Wikipedia Semi-Protection Begins

seanvaandering writes "Admins began applying their recently announced 'Wikipedia semi-protection' feature this week. The first articles to be semi-protected were George W. Bush, Hitler, and Jesus Christ, barring the newest 1% of all users and anonymous visitors from modifying the article (apparently Satan didn't make the cut). Does this mark the end of the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit?"

Comments

Re:Does this mark the end?

[OverlordQ]

Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Time to change that motto then huh?

Re:There's some sort of joke....

[shanen]

Unfortunately, it isn't a joke. Dubya thinks he hears voices from Jesus and the result is all too reminiscent of some of Hitler's actions. The motivations of the abusive 'contributors' to these topics varies widely, of course, but crazy is as crazy does. Insanity explains anything, but it has no predictive power.

The real joke is the ridiculous introduction to the topic. Of course Wikipedia is going to have problems where they are excessively idealistic. However, I don't think this is a very good solution. I think it would be better to use a form of controlled moderation. If an article is getting too many changes, too much reading activity, or is just manually designated as 'potentially troublesome', then all changes should be put on a pending status, and should be reviewed by randomly selected visitors before they are approved for general public visibility.

Wikipedia could actually do it by asking the next readers of any edited article whether or not they wanted to see the old 'approved' version or if they would be willing to consider the changes in the new article. If they want to see the changes, then they would see them in color, and they would have a form to check on to agree that those changes seem reasonable and should be included in the new page. Just an arbitrary example, but you might set the rule so that after five people approve of the changes, then they are considered part of the normal page, but if anyone disagrees with the proposed changes, then they article automatically moves into 'controversial status' for more attention. (And yes, you neeed to track the IP addresses to make sure the same guy doesn't try to read the article five times to approve his own changes.) Actually, the number of approvals required should probably be a function of the number of people reading the article.

In conclusion, such a proposal won't eliminate all abuse, but Wikipedia is not endangered.