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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."
...at people doing this and so that is why he is endorsing this change.
The semi free encyclopedia, editable by some.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Holy crap, was that English? I've been out of the U.S. far too long.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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"
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?
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
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.
...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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.