet hundreds of edits have been made. All that's going on is vandalism that gets corrected, or other low-quality edits that just get reverted.
WP is right up there with Civilization and Freecell in the competition for the most efficient time-eaters ever created. It's sort of like the humans in The Matrix -- they're all pumping huge amounts of energy into the system, and most of it isn't productive.
Now that all the most important topics have articles, it's really just devolved into a situation where people check their watchlists obsessively to keep changes they don't like from happening to their cherished articles. Nothing constructive is going on, and it's really getting to be a waste of time. I've emptied out my watchlist, and have made an effort not to waste any significant amount of time on WP since this summer.
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Having said that, I wish you success, and I hope you prove me wrong!
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On this topic, the notion of anonymous voting was actually a relatively recent innovation, and I'm not sure if it's really such a good one. While it does prevent personalized targeting of specific voters, it also makes it relatively easier to manipulate elections. You can't trace either the valid or invalid votes, which actually leads us back to Wikipedia, where the problem is with tracing the sources of valid and invalid information.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I am a law professor who specializes in information privacy law. If you're interested, I have blogged extensively about this case in many posts: Curtailing Anonymity on Wikipedia Fake Biographies on Wikipedia This is on the Adam Curry case: Wiki Thyself I also blogged about an earlier potential defamation case on Wikipedia: Suing Wikipedia Posts on anonymity: A Victory for Anonymous Blogging Is Anonymous Blogging Possible? Using Lawsuits to Unmask Anonymous Bloggers
As the creator and administrator of a Wiki service myself (Wikinote), I have to wonder what Wikipedia is truly thinking.
Wikinote and its sister website, Shortify, have seen their share of abuse. Most of the time it's SSH password-cracking scripts that try millions of usernames and passwords (and make 1GB logfiles with the auth failures - password authentication is disabled on WikinoteShortify). Sometimes you get a user who will try to fill the DB with random garbage.
On WikinoteShortify, disk space is extremely limited, so the major focus of our anti-abuse methods are in limiting the size of individual pages (64KB). Abuse still happens, though.
I've often thought of using CAPATCHAs or email verification to slow down the tide of bogus signups. But, realistically, that would cause more trouble for my users than it would for the spammers.
Abuse is going to happen. Do what you can to limit it. But don't stomp on your users while you are doing it.
That's the problem with limiting page creation to signed-in users. Spammers will create an account (or many, through a script) and attack. The extra step of an HTTP POST to get a new account is nothing for a Python script (nor, mind you, is the block on Python's user-agent). If you think you're accomplishing something, you're not - people will still find a way to vandalize Wikipedia.
The real question is why it is so difficult to detect bogus page creation. Wikipedia has always relied on human intervention to prevent abuse. There's always someone watching. Why is page creation any harder to audit than editing?
It'll still not prove your point that "any post not leftist in nature" will be modded down, but it'll look less like the traditional right wing complaints of the "left wing media".
The GPs opinion of Bush does nothing for your point, I'm afraid. And the fact that you seem to brand anyone not agreeing with you a "leftist" doesn't help either.
Right now, I can't view a single article without dada21 giving his tuppenceworth, usually to the point of (what appears to me to be) lunacy, modded up to the heavens. Why? He may be right wing, but he's not trying to be offensive and he's clearly not a Nazi.
It amazes me that a group that considers itself the "silent majority" in this country is so convinced it's being persecuted. One mistake by Dan Rather is convincing evidence the entire media has a pro-Democrat slant, despite it goring Gore at the last election, and spending pretty much the entire second half of the nineties trying to find something to impeach Clinton about, finally obsessing itself about a minor affair in a way even mainstream Republicans didn't seem to be.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.