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Wikipedia Adopting Semi-Protection of Pages

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the countering-the-angry-jerk-effect dept.

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."

2 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The wiki by TuringTest · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  2. Entropy is a bigger problem than vandalism by ThurlMakes7 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    IIRC, this kicked off when Jimmy Wales admitted two entries chosen at random by Nick Carr were "horrific crap". They weren't the result of vandalism, but just really badly written collections of badly chosen facts.

    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.