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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."
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.
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
Are you accusing the register of making the edit? It seems to me that it is simply parodying Wikipedia, in order to remind us of how much things would suck if all sources of information carried the same junk that sometimes appears on Wikipedia.
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!
What do you mean? Anyone can create and edit articles in Wikipedia now, and it IS the best thing since sliced bread. Only difference between then and now is, not ALL articles are under this process, just new/unpopular/not-vandalized ones. What people doesn't tend to realize (is it a flaw of human brain?) is that as processes scale, what served for the small doesn't work for the big.
There's such thing as knowledge crystallization, which changes the nature of the creation process. At the beginning Wikipedia didn't have mature content, so it didn't needed protection for it. Current immature content benefits from wiki default policy now as much as at the Wikipedia beginnings. But now Wikipedia is not homogeneus, so it doesn't makes sense treating all its content equally. So now it includes the best policy for immature content, and the best policy for mature content; it just happen not to be the same policy for both. Big deal.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
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.
None of the successful collaborative OSS projects have let anyone and everyone submit code to them; that would be a recipe for disaster. What's wrong with Wikipedia restricting people from turning a really good idea into a vehicle for furthering agendas, trolling and outright libel? The world is full of assholes and the relative anonymity of the internet allows them to be a lot more obnoxious than they'd dare be in the real world. Anyone who's played online games has seen that in action.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
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.
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
In that regard, it's a perfect model of larger society. Vandals, terrorists, and just plain twits are a tiny minority, but can rob the whole system of its value. The only option is a trade-off, and eternal vigilance is the cost. And by that, I don't mean that everyone about whom an article is written should have to spend every Sunday mopping up after idiots.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
"This page is temporarily protected from being edited by unregistered users and users with very new accounts in order to deal with vandalism. Please discuss changes on the talk page or request unprotection."
The system works.
Man, I've always wanted to say that!
"Namely, groupthink, conformism, the silencing of heretics, and the promotion of biased agendas."
Then why is slashdot one of the most popular discussion sites on the web ?
I can't remember reading many discussions where a few people make the same point, and then hundreds of others unanimously agree with them. This is why I think its ridiculous when people talk about the slashdot "groupthink". Think how many times here you've read the word "groupthink" here - that's a lot of people who aren't part of the "groupthinking".
The fact that you made the post to which I'm replying reinforces this. The fact you're (currently) at +5 reinforces it further. I don't agree with your comment. Personally, I think its an effort to use a personal gripe with the slashdot moderation system as a means of promoting a personal "political" belief in lack of restrictions on personal behaviour (which I personally think is a very valid and important principle in many areas).
I'm not complaining about your moderation - you've obviously hit some sort of chord somewhere - but I find it very interesting that the very fact you've been moderated to +5 invalidates the point you were making.
Well, first you get a very succesful model that will take over the rest. then your opponents bite and spread a dirty media campaign and you take them serious and change your model.
the real answer would be to fully ignore this bullshit.
I mean who cares about the reputation of Wikipedia among non-wikipedians. wikipedia is useful for us and we like it because it is different. I am not afraid of vandalism. I don't care at all about vandalism. And I do not care about these cyber-illiterates who want to continue the old way and raise concerns.
But this reaction of wikipedia is very dangerous.
It is like Terrorism. The terror kills just a few thousand people but the anti-terror measures let us all suffer and limit our abilities.
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
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.
Yup, as this thread shows. But when you look at some of the kooks^Wpeople who are doing it, is makes you think...
The truth is, though, that any good idea that is successful is going to get bashed by the spiteful, the petty, the self-obsessed, and the paranoid. Wikipedia has to show that it's doing something positive about the vandalism/sabotage issue, but apart from that it would be better to just ignore the idiots.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
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?
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.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
Seems like Wikipedia has hit stage 3 in the last weeks.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
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.
how much things would suck if all sources of information carried the same junk that sometimes appears on Wikipedia.
And there's me thinking how much better things would be, if I could edit out some of the POV junk that appears in mainstream news services...
They're probably not bothering to make up edits themselves, but they clearly are digging through the history, rather than running the story whilst the incorrect information is on the current version of the page.
I mean, the one they talk about here was reverted in the same minute (01:49, 17 December 2005).
The Register's article is highly misleading (if not outright libellous). Yes, when sometimes other sites accidently let some incorrect information out, even if only for a moment, it can be reported by other sites - but those sites would report it as "So-and-so made a blooper", not "So-and-so claim X", when they are no longer claiming that. I very much doubt that they spotted it, wrote and published this article claiming that this is what Wikipedia are currently saying, all in less than 60 seconds!
Certainly it is a problem with Wikipedia that there is a small chance of reading a vandalised page - perhaps there needs to be a "This article has been recently edited" warning for any page edited in the last few minutes.
But it is unfair to take advantage of the fact that the history is available (which isn't for any other site, including The Register), especially when they falsely imply that the information is still up there.
I used to like The Register, but I find this anti-wikipedia war rather immature - at least I know that the immature edits that appear on Wikipedia are by random vandals and will get reverted. It says something that the Register intends to be this immature as an official policy.
Then why is slashdot one of the most popular discussion sites on the web ?
;)
Because many people still read most or all comments (rather than just the highly moderated ones), and a lot of people are prepared to post against the popular groupthink opinion (we aren't all karma-obsessed).
I can't remember reading many discussions where a few people make the same point, and then hundreds of others unanimously agree with them. This is why I think its ridiculous when people talk about the slashdot "groupthink".
The point wasn't about the discussion, it was about the moderation. There are certain views which will always get modded up ("Apple/Linux/Firefox are great!", "Tell me why I should use BeOS/Opera when I could used Apple/Linux/Firefox?", "Copyright infringement isn't theft" [although amusingly, the one time I saw an exception to this when it was modded up posts saying that piracy of Apple software was theft - clearly the Apple groupthink outweights the piracy groupthink!]), and opposing views get modded down.
The problem is, how would a moderation system be used on Wikipedia? On Slashdot, this groupthink isn't so much a problem because you can still see all the comments, but it would be a problem if your moderation affected whether you can post.
This system already actually exists anyway - if you vandalise articles, you get banned. I don't see how changing it to a moderation system changes anything - that makes it worse, as it means that people who post unpopular edits could also be banned (currently, an admin will check the history to see that there is genuine vandalism).
Think how many times here you've read the word "groupthink" here - that's a lot of people who aren't part of the "groupthinking".
The fact that you made the post to which I'm replying reinforces this. The fact you're (currently) at +5 reinforces it further. I don't agree with your comment. Personally, I think its an effort to use a personal gripe with the slashdot moderation system as a means of promoting a personal "political" belief in lack of restrictions on personal behaviour (which I personally think is a very valid and important principle in many areas).
I'm not complaining about your moderation - you've obviously hit some sort of chord somewhere - but I find it very interesting that the very fact you've been moderated to +5 invalidates the point you were making.
Not really - all this means is that "Slashdot has groupthink" is itself an opinion which is part of the Slashdot groupthink
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.
Unfortunately, posts with a contrary position are only moderated upward if they make explicit mention of Slashdot groupthink.
A typical Slashdot moderator will read a post that supports an unpopular position, he'll moderate it down unless the post mentions Slashdot groupthink. In an effort to show that he's independent he will moderate the post upward.
The net result is that only meta-posts about Slashdot itself are given a fair hearing.