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Wikipedia Adopting Semi-Protection of Pages
kizzle (the other one) writes "A major policy change on Wikipedia was just passed 103-4-2 along with Jimbo Wales' endorsement to incorporate a process called 'Semi-protection' only on the most frequent targets of vandalism."
Give it some really nice leather binding. It'd look great on my mom's bookshelf.
...at people doing this and so that is why he is endorsing this change.
The semi free encyclopedia, editable by some.
Hopefully wikipedia is not going to a more totalitarian direction.
Wikipedia's been under some pretty harsh pressure lately. Orlowski's articles in the Register have been referred to here already; when I replied to Orlowski he responded with an unrelated allegation that Wikipedia had become a haven for pædophiles.
Quite a lot of people evidently don't like Wikipedia; partly, of course, because its rapid growth is making waves and it promises to grow into an extremely influential (and consequently powerful) source of 'knowledge', but also, I suspect, because 'Jimbo' Wales simply gets up some people's noses.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Why can't they do a contributor rating system, sort of like how slashdot has karma rating?
Require a login. Allow everyone to make changes initially, but track who makes changes. Allow any contributor with a positive rating over a certain threshold to score changes. If the contributor gets ratings below a certain threshold, they're not allowed to change certain "protected" entries. If the rating drops any lower, they're not allowed to contribute, period.
Anonymous ratings would not be allowed.
Thresholds of positive ratings could be used to determine if someone is allowed to make changes to long-established entries or entries otherwise classed as protected.
There would of course be the potential for moderator wars and as always a really persistant jerk could still corrupt the process, but detecting and correcting abuses might be a bit easier especially if ip addresses are logged to help detect abusers with multiple logins.
Yea, it won't stop the abuses but it would limit the number of people willing to take the effort.
As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has some issues. As a model of how and where distributed intellect fails, it's almost shockingly comprehensive.
When we were first considering making Epic Legends Of The Hierarchs available as a publically manageable satirical metanarrative, we dropped the basic timeline on Wikipedia because I liked the way their software went about things. Of course, a phalanx of pedants leapt into action almost immediately to scour - from the sacred corpus of their data - our revolting fancruft.
That's okay with me. I wasn't aware they thought they were making a real encyclopedia for big people at the time, and if I had, I'd have sought out one of the many other free solutions. I had seen the unbelievably detailed He-Man and Pokémon entries and assumed - like any rational person would - that Pokémaniacs were largely at the rudder of the institution.
I am almost certain that - while they prune their deep mine of trivia - they believe themselves to be engaged in the unfolding of humanity's Greatest Working.
Reponses to criticism of Wikipedia go something like this: the first is usually a paean to that pure democracy which is the project's noble fundament. If I don't like it, why don't I go edit it myself? To which I reply: because I don't have time to babysit the Internet. Hardly anyone does. If they do, it isn't exactly a compliment.
Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions. The fact of the matter is that all sources of information are not of equal value, and I don't know how or when it became impolitic to suggest it. In opposition to the spirit of Wikipedia, I believe there is such a thing as expertise.
The second response is: the collaborative nature of the apparatus means that the right data tends to emerge, ultimately, even if there is turmoil temporarily as dichotomous viewpoints violently intersect. To which I reply: that does not inspire confidence. In fact, it makes the whole effort even more ridiculous. What you've proposed is a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn't exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information.
(Penny Arcade)
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
When we were first considering making Epic Legends Of The Hierarchs available as a publically manageable satirical metanarrative, we dropped the basic timeline on Wikipedia because I liked the way their software went about things. Of course, a phalanx of pedants leapt into action almost immediately to scour - from the sacred corpus of their data - our revolting fancruft.
Holy crap, was that English? I've been out of the U.S. far too long.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
While this might be a significant change if you are a frequent Wikipedia editor, it really isn't anything that we on the outside will notice. This is basically a less restricted form of protection that is currently applied to a heavily vandilized pages, where only administrators are allowed to edit. This adds an intermediate status where you don't have to be an administrator, but your account has to be (only) about 4 days old.
There's a difference between your crap and wiki material:
Wikipedia is _about_ stuff, you probably posted your crap in its entirety.. If your crap was popular someone would have posted something _about_ it.
The PHP page over at wikipedia has been attacked by spambots. Basically, what the spambot does is blank the page, and replace the page with links to some web pages the spammer has set up, usually completely unrelated to PHP. The IPs the spammer use constantly change; we think the spammer in question is controlling a number of zombies across the net since the same IP never spams the page more than once.
When the spammer hits again, this particular for of protection will stop the spammer cold. This does nothing to stop the kind of subtle vandalism where someone falsely states that someone helped assassinate Kennedy, for example. But it does help stem a particular problem some wikipedia pages encounter.
Speaking of Penny Arcade, I never did figure out what exactly Tycho was referring to (e.g. - what article on Wikipedia did they create and subsequently get deleted, or so on).
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Perhaps now we can get on with writting a free encylopedia rather than arguing about who has the ability to edit pages. I'm surpuised it took them so long to get to this point. If parallels are drawn to software development it would be like letting any Tom, Dick or Harry submit a patch to the kernel, and have it included automatically, regardless of whether it even compiled.
While it would be nice to live in a world where people didn't abuse things like wikipedia that just isn't going to happen. The problem is that a very small number of people can do a lot of damage in a short space of time when it's completely open. I wouldn't be shocked if they moved to a completely moderated system before long.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
This is a protection akin to slashdot only allowing mod points to users who have UID's below X% of the total. Loosely speaking of course.
It's pretty much splitting the difference between the full protection (admins only) that already exists and just keeping more power away from anons and newer users. So now, to use a Windows comparison, there are pages that Administrators can change (full protection), Power Users (semi-protected, NEW!), and the overwhelming majority of the rest can be edited by guest users.
Now, they'll have to deal with the trolls who will register craploads of accounts for use in the future against the semi-protected pages. They're trying to make people/media happy on one end, yet ending up feeding the trolls on the other end.
I love wikipedia, even with the exploits available due to the anon & instant user editing ability. Considering the overwhelming amount non-trolled information, it's pretty incredible that it hasn't been abused quite a bit more.
I hope that they don't pursue this much farther. IMHO, anything more will trigger the trolls into being (even) more subtle and keep their bellies much more full.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
wiki.slashdot.org : WikiSlashdot
Add a Wiki plugin to slashode and host it on slashdot. This it will attract the trolls away from Wikipedia and introduce a persistant layer to the debate that takes place on slashdot.
Individual changes could be moderated just like on slashdot and the user could elect to ignore changes with a low score.
Does anyone know who is behind wikipediaclassaction.org?
They have some kind of axe to grind and I'd really like to know what it is. Apparently they have some sort of organizational affiliation.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
It's probably a good idea after the public controversy over "whats his name". On one hand no matter what changes are endorsed their will always be vandalists. I don't like to imagine the kind of people that get their kicks changing wiki articles but they are and always will be "out there". On the other hand it being free and open allows it to grow much faster than traditional methods. I suppose the trick is to find a balance of protections to deter vandalists as much as possible while leaving the foundation of wiki alone.
Allowing only registered members to edit articles is a good policy. As is disallowing or requiring special considerations for editting pages that are common vandlist targets, like Michael Jackson.
Personally I think editting should take longer, even if all the information isn't required. I think if you had to fill out a form before making an edit it'd keep some vandal from swinging by and making abunch of changes across multiple articles. If they had to fill out abunch of crap they wouldn't bother. Those types tend to be lazy and not all of them are willing to fill out an extra page of info just to make a few potty humor changes. People that genuinely want to add an article or edit one probably won't mind filling out an extra page considering they just did some "work" editting the page.
Just my two wooden nickels.
I'll make you a deal. You pray to God for help and I'll stop the moment he shows up.
He's referring to "ELOTHES (Epic Legends Of The Hierarchs)" , which is basically a parodical half-assed-fantasy-realm much like you'd find in Everquest, or a merchandising-based children's cartoon.
http://elothtes.pbwiki.com/
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Here is a wired article that will explain it better than I could possibly do: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,69641-0.html
Wikipedia is _about_ stuff, you probably posted your crap in its entirety.. If your crap was popular someone would have posted something _about_ it.
Great logic. By your rationale, Wikipedia should just turn off the ability to add new articles. After all, if it were popular enough, someone would have posted about it by now.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My reply to that "rant" would go something like this:
As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has some issues.
Very true.
As a model of how and where distributed intellect fails, it's almost shockingly comprehensive.
I quite agree.
I am almost certain that - while they prune their deep mine of trivia - they believe themselves to be engaged in the unfolding of humanity's Greatest Working.
I'm fairly certain that many, even most, do think that. They too are correct.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
Well I mean, from the Penny Arcade rant it looked like he'd created an article on Wikipedia and it got deleted. I was curious to see the argument on Wikipedia (in Articles for Deletion or wherever it got nuked). =)
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Namely, groupthink, conformism, the silencing of heretics, and the promotion of biased agendas.
If there's two things Slash and Wiki have taught us, it's:
- collaborative creation is a success. Most people do good work. It's a positive-sum game.
- collaborative restriction is a failure. Most people wield their power to blindly advance their politics. It's a zero-sum game.
You know, Tycho is a smart guy, but he's completely wrong about Wikipedia. "A model of how and where distributed intellect fails"? Come on. The surprising thing about Wikipedia is not that you can vandalize it. That's rather obvious. The surprising thing is that it works so amazingly well. He must have missed the article in Nature that found Wikipedia to be almost as reliable as Brittanica, despite being maintained by unpaid volunteers and being two centuries or so younger.
And the trivia? There is a lot of trivia in Wikipedia that you wouldn't find in a print encyclopedia, but so what? That's what makes it fun. It would only be a problem if the "serious" topics were missing, which isn't the case.
I just hope they get that page on inteeligeyant-esignday worked out to *everyones* best interests...
Bulk-create your vandal accounts now, and then wait for them to mature into the sort that can attack heavily-vandalized pages.
In practice, on the other hand, there are probably two or three people worldwide who are prepared to put time, effort and forward planning into attacking Wikipedia, as opposed to the thousands of casual vandals who will be dissuaded by the loss of instant gratification. So despite its theoretical shortcomings this will probably work very well in practice.
Xenu loves you!
Your proposed system is on the right path toward a more functional open information system, but your description of it makes it appear far too complex to be popular. Streamline and refine your proposal and you'll have a winner on your hands. Of course, whether or not you'll convince Wikipedia to adopt such a system is a different matter.
This is one reason I love Penny Arcade: despite targeting a demographic that is not, shall we say, generally renowned for their amazing intellects, Tycho has no problem at all crafting text so fine that you could actually cut yourself on it.
Go, Tycho.
Having said that, Wikipedia rules too. If you had to be certified by some Wikipedia authority as an expert on the topic at which you sling your words, it would never have gotten anywhere.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
The related comic was actually pretty funny - Skeletor updates He-Man's Wikipedia entry. However I think the timeline has no place on Wikipedia. It's of no interest to anybody but fans, who could just as easily go straight to the Epic Legends of the Hierarchs page. And hiding the whining behind a slew of fifty-cent words is just ridiculous. Wikipedia isn't the place for every single minor Internet phenomenon to get an encyclopedic entry, and its guidelines make that pretty clear.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
How about making Wikipedia more democratic by introducing a voting system. Let's say that for certain pages, each change gets a short (1 day at most) voting period and needs at least 50% of the votes to be accepted.
This will at least make vandalism much harder, while at the same time there is no barrier for proposing changes, as it should.
My karma ran over your dogma
That's half the damn problem right there. Sadly, he's not the only one to either look down and spit upon people who "think" they're doing something great, or to fail in taking Wikipedia seriously, either out of ignorance (Brian Chase) or... whatever... I don't know.
It's been said, but Wikipedia may not be "humanity's Greatest Working", but it is a "grand experiment."
Except, you know, when it can be cross-referenced with other sources. Some people just don't seem willing to do that kind of work, though.
To be honest, this just sounds like so much sour grapes...
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
I like the gist of this idea, but I think the "certified" reviews is unworkable and probably unfair. I think being able to rate an article's accuracy and quality (and having that rating appear on the article) is a great idea if only to get an idea of the popularity and inherant controversy surrounding the article. And I think you'd have to eliminate annonymous users from the voting process simply because it's too easy to setup a spambot network with thousands of IP addresses to vote for unsavory or innacurate versions of an article.
I think, therefore I doh.
These guys are so ignorant it's not funny anymore.
We are talking about Penny Arcade, a website for gamers. So they say it's a "waste of time" and only losers have time for something like that? Gamers say that? If Wikipedia-contributors have too much time, what is to be said about gamers? At least Wikipedia-contributors are getting themselves educated as a side-effect but what excuse do gamers have?
It's a hobby.
Some people collect stamps, others play computer games, others contribute to Wikipedia.
But it seems that a hobby is only OK when it's a complete waste of time, but if someone profits of it (like Wikipedia or free software) immediately someone starts namecalling.
When we were first considering making Epic Legends Of The Hierarchs available as a publically manageable satirical metanarrative, we dropped the basic timeline on Wikipedia because I liked the way their software went about things. Of course, a phalanx of pedants leapt into action almost immediately to scour - from the sacred corpus of their data - our revolting fancruft.
This is about right:
For the most part these are young people who lack both the experience to comment sensibly on real-life experiences, and the patience or depth to comprehend theoretical abstractions. And, like nearly everyone else in these United States, they think that first-class writing is distinguished not by clarity but by opacity.
So they pick topics that will not get them called for ignorance -- because their editors don't know about them, and nobody else cares about them: comic books, movies, TV shows, celebrity bloggers, etc. On such bare themes the young Turks hang words, metaphors, subordinate clauses and apothegms in (their articles suggest) whatever order they happen to come to minds only hazily acquainted with the rules and traditions of English composition.
Like all amateur artisans, they lay their materials on thick. When they make a mistake or intuit how lost they are, they just add more. Eventually the accretion is so monstrous that it seemes singular: maybe, the budding authors muse, this is what they mean by style.
It seems it was this on his "elemenstors" fantasy spoof. He posted a joke article and it got deleted. His mistake, and really not any basis for him to complain.
Agreed, you can't let every half-wit thesauruspants get 60 pages on his gerbil collection just because he thinks that they're historically notable.
I've been skeptical of wikis in general and wikipedia in particular since wikis first appeared. A previous company I worked at had a wiki; the QA manager argued that anyone smart enough to edit one wouldn't be malicious (at the time, wikis were new enough that only IT geeks had heard of them). I argued that it was an awful idea, that intellect and morality are orthogonal to one another, and that No Good Could Come of This. Three months and one particularly vicious employee later, I was proved correct.
After many years, I've mellowed a bit. With good user controls and tracking (ie no anonymous edits, everything public and in the open), and if it's kept within a community (like a business, major school or community group) then normal social norms will make a wiki highly productive and useful. We're even implementing one at my new job.
But the OP, for all his linguistic florishes, is correct about another thing: this is why we use a representative democracy. The founding fathers avoided ballot initiatives, built swathes of government that were proudly NOT directly elected, and otherwise tried to put a brake on the perils of mob rule.
Of course, the advent of TV pretty much killed all that. As CS Lewis points out, people aren't clear when they talk about democratic behavior whether they mean the kind of behavior that democracies encourage, or the kind of behavior that keeps a democracy going. The two aren't the same.
In both ancient Greece (whose democracy didn't last as long as ours has) things became disorganized and they fell to conquest. In Rome, they were subjected to endless slave revolts, until finally a popular military coup put a series of dictators in power. It turned out that the people wanted their vote, but not as much as they wanted generous social services and lots of bloody entertainment.
I like Wikipedia. I'm an occassional contributor. If you accept its limitations, then it's a great resource. But if it also teaches you a little about the perils of democracy, then so much the better.
Then why are you typing this in Slashdot? Wikipedia allows users to comment how it should work, go there and copy+paste what you said here.
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
This happens alot with writing by committees, and isn't unique to Wikipedia. It just gets worse as it gets older. Wikipedia has collected more facts over time, but it reads worse.
There's no cure for this except getting experts and real editors with good language skills, and they're hard to find as anyone who's tried to staff a tech docs team knows. But this runs counter to the "anyone can do it" philosophy.
So no amount of tweaking the processes helps - you simply need skillful people. The ex-Britannica guy (McHenry?) had a good line, which is that Wikipedia can get better, or Wikipedia can keep the utopians - but it can't do both.
In other words, he's complaining because he tried to use the page as a way of allowing people to collaboratively write a story, or did he post a genuine article he thought would be interesting to some? If it's the latter, he has a genuine complaint; if it's the former, then he's guilty of being a victim of his own ignorance, gilded with fancy words. Eloquent use of language still doesn't make you right.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
It's been said, but Wikipedia may not be "humanity's Greatest Working", but it is a "grand experiment."
Actually, it's a "failed experiment".
Except, you know, when it can be cross-referenced with other sources.
The next logical step being to not waste any time on Wikipedia and just go to some reliable sources.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
It's a hobby.
Yup. That pretty much sums up why most people ("Gasp! You mean there are people outside of slashdot that don't follow our group-think?") don't take wikipedia seriously.
Which is pretty well what WP is guilty of: guilding a tower of ignorance with fancy words like "encyclopaedia", for example.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
"the first is usually a paean to that pure democracy which is the project's noble fundament."
My, sounds like someone doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.
Tycho seems to have a grudge left over from the whole Epic Legends Of The Hierarchs episode. I'm sorry Tycho, but He-man and Pokemon are a part of popular culture, and therefore belong in Wikipedia. Legends of the Hierarchs does not.
"I am almost certain that - while they prune their deep mine of trivia - they believe themselves to be engaged in the unfolding of humanity's Greatest Working. "
Well, not quite that, but we do feel that providing a Free (as in speech) encyclopedia to the world is a Good Thing (tm). We're pretty proud of what we've accomplished so far. Just as you should be for organising your Child's Play Charity.
"If I don't like it, why don't I go edit it myself? To which I reply: because I don't have time to babysit the Internet. Hardly anyone does. If they do, it isn't exactly a compliment. "
See: Altruism.
"The second response is: the collaborative nature of the apparatus means that the right data tends to emerge, ultimately, even if there is turmoil temporarily as dichotomous viewpoints violently intersect. To which I reply: that does not inspire confidence. In fact, it makes the whole effort even more ridiculous. What you've proposed is a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn't exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information."
Is someone pointing a gun to your head forcing you to use Wikipedia? Don't use it if you don't want to. But please quit bashing for no apparent reason.
As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has some issues. As a model of how and where distributed intellect fails, it's almost shockingly comprehensive.
Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions.
If I don't like it, why don't I go edit it myself? To which I reply: because I don't have time to babysit the Internet.
I think parent should be read several times by those who are so quick to throw around the Wikipedia-basher label.
Google could help you find sources, sure, but what if you just want a quick overview of the topic? Then, if you're interested in learning more, dive into the more detailed sources...
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Disclaimer: I'm not one of the grandiose gobby half-wits that make their views known to everyone on the Wikipedia mailing list (most of the posters there, in other words). I find most admins unbearable assholes... but then their job is rather unbearable in many cases.
I edit Wikipedia. You know why? It's because I like doing it. I don't have any grand dreams of creating the worlds' greatest repository of information. Of one day seeing Britannica fall at the feet of Wikipedia begging forgiveness for its lack of respect. I just do my bit on the articles I like. I watch all the edits on about 200 articles... I check them out, verify them, correct them if necessary and then do a few fix ups on pages that I've looked up.
I stopped doing any work on cleaning up shitty unsuitable articles -- there are to many admins who think *anything* should be in wikipedia. Trying to get of articles is like pulling teeth. You find yourself fighting against the godawful Wikipedia process -- which is a grand battle between Deletionists and Inclusionists (roughly speaking: people who think crap should be deleted, and people who think anything is suitable, no matter how trivial or obscure). Putting yourself in the middle of this process is mind-numbingly tedious and full of admins who think they can short-circuit "the process" (Deletionist: either deleting articles off-handedly, Inclusionist: bringing them back when they've been deleted legitimately) that every other poor miserable fucker has to trudge through to get anything done.
I gave it up. Now I just edit the articles in which I'm interested. I don't waste my time cleaning up shitty articles because it's not appreciated. I'm not alone in this view.
All the sins of democracy are much more prevalent in dictatorships. Personally, I would like to see Wikipedia introduce some sort of versioning system, that allowed for minority views to be heard. It would solve their problems of restriction to a greater extent than imposing these top down ruling upon the community, which will lead to resentment and a feeling of disempowerment for the workaday contributors. And I don't think there is anything wrong with being able to rate your peers, and being able to peruse the consensus of the community with the help of social software. In fact, I would argue it is absolutely essential in building any sort of virtual community online. I never understand how people such as yourself command such a following with your "tyranny of the majority" rants. Please, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Il Duce, the list goes on and on.
Reading some of the responses in the thread, I have to say that a number of people missed the point of what Tycho was saying. Here's the cliffnotes version:
1. It wasn't obvious that Wikipedia was a serious enterprise when he came upon it. (due to content)
2. The Wikipeidans see themselves as being involved in " the unfolding of humanity's Greatest Working." This is unlikely to be the case.
3. 'You can fix it yourself' is an inadaquate solution because "Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions."
4. The fluid nature of the Wikipedia undermines its usefulness as a reference.
that is all.
To be honest, this just sounds like so much sour grapes...
+100000000 Insightful
Vandals have what is known as sock-puppets, multiple accounts in order to vote several times. Obvious ones (such as those who voted in their first few edits) are caught, but there are much more sneaky ones. There was one such user who made over 12,000 edits before being banned as a sock puppet of another banned user, but most of the time, editing for a few weeks with another account will make a convincing sock puppet.
Do you play with your Willy?
Just a muse, but how about a peer to peer based version of wikipedia, independent from Wales and company. An app that incorporates a rating system and such.
Frankly the whole discussion is pointless, because I don't think Wikipedia knows what it is, and until it has some firm direction and some logical guidance all it is, is a mob scene. A great deal of the data there is valid (I reference it a lot, after carefully reading the articles), but a system that allows anyone to edit it makes it ripe for abuse. Imagine if the Founding Fathers of the USA made the Constitution re-writable on-the-fly like Wikipedia: chaos! But they knew that the Constitution could not remain static if it was to keep up with change, so they wrote in a mechanism to allow for changes, but measured changes. This same sort of system needs to be applied to Wikipedia, a kind of group peer-review, to lower the GIGO factor.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Yep, and pretty well-written too.
Oh, if you do something as a hobby, your work is not to be taken seriously? Try to explain that to genealogists, free software authors, and anyone else who puts pride into their hobbies.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Voting works where opinions reign, but wikipedia is supposed to be a factual resource. Voting on factual information seems kind of risky, especially if the voting is open to anyone (who may or may not have the specialized knowledge required to make an informed choice).
Actually, it's a "failed experiment".
Really? Would you be so kind as to identify exactly who it was who proved that it has failed, and when? Because they clearly forgot to tell anyone apart from you.
Summing up recent articles that made the news, we have:
Evidence that Wikipedia has flaws: first, "the articles on Jane Fonda and Bill Gates aren't very good"; second, "one single vandal inserted a single libelious statement into an article about someone obscure that nobody actually cares about, and the subject overreacted".
Evidence that Wikipedia is actually doing pretty damn well: the Nature study.
Evidence that Wikipedia is a failure: none.
As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has some issues. As a model of how and where distributed intellect fails, it's almost shockingly comprehensive.
The first statement is true. The second is meaningless; it uses big words, but ultimately doesn't use them to say anything.
Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions.
This is simply untrue. Any persistent idiot who tries to obliterate genuine contributions will inevitably fall foul of some of the disciplinary policies that are enforced quite rigorously. For example, if someone undoes your changes more than three times in one day, they will receive a temporary ban; if they persist, or try to evade the ban, they may be permanently blocked. If you feel your contributions are defensible, it's trivial to ask others to support you, or to take the dispute to any number of dispute resolution systems with binding outcomes.
If I don't like it, why don't I go edit it myself? To which I reply: because I don't have time to babysit the Internet.
And? You don't have to babysit anything. You make your changes, and if they're worth having then there's a good chance that other people, who do have the free time (or choose to give up some other hobby, to make the time), will babysit them for you.
Tycho's just pissed off because his "contributions" (read: a silly hoax he was trying to spread) were obliterated without any need for persistence or idiots. The speed and efficiency with which ELoTH:TES was expunged from Wikipedia is a perfect demonstration of one of the wiki's advantages - by and large, it does manage to heal itself from vandalism. The only way Wikipedia could have failed would be if Tycho's "contribution" had not been identified as a hoax and swiftly deleted...
The study that showed that in WP's strongest field (the sciences), it still had 30% more mistakes than a real encyclopaedia and that some of these were both major and basic? That's an endorsement alright!
WP is a bad idea done well. The code is fantastic, the content is worthless. Editing WP articles is a waste of time since you have to come back every day, preferably more than once per day, to fix errors that you already dealt with as well as new ones. That is a plain stupid system and the result is the pile of junk that we see today masquerading as a reference work.
They need to dump the "anyone edits" and have a small team of editors who have some knowledge in their fields and review submissions in those fields. The also desperately need sub-editors who can polish the language to make whatever useful information that is submitted clear.
In other words, if they want to be treated as a real encyclopaedia then they need to act like one.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Great logic. By your rationale, Wikipedia should just turn off the ability to add new articles. After all, if it were popular enough, someone would have posted about it by now.
Way to miss the point. Since your reading comprehension skills appear to be lacking, let me explain in simpler language: the idea is that you shouldn't post about stuff you created yourself, because if it has any actual importance or popularity, other people who didn't create it themselves will want to post about it.
In other words, you shouldn't post vanity articles about yourself, or your band, or your fantasy universe, because if they matter, other people will write them.
It's not rocket science.
This is ineffective. I could easily create multiple accounts if I wanted to burn the George W Bush article at different points later in time. Clearly this policy violates the wiki-philosophy of openness and community. Here's a better idea. Each edit has a timer. During the time between the edit is submitted and it is posted it waits on a link at the bottom of the screen. The edit has two counters: Good/Flamebait. If there are more flamebait counters than good the edit doesn't get posted. Its that easy. Good edits make the cut (on low traffic entries just by default), new users with valid edits get through, and it makes catching non-factual edits before they damage the quality and reputation of wiki super easy. Mix this with banning of accounts that continually post false information (or support it), and you have a more community-controlled system.
He posted an article based on describing events in a fictional fantasy realm which was created as a parody, true. But he felt this wasn't totally out of place given the vast array of articles on say, the characteristics of individual Pokémon that are present in Wikipedia. His confusion arose from the fact that wikipedians consider themselves a serious encylopedia (thus excising his article with great speed) while allowing a multitude of detailed articles on similar fictional characters.
No it's a paragraph of pretentious drivel using lots of big words, real and imaginary, in a failed attempt to look intellectual. Or in shorter terms what the bloody hell is he on about?
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
The next logical step being to not waste any time on Wikipedia and just go to some reliable sources.
No. "The alternative to reading about stuff in Wikipedia is not going to the library and researching the topic, or looking it up in a traditional ncyclopedia. Alternative a) is looking it up using freaking Google where results can be anything from better to way worse than on WP. The more likely alternative b) is not looking it up at all and staying ignorant on a topic." That's from a mail I wrote in reply to PA's rant.
If I'm looking for information where accuracy is vitally important, yes, I'll probably use another independent, "authoritative" source of information. But in the vast, vast majority of cases, I'm just curious about something, and accuracy isn't vital - although it's nice to have. Maybe you're different, but I'm curious all the time. But I'm also lazy. Wikipedia lets me learn or at least read huge amounts of information with the least amount of work involved in getting it. I think I'm hitting Wikipedia about a dozen times a day on average on topics I wouldn't have considered looking at just because it's so damn simple and effortless.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
The second is quite meaningful and, I might add, insightful. WikiPedia is an example of how distributed intellect works and how it can fail.
That you apparently disagree with the statement does not mean it is meaningless, it just means you disagree with it. I suspect that if the statement had been worded as "WikiPedia is an example of how distributed intellect works and how it can succeed" you would not have an objection to it.
And? You don't have to babysit anything. You make your changes, and if they're worth having then there's a good chance that other people, who do have the free time (or choose to give up some other hobby, to make the time), will babysit them for you.
If others would babysit them for me, I wouldn't have had to babysit them in the first place.
As I've said before, I think WikiPedia is a great concept. It still has, however, the rough edges of all nascent developments, rough edges like real accountability (not PR accountability) of its authors and reponsibility to its readers.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Wikipedia already tracks past revisions of an article. Each article has a revision history. What you get when use wikipedia is the latest version of the document. The most simplistic and obvious fix for vandalism is this: Whenever someone submits a revision to a document, that revision has to remain the latest version (with no more edits by that person or anyone else) for 24 hours before it becomes the version which is shown to visitors as the main version. If another edit happens before the 24 hours is up, the clock is reset and it's another 24 hours before that version can become the main one (and the one currently showing still hasn't changed). What this means is that "edit wars" flip-flopping content back and forth in periods of hours will be invisible to the wiki-browsing public (Whereas editors/contributors always have the option to view the "raw" most-recent version of course).
We already have plenty of "good guys" at wikipedia who go watch the list of recently-edited documents for vandalism or inappropriateness and correct it - the problem is just that they cannot get to them all in time. This gives them a 24-hour window to catch the problem and fight it back. Only when the doc "settles down" for 24+ hours will an updated revision be available to the world. And it requires no user ratings or moderation system beyond what has already been in place, or special priveleges, or anything of the sort.
THe only real problem with this is news / current events. But there's already a seperate wikinews for that kind of thing, and you could always categorically handle "current events" docs differently. This is a system for protection encyclopedic articles.
11*43+456^2
Ummm, he wasn't saying writing to Wikipedia was a waste of time, but that being forced to make edits is. That is to say, while following your hobby is a very productive usage of your time, assuming that others would share the same interest as you in tracking random edits isn't.
More than mere navel gazing.
What the fuck are you on, idiot? If you're the leading expert in a field, and you're writing about new research that you and only you have performed, who the fuck else do you think could write about that? Your false humility bullshit is moronic and worse, detrimental to the quality of wikipedia. I suggest you practice your reading comprehension skills yourself and take this advice: Kill yourself. That is all. Dismissed.
Just blank it, slap on the cover of January 2006's Vanity Fair and you'll distract all the Wikipedians (or at least half of them) as you spam it with your views of how life began. ;)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Because we all know every article on wikipedia is filled with historically significant information, relevant to the majority of people, right?
Seems like everyone missed the point of his comment: "I wasn't aware they thought they were making a real encyclopedia for big people at the time..." He was commenting on his personal ELoTH:TES wiki that his own users have been editing. This was not a slam on the official wikipedia.
This is somewhat ironic, considering IT COMES FROM ANOTHER BLOGGING IDIOT.
He uses the exact same style as Tycho - and honestly this fear of the english language is problematic. Tycho isn't using "big words" in an "attempt to make himself sound smart" he is using exactly the words he needs to make his sentences as clear as possible. Instead of using ten smaller words to dance around the point he's trying to make, he instead takes a polysyllabic approach that directly addresses the problem. And yet whenever anyone reads something that exceeds the grade eight reading level, they start whining and complaining that they have to think in order to understand what's going on.
You have taken a single sentence out of context. Good job.
If you bother to include the whole relevant paragraph, Tycho says that correct information does eventually triumph over bullshit on collaboratve projects like Wikipedia, but that it's idiotic to fight with the people posting bullshit rather than just exclude them from directly editing articles.
Last night a jackass friend of mine changed the last sentence in the Michael Jackson article's child molestion section to read "Michael Jackson never molested any children. He made love to them." And wham, it was live on the internet for at least an hour. Doesn't that seem ridiculous? Shouldn't peers at least have to evaluate the edit first, rather than spending time to correct this stupid shit?
-----
jonathan barket
So they say it's a "waste of time" and only losers have time for something like that?
This was not a comment about anyone who contributes to Wikipedia. It was a response to a particular argument that people make in defense of Wikipedia, that if a person is upset by an entry, they can change it themselves.
His point is that the "if you don't like it, change it" argument doesn't take into account the fact that Wikipedia exists now. There is no "end goal" for Wikipedia, because it is a resource at this very moment. So if an entry is changed for the worse, that entry exists as part of the whole of Wikipedia until it is fixed. (And you can't expect people to constantly monitor all the entries they care about, nor should you expect people to have to spend their time erasing vandalism or stupidity or whatever, so it may potentially exist for a while.)
What people who argue this don't realize is that fixing an entry does not change the fact that it was wrong for some period of time. If your car gets a flat tire, fixing it does not change the fact that it was flat. You may have depended upon the tire being good in order to get to an important meeting, which you did not make. Fixing the tire does not magically get you to the meeting on time.
Similarly, fixing a Wikipedia entry does not magically make the people who viewed the entry while it was bad suddenly view the fixed version. Someone may have used faulty information, or become biased against someone or some product, or whatever. (And yes, there are arguments that respond to these problems, like the "don't trust anything" argument; but this argument, that if an entry is wrong you can just fix it, does not.)
The point is, Wikipedia is not simply its current incarnation, but also all of its past incarnations.
...he's right. As an active Wikipedia admin (German wikipedia, not English, though), I expect that this feature will allow us to use the "full" protection less often, especially for article relevant to current events. Thus, "normal" contributors could work on updating those article without having to revert lots of dumb vandalism. Right now, such articles get "full" protection, so only admins would be able to edit it. That's quite annoying.
I belive that together with the ability to mark "good" versions (which has been discussed a lot, but is still vaporware, AFAIK), the semi protection feature will help to make wikipedia more reliable, while remaining open and free. That's what everybody wants, no?
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
This is not a major policy change. It is not what is being reported here or elsewhere. It is one of many very minor changes to the software to allow better management of the site by the community. It is my opinion that this particular status is not likely to be used very much at all because the other changes to the software will be more wiki-like and more powerful.
:-)
It is a very unfortunate thing that Wikipedia has gotten so popular that random internal bits of discussion in the community about all kinds of different things are so badly reported as 'news' when they are not. I advise the world to relax a notch or two.
--Jimbo Wales
Wikia
Tycho's writing style is a bit thesaurus-heavy. He gives the impression that he's going about things backwards: Rather than trying to say something, and then finding the appropriate words to say it, instead he has words he wants to use, and finds ways to work them in. He's much better at it than most would-be internet intellectuals, but it still falls flat more often than not.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Important Note from Jimbo to news media: I see that some news media have picked this story up as if it is important. Please please please don't do that. This is one of many changes to the software which are coming soon, including the ability to put pages into a 'validated' state (better name should be determined) and so on. Treating this as a major policy change is therefore a huge huge error being made by people who have no understanding of how Wikipedia works.--Jimbo Wales 16:00, 17 December 2005 (UTC) [1]
Is this some form of complicated reverse psychology, or does Wales really believe that he can tell the media what they can and cannot cover as news?
" Didn't read TFA but that never stops me. I think..."
Obligatory RTFA.
Read the article, don't jump on here calling other people's quite valid interpretations down because "you think" you know better 'just because.'
Here, you ass-hats get away with it, cuz slashdot is all about anyone's opinion; but even then, I always try to mod people like you down.
Pull yer head out yer ass, get some facts, then make a contribution that's actually worthwhile to read--just like this new system on the Wikipedia is Hoping to encourage.
A couple fans told me that my last journal entry was mint; give it a shot. Hope you like.
A little difficult when you may not even be aware of what sources are available, or even reliable, don't you think?
And your proposal is that we use an unreliable source to find a list of alternative reliable sources?
Google could help you find sources, sure, but what if you just want a quick overview of the topic? Then, if you're interested in learning more, dive into the more detailed sources...
If I want a quick overview, I can find better information elsewhere online than on Wikipedia.
If you were critizising "forced edits" you were attacking a strawman, because even if Wikipedia wanted to "force edits", they couldn't force anybody to do anything.
I have to say the GP post is exactly correct. Everybody fucking knows there's not many important fields with only one important opinion, and Wikipedia's policies specifically address the very few cases. Some minor Internet phenom isn't important one-person research anyway, so you're comparing apples and oranges.
And you didn't even take one single sentence from my posting, even better!
My posting was primarily about the namecalling - of course I included only the relevant passage.
Actually I had exactly your opinion a few years ago, that it just can't work. However in day-to-day life Wikipedia has been very useful and also accurate for me.
So for me, any "gamer" is not in the position to claim any moral high ground especially when it comes to the topic of "wasting time".
Of course vandalism is a problem and this measure is a way to address it.
While I do think that the breadth of Pokemon information on Wikipedia is a bit silly, it still refers to fictional characters that are present in actual works of fiction that actually exist. ELOTH:TES, on the other hand, isn't even a real work of fiction. Its content is made up by the PA guys and their fans as they go. It's definitely not something for Wikipedia.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
Oh, great, now vandals have a motivation to vandalize even MORE pages. Before, they could get the same pages over and over again, and it wasn't THAT bad if you avoided them. But now, they'll be moving around to get all the pages that aren't protected, meaning widespread goatse links and the like. Think of it like a bully in grade school. Before, it was so easy to vandalize, I imagine most vandals got bored with it. Now, there's something of a challenge. This might promote vandalism, not stem it.
Those who anthropomorphize science and/or nature already believe in an intelligent designer.
From the page linked in the summary:
Important Note from Jimbo to news media: I see that some news media have picked this story up as if it is important. Please please please don't do that. This is one of many changes to the software which are coming soon, including the ability to put pages into a 'validated' state (better name should be determined) and so on. Treating this as a major policy change is therefore a huge huge error being made by people who have no understanding of how Wikipedia works.--Jimbo Wales 16:00, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
He couldn't possibly be referring to Slashdot editors, now could he? They? Not understand how something works? Inconceivable!
The problem is that the hobbyists can be ignorant enough that they force those that are professionals in the field to either correct the mistakes or live with them. They have much more important things to do, but are forced to correct outright lies about their life's work for a website that doesn't deserve their work (this includes having others correct it for them.)
Of course, people will say the above statement is what makes Wikipedia work. However, this is a bad interpretation. Those that have articles devoted to their work do not judge Wikipedia well when they learn that their work is disputed. This matters in the long scheme of things, because if they don't have faith in the articles, they will dismiss Wikipedia as dangerously inaccurate.
And they will be right.
A group of medical practitioners are establishing the ganfyd (it is full of notes from/for your doctor(s)) medical reference wiki (URL:http://www.ganfyd.org).
We aimed from the start at an effect distinct from those of The Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) and the medical encyclopedia at URL:http://www.wikimd.org/ in two ways:-
Other small differences include scope - ours is of and for doctors of the UK, Australia and Canada reflecting the membership of the forum in which the project was sparked (URL:http://www.doctors.netuk/ (closed forum)) and the licence required to enforce the restriction of qualification - I wrote a modification of one of the stock Creative Commons licences for this URL:http:/osborne.defoam.net/~akm/ - rather than the GFDL.
We hope, and expect, that these design differences will produce the effect desired, although we will undoubtedly modify them as time and events indicate.
The real problem with the wikipedia isn't the vandals.
It's how the system creates and nurtures vandals.
The capricious, frustration-based, and heavy-handed behavior of the admins results in a game that vandals enjoy playing, over and over again.
People who might have been brought calmly into the business of improving the encyclopedia are goaded instead into becoming pests.
The problem isn't mechanical, it's social. Admins need to be trained that humility and acceptance are more powerful motivators than insults, imperiousness and backhanded punishments.
Executive summary: The Wikipedia hive-mind rejected his article and he's bitter about it.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Quoted from the linked page:
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
[That, and it's pretty late out here, so my lexical skills are at an all time low. :-)]
More than mere navel gazing.
Compare the budgets available to WP vs the Britannica and you'll see that WP has done pretty well considering the resources they have to work with.
The code is fantastic, the content is worthless
I've found the content to be useful on a number of occasions, as have many other people. If WP doesn't work for you, fine -- ask for your money back and use something else.
They need to dump the "anyone edits" and have a small team of editors who have some knowledge in their fields and review submissions in those fields.
Interesting -- that was, in fact, the original way the project worked, back when it was called Nupedia. The Nupedia project never made it to 100 articles before folding due to lack of interest. Hence the move to the more inclusive and successful Wikipedia format.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
== NOTICE OF VALIDATION ==
I, your supreme wiki admin, hereby VALIDATE this page and dutifully declare no further modications will be permitted.
It is so ordered,
December 17, 2005
blatent vandalism is generally quickly reverted and obvious to anyone who sees it in the meantime.
far nastier can be subtule stuff like changing figures arround etc.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Wikipedia has collected more facts over time, but it reads worse.
I disagree.
The *average quality of new content* may be lower.
However, the quality of any given *existing* content rarely drops (other than through vandalism). The quality of existing content nearly monotonically rises.
All you're saying is that content that previously *wasn't covered at all* is not yet up to the level that mature articles have (and, possibly, articles once started with with the original group of Wikipedians).
So if your test for the quality of Wikipedia is to choose a random article and examine how well the article reads -- yes, you may measure a drop in quality over time. However, the alternative would be for those masses of added articles to not exist at *all*. If you look at just existing articles and examine whether they are getting better or worse, I would say that they are definitely improving.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
The study that showed that in WP's strongest field (the sciences), it still had 30% more mistakes than a real encyclopaedia and that some of these were both major and basic? That's an endorsement alright!
It had the same number of major mistakes as the EB. It has more minor mistakes, though. Also, I'd say that the Wikipedia's strongest area is technology and internet culture, followed by the sciences.
They need to dump the "anyone edits" and have a small team of editors who have some knowledge in their fields and review submissions in those fields. The also desperately need sub-editors who can polish the language to make whatever useful information that is submitted clear.
In other words, if they want to be treated as a real encyclopaedia then they need to act like one.
I imagine you're just another one of the armchair quarterbacks that far prefers grousing and belittling others to actually making a difference. But on the slim chance that I'm wrong, I'll point out that you can make this happen yourself. You can copy both the software and the content and start your own version at any time. Restricted editing roles would take maybe a week to add.
But is this enough? It's not at all difficult to make a bunch of Wikipedia accounts and store them for use in later vandalism.
Yes, but that sort of purposeful, constructive activity is generally beyond most vandals. I just can't see people saying, "Hey, let me create an account so a month from now I can put the word 'poo' at the beginning of this random article."
And your proposal is that we use an unreliable source to find a list of alternative reliable sources?
No, we use a source which I know from experience is usually reliable, to find a list of sources which themselves may or may not be reliable.
If I go direct to other sources, we don't necessarily know that they are reliable anyway.
If I want a quick overview, I can find better information elsewhere online than on Wikipedia.
Examples?
the real answer would be to fully ignore this bullshit.
It's not even just this furor -- this is just the present set of claims about why WP doesn't work.
I use Wikipedia many times a day. I consider it as important as Google. I see tons of posts on Slashdot from people bitterly criticizing Wikipedia. All I can say is, it works. Surprisingly so, to me, but it does really work. Maybe at some point in the future it will stop, but right now, it's great.
I remember a period of time when people like kelkoo were managing to spam the bajeezus out of Google. There were many people on Slashdot saying that Google had lost its value, how everyone should switch to an alternate search engine, etc. Uh, huh. If that's the case, people will figure it out themselves -- you don't need to keep hollering at them.
I'm sure that Wikipedia will evolve over time, and maybe someone will fork it with some different design ideas, and that fork will win out. But the people claiming that WP is not useful are just *wrong*. You can always find some article on WP that is incorrect, but you'd have to ignore the vast quantities of useful, well-written information. I've read more history in the past year on WP than I ever thought I'd read in a lifetime -- unlike most of the history classes I'd taken in the past, WP is facinating and allows one to easily dig for more information.
I personally think that it's because so much computer security theory is based around the idea of preventing any exploits or attacks at all, instead of around survivability, and that really bugs people who normally work on computer security. It drove me nuts -- I've spent time doing P2P design, and at first all I could think about was what appeared to me to be gaping holes in Wikipedia's functioning. Anyone can vandalize almost *anything* on Wikipedia! There are so many subtle ways to attack it! There's so much of the fallible human element involved! And yet...Wikipedia works. Clearly, my model of the way such a system needed to work in order to be useful was wrong -- Wikipedia wasn't what was wrong. I had undervalued survivability, because in the past, systems that I'd looked at that had allowed attacks had simply *failed*. Wikipedia doesn't.
The environment is always changing, and I'm sure that Wikipedia will evolve with it, and forks of Wikipedia will probably explore different ideas. Wikipedia is a potential source of more social and informational research than I can even begin to imagine. The point is, though, Wikipedia simply is not the dead-end road that it seemed to be when I first glanced at it -- and I think that many other people are making the same error that I was upon first seeing it.
My argument here isn't going to help or hurt WP. If something is genuinely useful, people will flock to it in the long term, and if it becomes not useful, people will leave. However, I think that the reasons that people criticize WP so heavily are interesting and worthy of discussion.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
The study that showed that in WP's strongest field (the sciences), it still had 30% more mistakes than a real encyclopaedia and that some of these were both major and basic? That's an endorsement alright!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4530930.stm
Both had 4 "serious errors". Wikipedia had 162 "minor errors", compared to Britannica which had 123.
If your point is that Britannica is better than Wikipedia, then yes, great, this report supports you.
But I don't think anyone's disputing that. What's being disputed are the claims that Wikipedia is entirely useless "because anyone can edit it". This article refutes that claim. An increase of 30% in minor errors is a significant difference, but it is nowhere near enough for us to go from "trusted source" to "useless" - especially when both have the same number of serious errors.
Another good thing about Wikipedia is that it is open about the fact that anyone can edit it, and so people realise they have to be careful about accepting things as fact. Britannica doesn't do this - people assume everything can be trusted, when in fact, that is not the case.
The question I'm asking is why Britannica still has so many errors, when people are paying good money for it...
They need to dump the "anyone edits" and have a small team of editors who have some knowledge in their fields and review submissions in those fields. The also desperately need sub-editors who can polish the language to make whatever useful information that is submitted clear.
In which case, it's YetAnotherEncyclopedia done like all the others, so why bother?
That sentence was just fine. I enjoy their entries quite a bit. However, I disagree with what he has to say about Wikipedia.
Help I'm a rock.
Oh, if you do something as a hobby, your work is not to be taken seriously? Try to explain that to genealogists, free software authors, and anyone else who puts pride into their hobbies.
Pride != Expertise
Seriously, Penny Arcade brought up a very valid point. The entire concept of wikipedia is severely flawed. A source of empirical knowledge needs to be both reliable and accountable. Wikipedia is neither. The entire premise of the project prevents that.
As you know, when it came to major errors, both encyclopedias had the same number, four. As to minor errors, Wikipedia had four per article and EB had three. EB has had over 230 years to fix these mistakes by now. Wikipedia is not yet 5 years old.
That's an endorsement alright!
The main endorsement, also reported in the study, is that 12% of Nature authors consult Wikipedia on a weekly basis. These are all academicians, so they typically have free web access to the Encyclopedia Britannica through their library's subscription. Why would they even bother with Wikipedia I wonder?
The GP poster (rude though he was) wasn't saying important, he was saying leading. You want the most qualified person possible doing the write-up on these things, so if it's a new field of research, there could very well be one person more qualified to write about things that only they have done so far. They shouldn't be excluded from contributing their knowledge just because they're the best at what they do.
I hope you're being ironic.
how to invest, a novice's guide
how about having all changes hidden (viewable from wikipedia.com/latest or whatever), allowing the mod's to merge the changes with the visible version of the article (or have them merge after a week if theyre not deleted by a mod, or something)
They have a sizeable wiki of their own they are using to put this stuff together, partly as an exercise in simply making stuff up, and partly to put together ideas to be used in future work. If the PA guys actually, say, produce a series of comics on this body of work, does it stop being "made up" fiction and become "real", thus making this article valid? These rules are rather arbitrary, doens't it seem?
I tried being a gynecologist for a hobby some time, but it was rather taken over-seriously.
Oh, you said gene... nevermind.
None of the successful collaborative OSS projects have let anyone and everyone submit code to them
;-)
Indeed! None of them do that
Exactly what I was looking for, thanks. =)
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Seems to me that this could be resolved by restricting modification of semi-protected pages to users with a certain number of edits rather than time since registration. This would force dummy account holders to post some content before they can get to those pages, increasing the likelihood of having their trollish behaviour discovered.
the extra step of requiring an account to be created (thus allowing spam accounts to be banned) would make automated spam far more difficult (especially if combined with a good captcha).
"good captcha"? Isn't that a contradiction, as Wikipedia:Captcha#Accessibility points out?
Require voice-verified[1] accounts before allowing live edit privileges.
I can think of a few people who would strongly object to that.
Disallow Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, GMail, and other known free email providers from email verification. You want to edit at Wikipedia? You need a real email address.
What if somebody has Internet access from Yahoo! (an SBC reseller) or MSN (msn.com is often lumped with hotmail.com)? Would you really want to make somebody pay $30 per year for a second address from, say, Spamcop.net just for the privilege of editing Wikipedia? What about somebody whose only Internet access is at a public library, given that most public libraries do not provide e-mail accounts for their patrons?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I found the sentence structure perfectly (cromulent?) serviceable. I understood what he meant and did so without even working hard at it.
And "using big words" is not at all what I meant. Anyway, it only has four (of what I would consider to be) "big words" -- "metanarrative", "phalanx", "pedant", and "corpus". And those last three are iffy; you really should know them. The first, of course, you should be able to figure out without looking it up. "Fancruft" is the word Wikipedia applied to their work, and so was used sarcastically/resentfully (even though it's not hard to figure out either, given knowledge of the hacker jargon term "cruft").
Last I checked, he wasn't writing for any foreign audience, and so cannot be reasonably faulted for misunderstandings on their part.
The man likes his subclauses, and his forceful turns of phrase. Get off his back. If he dumbs down his writing because of lazy readership, it would be a pitiable transgression against the variety of human expression, and the loss of a distinctive voice.
In short, stop wishing him into a USA Today copywriter, already.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Yes, it is interesting how many times people have accused Tycho of "using big words" to "sound smart" within this discussion. What are the "big words" that Tycho used? Second, how precisely are they indicative of pretention? Does it escape the realm of possibility that this is in fact how Tycho always writes?
1. Read text written apparently in a manner more "smart" than you're accustomed to.
2. Become outraged by a difference of opinion about a Slashdot darling.
3. Ascribe any criticism in the aforementioned text to "sour grapes."
4. Write post on Slashdot that discredits the author by suggesting the manner in which they have written the text suggests an attempt to appear more "smart" than the author really is.
5. ?
6. Wikipedia profits
Why don't you grow a pair of balls and send that to Tycho in an e-mail rather than posting it psuedo-anonymously on Slashdot where it will never be read? You know, unless you think posting a one-sided conversation in shitloads of comments on an article on Slashdot meets that requirement.
Well, I would have posted it on penny arcade, but they don't allow comments. Emailing him? No thanks, I'd rather discourse in public.
Didn't know the policy was voted on by the community. However, I really feel like there should be authorship attribution - and from what I understood from the FAQ when I read it was that this was a policy set by Wales and company and that it was not up for debate. That is my biggest bone of contention with the project, so much so that I've hesistated giving them much money. The community exists because of all the contributors' efforts, and yet Wales is the one who gets to run around like some kind of celebrity. Where are the accolades for the everyday, workaday authors of content? I say, add authorship recognition/attribution. Just my 2 cents.
Wow, what a great rant that's completely founded on a point of complete ignorance.
Wikipedia is for factual and notable information.
As much scorn as you can heap on He-Man and Pokemon, they are very notable (known world-wide) and the descriptions of the series and their contents is factual. (i.e., the games Pokemon Blue and Pokemon Red both contain monsters X, Y, and Z.)
What Tycho is describing here is that he said "Hey! Wiki editing is really cool! I think I'll use Wikipedia for my new original fiction project!" And though I can't check because of course the article was removed, I strongly suspect that he wrote it as "these are events that actually happened" rather than "this is part of the backstory of a fictional world"; it's a mistake commonly made by those who don't understand the purpose of Wikipedia and why they have the power to edit these pages.
See, he's right that Wikipedia's interface is cool; he says "I liked the way their software went about things". I'm a writer too, and I plan to install MediaWiki on my next computer just for holding my own writing. But here's the difference: I'll be using my own resources.
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
When we were first considering making Epic Legends Of The Hierarchs available as a publically manageable satirical metanarrative... a phalanx of pedants leapt into action almost immediately to scour - from the sacred corpus of their data - our revolting fancruft.
Some people think writing this way is humorous. These people are known as morons
"don't jump on here calling other people's quite valid interpretations down because "you think" you know better ".
Well excuse me for fucking breathing, who or what did I "call down"? Where does my comment even suggest "I know better"? Is your parinoid and insecure personality showing today?
"get some facts, then make a contribution that's actually worthwhile to read--just like this new system on the Wikipedia is Hoping to encourage."
Put down the crack pipe. I made the comment because I have edited on Wikipedia once or twice in the past and have also come across badly vandalised pages. Consider it a suggestion by an interested user, not a thesis on TFA.
"Here, you ass-hats get away with it, cuz slashdot is all about anyone's opinion"
In case you hadn't noticed this is a slashdot discussion, the whole fucking thing is based on OPINION. If you want a "fact" then how about the fact that your post does not contain any facts. In FACT your post is just another aggressive bile spewing opinion from a dickhead who does not "get it".
"Pull yer head out yer ass..."
You arrogant, unimaginitive little turd, how about you go first!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"A couple fans told me that my last journal entry was mint; give it a shot. Hope you like."
I read the whole tedious thing, all I can say is: "Self praise is worthless". You should hire a lumberjack to remove the chip on your shoulder.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.