Slashdot Mirror
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?"
No.
It marks the end of the free encyclopedia that can be edited by any idiot. Now, it can only be edited by 99% of idiots and most importantly, those specific people that spend the time actually editing the articles.
No.
This has been gone over several times now. This will be used to bridge the gap between no protection at all and total lockage (i.e. only an administrator can lock it).
In fact, I expect this will promote more freedom, since pages which would have been put to administrator-only locking will now be under this type of protection, where most users can still edit the page.
Does this mark the end of the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit?
No. It marks the beginning of someone taking responsibility for spreading false information.
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.
But if NAT or a proxy is involved different legitimate users may come from the same IP. And if somebody wants to perform vandalism, it doesn't take much to read the page five times tunneling through five different hosts. I could easilly access the site from 40 different IP adresses from a handfull of different networks. (And that is counting only those to which I have legitimate access).
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
I wish they would switch the email feature on, so that Wikipedians are informed of changes who do not log in every day.
Orange juice for me -> aren't Jews for me?
It's so much funnier when someone explains it.
Check it out.
Hi, I'm the writer of the History of Alaska article on Wikipedia, which appeared on Wikipedia's main page on September 27th. Wikipedia's Director of Featured articles, Raul654, who decides what featured articles go on the main page, has a policy of not using protection on featured articles on the main page. I'm not sure about semi-protection, but when History of Alaska was on the main page, it received a lot of vandalism. On one occasion, someone replaced the Prehistory section with obvious vandalism. I think it might have been something like "native americans suk and brains mom's a whore," and rather than reverting to the last version, another Wikipedia user instead removed the comment, and this went unnoticed for several hours! When I awoke that afternoon, I had to readd the entire prehistory section! This made me wonder how much content is lost, temorarily or permanently, for a time through errors when reverting vandalism in a hurry without checking through the edit history. With vandalism not occuring as often, people will have more time to look through the edit history, I would hope.
Actually, I just semi-protected it : http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special% 3ALog&type=protect&user=&page=He-Man .
You're not serious? Roosevelt consulted with anthologists? That takes him right out of my book!
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
uhh...
http://www.snopes.com/glurge/twoquest.htm
-Rob Ewaschuk
If Zonk an the Slashdot editorial staff want to take offense at Wiki putting some controls in place, they should get rid of moderation and karma. Conceptually both are means of reducing the visibility of trolls and vandals on a web site and promoting useful content. It's hypocritical to think otherwise.
Any president is going to be the target of political activists who wish to defame or mock the opposition party. I'm sure Bill Clinton's profile is guarded just as Bush's.
The fact is nobody wants KKK members editing MLK's profile either.
Suck it up. There's trolls on the internet and Wiki is doing something to control them.
I suggest the following approach:
1. Find reputable news source reporting the disagreement - the more reputable the better. Possibly several.
2. Change the text to use words to the effect of "The TRC concluded that whatever, a finding which is disputed [cite dispute with source].
3. Include the source link in the references and also if useful in your edit comments.
It's a lot less likely that a well sourced edit will be reverted and if it is, the next stop is the talk page to point out that all substantial views on a topic are supposed to be covered, as part of the general neutral point of view policy. Include several more references to the dispute as part of that, to make it obvious to all readers that it's not just you with a personal view.
In the event that that is unsuccessful, the next stop is using the peer review request mechanism to involve a wider part of the community in the discussion.
Which language version of Wikipedia did this happen in? The current and all of the subset of versions I checked of the English language article did not mention an ANC bombing.
> It's even creepier when DHS agents bang on people's doors who aren't doing anything wrong.
You wouldn't be thinking of this story , would you?
Guess what, that story is a hoax.
Trust me, though, I'm as creeped out by the Bush administration as you are.
Hi.
I see here (SlashDot) and other source of information recurrent incorrect statements about Wikipedia. The summary is: there IS training, there IS responsibility, there IS watchdog system, this is not anarchy. Let's walk some statements.
* And the admins have developed a knee-jerk culture.
Incorrect. A persistent bad contribution needs to be slowed down quickly for it's damaging quickly. This will happen only if a user repeatedly contribute badly, after several attempt of communication and explanations on the nature of the problem. The feeling which could lead to this belief of "knee-jerk reaction is probably due to the common belief that "I" as a new contributor, can immediately do what "I" think is the best... Unfortunately, as a new user you may know plenty of things, you may be a genius, but you haven't a clue about the system your arriving on! If a new user does not realise that, he must be quickly slowed down. If this new user can not understand that he needs to learn, that is when the so called knee-jerk reaction will be felt.
Most slowing down actions in WP, complies to suggested procedures. Like: talk, explain, warn once, warn twice. If strong disagreement comes in, slow down both parties, get some external views and keep going. So... the "knee-jerk" reaction is not, by a very long shoot, the standard reaction.
* There's no real training for admins
This is plainly incorrect. A minimum of 5k edits are required. Involvement in different tasks is required like: recent changes patrol, articles for deletion, requests for comment, minor fix, major contributions.... All those things are verifiable. All admins will be subject to community scrutiny before being appointed admins. So... there is a serious bit of training for becoming an admin! It is quite thoroughly checked out.
* And I've never seen one yet apologize for abusing their authority
Then... go back to Wikipedia. This interesting statement of yours, is the key explanation, telling us how you can do so blatantly incorrect statements.
* ...it's impossible to get literally every one of them to agree on anything,...
Note, that is precisely why in human communities we have, judges, tribunals and so on... Because humans do mistakes, are biased, are fraudsters and so on... Nothing very new. I'd say void'ish point ?
* Because of the one-sided nature of a debate in which one party can totally silence the other...
Precisely no. Except if one is a vandal, no one in WP can really be silenced arbitrarily. That is IMO one extraordinary aspect of WP: No one can slam the door shut. That is precisely the reason why some debates go on for so long in WP. See requests-for-comment or requests-for-arbitration: the talks can be heated, exhausting, over weeks... But no one can shout once for all. Decisions are collegial, not the result of one free-rider. That does not mean they are necessarily just, for sure. Only Mr. JW has absolut power which could be exerced limitlessly... Obvioussly he can not do that on about 800K articles!
* ...noise is introduced into the system.
I also see signal-to-noise ratio as a major issue in WP. But not for the reason you identify here. Wikipedia risks to be noisy because of it's openness, not because of it's admins. That's is precisely the reason why some new technical solutions are introduced in WP: semi-protection, no anonymous article creation.
I think you have it all wrong on this one. :-)
Don't get me wrong: there are loads of issues with WP. Definitely not a simple experiment.
Bye. Zijus.