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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."
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.
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.
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.
Did you bother to RTFA, or even read the entire summary? This only applies to pages which are frequent targets of vandalism, and only prevents anonymous and very new users from editing them; from the SPP page:
The barrier should be low enough that editors who wish to contribute constructively need only wait a short time (on en.wikipedia, the newest 1% of accounts last about 4 days) to be fully active.
While I'm sure there'll be plenty of idiots screaming about how Wikipedia is becoming less 'Free', if anything it's becoming less restricted; up until now, the only possible course of action has been 'full protection', in which case only *admins* can edit the article.
Please read the policy:
...
Semi-protection of a page prevents the newest X% of registered users and all unregistered users from editing that page.
Semi-protection:
* Is not a proposal to prohibit anonymous editing.
* Is not a proposal for pre-emptive protection of articles that might get vandalized.
Does anyone know who is behind wikipediaclassaction.org?
It looks like the article is up for a deletion vote at the moment (some consider it non-encyclopedic), but there's actually a pretty good Wikipedia article on the Wikipedia class action suit. Here's the first few paragraphs:
WikipediaClassAction.org is a website that claims to represent people wishing to file a class action suit against the Wikimedia Foundation to hold the creators/founders of Wikipedia legally responsible for malicious postings made by contributors to Wikipedia that are claimed to have caused damages to other individuals and groups.
Allegedly started by the owners of QuakeAID, wikipediaclassaction.org (domain name registered on December 11, 2005 by Jennifer Monroe) refers to a 2005 incident involving John Seigenthaler Sr. who was identified by a Wikipedia article between May and September of 2005 as having been implicated in the John F. Kennedy assassination and the Robert F. Kennedy assassination.
The site claims to be "currently gathering complaints from the entire Internet community, including individuals, corporations, partnerships, etc., who believe that they have been defamed and or who have been or are the subject of anonymous and malicious postings to the popular online encyclopedia WikiPedia."
I should add that QuakeAID, the company behind the suit, is generally considered by many to be a fake/illegitimate charity. They seem to be upset that information about this illegitimacy is in their Wikipedia article, although people from the company have done quite a bit of editing on it.
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.
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
That would be simple for vandalism that consists of deleting parts of the page, inserting 50 links or stuff like "Wikipedia sucks ass" and such. But those are usually found and reverted soon anyway.
The hard part is the subtle stuff - people who insert false information that sounds credible, and can only be falsified by thorough research. It gets really tricky there, the semi-protection stuff will not help with that.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
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.
The first edition was published 1768-1771 in three volumes.
Brittanica gets a new edition every 20 years (?)
The print edition was revised this year. The Brittanica Book of the Tear was first published in 1938. Brittanica has been on-line since 1981, beginning with Lexis-Nexis.
One edition of Brittanica is several thousand dollars
The holiday special: $1500 US for the cloth-bound Brittanica, Book of the Year, Great Books of The Western World, Annals of America, and Webster's Third International Dictionary. 120+ handsome, well-made, hardcover books, with free shipping.
The 2006 Brittanica DVD: $20 US.
Another four years and Brittanica is out of Business
Considering most of the prophecies posted on Slashdot, I have my doubts.
Everyone needs a dictionary with exhaustive entries on The Simpsons and Goatse.cx. My favorite entry is the one on Japanese Toilets , quite informative. And of course, ya can't have an encyclopedia without a List of Streetlight Manufacturers and Fixtures.
I think wikipedia's strength does not lie in stuff that one would find in an normal encyclopedia, but the odd stuff that might otherwise be hard to find. Heck, it's fun just to hit Random Page and read what comes up.