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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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.