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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?"
I agree 100%. Requiring prior participation is not the same as requiring a "premium" subscription fee or some other such nonsense. IMO, anything that protects the quality of Wiki is in the best interest of us users.
Math is math. Regular expression is regular expression. The tools are there. The future is now.
It was a joke.
Wikipedia really needed to do something like this, and banning anonymous changes to a few reasonably stable articles seems like a decent compromise. The articles can still be edited by most people who are into wiki.
That being said, all this outcry over a couple articles being changed is way over hyped. That nature study that showed that it was nearly as accurate (in science articles) as the online encyclopedia britannica just confirmed that.
The articles that are semi-protected are mostly huge writeups that are more or less complete by now, it's not like they would be edited much anyway, it would be a different thing if the page about George W Bush was to be semi-protected as a stub, i.e. when it needed a huge flow of information to be made. A good reason for unprotecting a page would be if huge discoveries had been made about it and it needed much input, like if someone proved Jesus was a hoax.
It's also a good thing to have to keep the vandals out, it's been rampant since the John Siegenthaler controversy.
Maybe there is a dream which still survives among some idealists, that everyone, everywhere, should be able to contribute equally, and with equally fruitful productivity, to a knowledge database, absolutely regardless of any ability they possess to summarise and intepret knowledge in a useful and logical fashion. But for those with a realistic outlook, Wiki article writing ends up looking like any other skill set. It isn't intuitive. It takes a bit of experience. And the more experience you have, the better you'll be at it. Closing off, in effect, those with no experience whatsoever, and requiring you be reqistered at least for a few days to edit specific articles, ultimately, is no loss.
Karma: Chameleon (comes and goes)
Not to troll, but how is this slogan anything but accurate? ANYONE can edit Wiki. ANYONE can take the time to learn how to use and benefit Wiki before contributing. ANYONE can benefit from a non-Google source of the "worlds information" that has been protected from the scum of the Internet (ref to Spammers, idiots, etc, not Google).
Math is math. Regular expression is regular expression. The tools are there. The future is now.
They're huge subjects, which leads to well-written articles, which in its turn leads to many readers, vandals want many readers, so they edit those pages.
Wikipedia doesn't censor texts. Users do.
Those mechanisms aren't intended to kill the "anyonecanedit", but the "anyonecanvandalize"
~The fear for the blood tends to create the fear for flesh~
>> Does this mark the end of the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit?"
We can hope so.
Letting everyone contribute means your standards sink to the lowest common demoninator, which is lieing, cheating, self-promotion, and the demonstration of ignorance.
Rather like Slashdot.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
There should be an equation for article editing. An article should be given a value ranking its popularity and users should be given a rank, ranking their contributions to the wiki community. Only highly valued contributers should be able to modify high ranking entries.
If you want to edit Hitler you must frist be a proven, intelligent, useful contributer. If you want to write an entry on the superconduction uber widget, knock yourself out. My 2
These measures may slow the casual trolling and idiocy but it will do nothing to deter or prevent the more dedicated trolls.
I'm a coder and I can't imagine why Wikipedia would want to semi-protect select articles, and not *all* articles. (Bitflag vs Micromanagement)
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
The key similarities between Bush and Hitler are that both are fierce nationalists pushing agendas that include aggressive foreign policies and a reduction in civil rights. The conditions in Germany following WW1 gave Hitler the support he needed; the conditions in America following 911 gave Bush the support he needed. Both societies were deflated and wanted to rally around a strong leader. Both leaders used that to their advantage, breaking long-standing rules, purportedly for purposes of strengthening the nation.
Nationalism and intimidation is how Hitler did his thing. It's creepy as hell to watch the President deflect pertinent questions with patriotic jargon. It's even creepier when DHS agents bang on people's doors who aren't doing anything wrong. Of course Hitler went farther, and of course W isn't the first president to do such things, but that doesn't make it any less creepy.
It wasn't even marginally funny in the first place.
Say it is time to elect a new world leader, and your vote counts. Here are the facts about the three leading candidates:
Candidate A associates with crooked politicians, and consults with anthologists. He's had two mistresses. He also chain smokes and drinks 8 to 10 martinis a day.
Candidate B was kicked out of office twice, sleeps until noon, used opium in college and drinks a quart of whisky every evening.
Candidate C is a decorated war hero. He's a vegetarian, doesn't smoke, drinks an occasional beer and hasn't had any extramarital affairs. Which of these candidates would be your choice? Decide first, no peeking, then scroll down for the answer.
Candidate A is Franklin D. Roosevelt
Candidate B is Winston Churchill
Candidate C is Adolph Hitler
Sorry it doesn't involve bush, but it shows you can never judge a book by its cover!
And another ones for kicks:
If you knew a woman who was pregnant, who had 8 kids already, three who were deaf, two who were blind, one mentally retarded, and she had syphilis; would you recommend that she have an abortion?
Because she gave birth to Beethoven.
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
There is an connection.
Jesus Christ, Adolf Hitler and George W. Bush are pretty much the first article a 12 year old will look up on Wikipedia. These youngsters are so open to information fed through the media, that when they fill in or click random links, their brain gives priority to the above mentionen names.
Blocking those pages could mean, they will stop vandalizing, or that they will start vandalizing what is next on their subconcious treshold.
lets see, trying to find the biggest icons todays culture, the names most often heared by our children. who are going to be next to be blocked from change, if any? The Pope most likely, Michael Jackson, I would think. I think Saddam Hussein scores rather high to.
A tadpole is a pollywog
Aside from the principles of the thing - that's three articles out of 800,000 that can't be edited by *everyone* - and with the number of members growing at a rate of 5 to 10% per month - anyone who has been a member for a week or so will out of the 'newest 1%' catagory. Sure, more articles will inevitably get added to that list over time - but it's never going to be more than a vanishingly small percentage of articles.
In terms of practical limitations, that's pretty minor - and if it keeps the site maintainable and useful - it gets my vote.
As a matter of principle - well, Wiki isn't about giving people the right to free speech - it's about getting facts into an encyclopedia.
It is believed that the encyclopedia will be better if everyone can edit any article at any time because 'Many eyes make all bugs shallow'. Even as an uninformed layperson looking up Aardvarks, I can spot a spelling mistake in an article and fix it right then and there...but in the case of the kinds of articles being restricted here, there are already PLENTY of eyes on them and adding more won't improve the encyclopedia.
From that perspective, how likely is it that someone who has authoritative knowledge about those few articles will know something that is verifiable that can't wait one week to be posted?
You might argue that (say) some insider in the pay of George Bush needs to be able to post especially incriminating evidence that he/she just discovered onto the Wiki page - and might need to do so either urgently - or anonymously. But that kind of information is unverifiable and falls under the 'no original research' criteria which would eliminate it from Wiki anyway. Wiki isn't a news site - information of that kind should be posted elsewhere first - and only end up in the encyclopedia when it's been verified, understood, etc.
People who visit the Wiki and search on 'George Bush' should not expect to find the latest, juicy tidbits about him there. It's an encyclopedia - they should expect to find historical information that's reasonably well established. It should contain information ABOUT any controversy without actually being controversial itself.
The VAST amount of work that goes on in the Wiki is far more mundane. The other day, I looked up Red Squirrels - found that a sentance about the number of young they bear was incomprehensible - so I looked the information up on half a dozen web pages about squirrels to find out the truth - and corrected the sentence right then and there.
Red Squirrels - not reigning US monarchs^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpresidents.
www.sjbaker.org
Would you be willing to go to all that effort just to modify some article to say, "OMG GNAA RULZ! LOL!"?
I wouldn't. But then again I don't have any incentive to vandalise Wikipedia, so I'm not the person you should be asking. I'm afraid there does exist a few persons that are both intelligent and willing to use quite some time on performing vandalism. Luckily I think they are rare.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Maybe this has already been well discussed, but why doesn't Wikipedia use a system of meta-moderation like slashdot? Before a change was accepted it would have to pass some other random moderators check, who would simply approve or disaprove whether or not the content seemed plausible. What do you think? What do I not know about this debate?
If we're nitpicking, I doubt that people without internet can't edit Wikipedia. Besides, nobody promised that everyone could edit everything.
Yes... because we all know that having a Bachelor's Degree makes you unbiased in the subject.
I'm sorry, but this suggestion is one of the more elitist ones I've heard. I've know PhD professors who were dumb as a doornail - in their supposed specialty! How they got a PhD, I don't know.. but they got one.
Hitler was a fierce racist, not just nationalist. Bush obviously has no problems with Americans of any race -- just look at his administration. You can't dismiss Rice, Gonzales, Powell, Alito as "uncle toms". There is no nationalism as in "America for Americans" either -- if anything, Bush is blasted by dimwits from Left and Right for being too easy on the immigrants (legal and otherwise).
And then, of course, there is Godwin's Law. In short, you may truly hate George W. Bush, but he is not sending (nor would like to send) millions of innocent people to gas chambers. To compare someone to Hitler, the accusation must of that kind of gravity.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
IMHO, this is a great compromise that protects the validity of Wikipedia while still allowing edits by anyone on the large majority of articles, and edits by 99% of people on even controversial ones.
In fact, it looks like they've taken a page from the Slashdot moderation system, which only takes something like the earliest 90% of accounts as possible moderators. This system (with certain exceptions, e.g., +1, Funny) has always worked pretty well for me, and I'm confident this one (with tweaking) will as well.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
At least Hitler was honest about it.
Or, the alternate explanation: both sides were right...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
It's pretty obvious why, isn't it? For the same reason that Bill O'Reilly keeps inventing Wars on Christmas, and Dubya has to keep linking Iraq to 9/11: convincing people they are being threatened/persecuted is an effective way to scare them into supporting you, because they think you will be the one to defend them from all the baddies that want to hurt them.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I really don't know what it is about slashdot that makes people want to post this kind of ritual Chimpybushhitler obeisance to moonbattery every fucking article, no matter what the subject is. Unfortunately, there's no medicine to cure this kind of idiocy - certainly reality doesn't seem to help. If Bush were really a fascist along the lines of Hitler you would have already been arrested for posting that comment. Idiot.
And remember that "fascist" Abraham Lincoln had Democrats thrown in jail for being less defeatist during wartime than Democrats today.
The biggest difference between G.W. Bush and Hitler is that Hitler is widely considered one of the most skilled orators of all time...
If something is true, than it is true. These wiki battles about "the truth" aren't proof that wikipedia doesn't work, it's proof that it DOES! It spurs on discussion, it causes investigation. If you make a claim about something and present it as fact, you'd better be ready with evidence to back it up. To me it seems that this pursuit of truth is EXACTLY what wikipedia should be doing.
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
"Whatever it says is legally the truth"? If you're going for sarcasm, the rest of your post was a little over the top, but if you're serious, your claim is rather irrelevant to the issue in question.
First, what is "legally the truth" in South Africa certainly has no force over Wikipedia -- otherwise, Wikipedia would have to publish only glowing reports about countries like North Korea, or about e.g. China's human rights records, where the "official truth" is rather at odds with the known facts.
In this particular case, there seems little doubt that Botha's administration was responsible for executing the bombing(s) in question, but the claim that Botha directly ordered any of them is little more than an allegation by Adriaan Vlok and Johan van der Merwe. That doesn't mean it's not true, but it's not a fact that has been verified on the same level as "Nazis killed millions of Jews", etc. -- it's merely the testimony of a couple of people who had something to gain (amnesty).
Botha may very well have ordered the bombing -- I think it's highly likely that he did -- but the only fact we can be certain about is that it has been alleged that he did so. For all we know, the TRC pressured Vlok and Van der Merwe to make those specific statements. Absent a confession from Botha, or significant corroborating evidence from others, it is an allegation (are there facts I'm not aware of? If so, I'd appreciate a link).
Note that I'm not attempting to excuse Botha's many crimes against humanity. If it were up to me, he'd be in jail for the rest of his life. I think it's a pity that his refusal to testify didn't lead to such an outcome. However, that still doesn't mean you can assume facts about him just because, in essence, a couple of people said so.
I'm a coder and I can't imagine why Wikipedia would want to semi-protect select articles, and not *all* articles. (Bitflag vs Micromanagement)
Because I first learned about the Wiki concept when I made an anonymous edit to Wikipedia correcting a typo. There needs to be a way that people can figure out how it works without signing up first. A signup process is a powerful deterrent.
IMDb doesn't know this, for example. Clicking so much as "yes" or "no" on "Did this comment help you?" -- or even "Read more comments" -- brings you to a page where they ask you for your social security number, your mother's maiden name, the ID of your current NSA file, etc. Who wants to sign up?