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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."
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
only minimal changes, which can be dramatic, are not changed due to nobody knows that the fact is false.
There is a blocking feature already and it makes sense to protect some of the pages which are changed to often (Like GW Bush, or 9-11 and similar). Even on that pages you can still contribute.
It is a open dictionary, but nobody claimed ever that there would be no control on it.
btw. even slashdot adpoted some stupid graphics to protect posts just as everybody discusses it on WP.
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.
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
Er, I think that the point was that the text was unclear and inarticulate, despite the fact that it uses big words. The sentence structure is horrible. Try parsing any sort of meaning from it if you're not a native speaker - even for us, it's tough. Living overseas does make you give greater thought to how you form your thoughts into language.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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?
It's not just the Register, though, bashing Wikipedia is the cool thing to do at the moment. For instance, yesterday Penny Arcade posted a rant ("As a model of how and where distributed intellect fails, it's almost shockingly comprehensive." - whatever); Wikipedia criticism is also a topic in a number of dead tree publications.
The Register is particularly annoying, though, because I read it all the time. I don't mind them bashing Wikipedia, but these days it just seems as if 50% of the articles on The Register are Orlowski on "Web 2.0" or Wikipedia or this Stern guy with some unfunny commentary that's pretty much on par with most Slashdot trolls. The other 50% of the content are either reproduced from third parties or business reporting and thinly disguised press releases I don't care about. I don't know, maybe it's always been that way, but I don't know why it ever appealed to me.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Getting worse? Don't think so.
I personally "cleaned up" several articles, i.e. wrote a decent intro, moved paragraphs into appropriate sections, linked and unlinked things, and, of course, corrected many typos and grammatical errors.
There are many people devoting time to such work besides "fact adding", at least in the German wiki.
I would think the process by which an article is created is
stub ->
facts added, possibly in form of horrible lists ->
turning the thing into an article
Regards.
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"
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
...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.
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?
[
> reputation system
Let's devise objectives and constraints.
At the present pace the 'Wikipedia expert' will soon be of value, therefore we may enable experts to be interested in enhancing Wikipedia articles in order to gain respect. This may enable us to build the reputation system, which will benefit to WP and to the experts.
> new or otherwise unreviewed articles
> note saying "This article has not been reviewed
Any visitor must be able to read the cutting-edge version ('unstable') of an article or a reviewed one. He must be able to configure this in his personal preference and, while reading, switch between versions by clicking on a tab. Some will prefer to only read reviewed articles while others like the way it works right now.
> As for the reputation system itself: Users' reputations would start at 0
The existing user accounts and articles history offers a way, through some automagic analysis, to detect existing 'Wikipedia experts'.
The analysis will calculate, for each existing user, an 'efficiency score' on each category based on the volume, age, audience and stability of his writings. On each category the one-per-thousand best writers (who produce good-and-stable articles) will be immediately promoted into some 'Wikipedia expert' status and form the category's council. The council will be able to 'promote' other users into the 'Wikipedia expert' status.
> gradually increase both with time and with each new contribution they make
And decrease upon error discovery (which will increase the 'score' of the discoverer), inviting anyone not only to create and update but also to fix (correct).
> Certain individuals -- certified scientists, professors, etc -- could also be given field-specific bonuses
Indeed. The council in charge of the category will probably be populated, immediately after its creation, by people knowing those recognized experts. The council will be able to invite and promote them into 'experts'. An expert will be able to deliver the ultimate seal of trust to an article belonging to his category.
On some discussed or non scientific matters we need a trust-system enabling anybody to 'elect' his own experts, or to give to some entity the right to select adequate experts.
> reputations will be decreased whenever an edit is completely reverted ... upon the new content validation. Indeed!
There is a way to implement all this: WebDSign-WP
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!
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.