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?"
These measures may slow the casual trolling and idiocy but it will do nothing to deter or prevent the more dedicated trolls.
I run a small not-for-profit educational and science facility which receives many visitors. One kind visitor decided he was doing us a favour by adding a Wiki article about our small organisation. Soon after an unfortunate soul suffering from a bi-polar disorder and who we've had problems with before "attacked" our Wiki entry, at first adding unpleasant claims about us, then simply blanking the article. The Wiki entry had become a very important first-referrer for us and our website, and so we wasted a lot of our time dealing with the issue. In the end I submitted our entry to the Vote for Deletion list, but even this turned out to be contentious, and lead to even more problems. After months our article was finally removed, but not before it had caused problems out of all proportion to what it really is.
I believe the Wikipedia is a great idea in theory but mostly unworkable in reality.
Reading the policy, it's not very aggressive. So it's not _that_ bad. It's only for selected articles prone to vandals, and you only have to have an account more than 4 days.
I think it's very sensible and over time will become more aggressive. I think it's quite akin to how slashdot started. Slashdot started with good intentions. Then the trolls came. Slashdot had to figure out a way to deal with trolls, and over the period of years, has the trolls mostly under control. If you browse at -1 you can see how many trolls really post on slashdot. Wikipedia's first step really needs to be just to get the trolls under control. Once you weed out that crowd and have (semi) mature individuals serious about the content, it's much easier to improve the quality of wikipedia. I think we want wikipedia's only inaccurate content to be true unintentional mistakes. Not trolls and edit wars.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
The story submitter is a fucking idiot. Why he added that comment at the end was merely to troll. He's probably the same type of jackass to troll on wikipedia. Wikipedia needs sane troll control. It's more than reasonable to say "for controversial articles you need to have an account that's been around for a few days". I think this should be the default policy rather than just for controversial articles. Wikipedia needs a lot of work done to get the trolls under control. The idea of wikipedia works only in a world of no trolls. People who have nothing better to do with their day than post false or idiotic content for no other reason than their amusement.
They are probably taking the wait and see approach not to scare off users. Ultimatly much more needs to be done to get the problem under control. Filters need to be in place to stop the common GNAA type of garbage. Also, they _really_ need a more sensible heirchy. Mod points maybe? That way, people with mod points can tag certain content as garbage. Then a higher up can just browse content marked as garbage and lock articles, ban users, etc etc.
The current system is working ok, but to keep good content contributers for the long term we need to get some sensible restrictions and a better authority heirchy.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Articles like "George Bush" and "Hitler" are precisely the articles which need this protection THE LEAST!! Those articles must be on like a thousand users watchlists, there's no way vandalism even lasts a few minutes there. It is small obscure articles that aren't watched by anyone hardly that have vandalism last for months and need this kind of protection most! That is impossible however because there are thousands of times more of those articles than there are high profile ones. That is why all totaly anon editing needs to be stopped and a mandatory wait period of say, a week for new users wanting to begin editing articles needs to be put in place. Wiki is already VAST, it doesn't need huge numbers of new articles anymore, it needs to fix the errors in the article it already has and that is the only way it can be semi-reliably accomplished. (full disclosure:I have over 3000 wiki edits and am very familliar with the system used there)
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
"End of the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" sounds very ominous, but 4 days is nothing. Any halfway serious contributor should have no problem with that waiting period, especially since it is only applied to a small handful of articles. Plus the policy states that it should be applied reactively and not proactively in anticipation that an article may be vandalized. All said, a minor change that has been blown up because of the connection to the Seigenthaler ruckus.
Obviously it's the end of the wiki anyone can edit, because anyone can no longer edit those parts of it. It's not the beginning of that because it already happened a few weeks ago, with the recent "experimental" ending of the 14,000 new page creations a month by those without an account (about 1/3 of all new pages). That's likely to have a far larger effect on decreasing content creation and improvement.
Possible negative consequences include creeping de-wikification, if this spreads to pages which are called "finished" or just spreads to a lot of pages.
Possible positive effects include reduced vandalism, though if a few pages are affected, it seems unlikely to have a significant effect on total vandalism levels.
So long as it is contained to a hundred or two pages it seems unlikely that semi-protection will do significant harm. It is likely to decrease the chance of seeing silly vandalism on a few hot target pages.
Personally, I'm more worried about one person choosing to discard 14,000 pages a month based on the story of the day. It seems fairly unlikely, unfortunately, that we'll see Mr. Seigenthaler apologising for the lasting harm he's indirectly caused by provoking that reaction over a silly joke making unbelievable claims about him. So, the correctable and somewhat quality-controlled version of the web is that much weaker.
For anyone who missed it in the fuss at the time: the offensive content in the Seigenthaler article was first removed by an anonymous contributor. What one put in, another removed. Which is exactly how it's supposed to work.
Yeah, and still, then if someone sees the vandalism soon enough (with enough traffic, it's not at all unlikely), they'll start voting no to the changes, faster than you could vote yes.
Tordek, Dwarven Warrior - Juegos de Rol en Argentina
I've had some zealots come in and delete things I have written. I try to be fair-and-balanced, but when people start deleting things to keep them slanted, what can be done?
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
I was working on the article on Pieter Villem Botha, a former President of South Africa. Reading through the article I found it said that Botha ordered the bombing of an ANC ("African National Congress") meeting in South Africa...
I know there are allegations floating around that the South African Secret Service was involved with a bombing like that so where it said in the article "It has been proven that..." I changed that to "It has been alleged that...".
Five minutes later, some helpful individual reverted the article back to its former state and claimed I was vandalizing the page.
I went back to the article and changed it back to that the bombing is alleged to have been Botha's work when someone cut in again and added a link to the infamous "Truth and Reconcilation Council" that had somehow proven beyond doubt that Botha was guilty of doing that.
Now the problem is, whatever the "TRC" comes up with, it will always be the ANC's version of what happened, largely and mainly because the ANC is funding and staffing it, meaning the link to the "hard evidence" is worth crap. However someone who doesn't know any better will swallow the pitch, hook and sinker.
A group of ideological crazed people with admin rights on Wikipedia have set their minds to the proliferation of the political correct version of history and they'll tolerate zero deviation from that.
And this is, in a nutshell, why Wikipedia does not work.
I was going to post this with my slashdot ID but I don't want people to associate my slashdot ID with what I use on Wikipedia. If somebody would donate a mod point to this article I would be much obliged.
Would you be willing to go to all that effort just to modify some article to say, "OMG GNAA RULZ! LOL!"?
My other car is first.
And my grandfather, of course, abided...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
See, the problem is, all you need to know before editing the first time is that there's an edit button and a submit button.
There's no training whatsoever.
And the admins have developed a knee-jerk culture. They're totally immune to the idea that someone is being honest. And when you try to point out that the admin is being dishonest, they label you a troll and other admins conspire to keep you from defending yourself.
There's no real training for admins, either. And no realistic way to take away adminship (try instituting arbitration from behind a sequence of blocks; not everyone can just change their IP, and doing so is a blockable offense anyway). So there's no incentive for them to learn to be humble and respect their ability to enrage honest people. They know they can taunt and dissemble and never face repercussions as long as they aren't openly profane. And I've never seen one yet apologize for abusing their authority.
They don't have any authority, anyway. Their job is to mechanically apply the policies, because the software can't decide what is and is not an appropriate use of the system. But they've gotten way out of hand.
The primary problem with the system is that there are hundreds of admins, and it takes just one with a mistaken apprehension of a user's action to cause a problem. It's impossible to get literally every one of them to agree on anything, so any user is liable to be abused at any moment. And virtually no user is capable of knowing the exact behavioral keyhole through which to walk in order to get an admin defrocked.
Because of the one-sided nature of a debate in which one party can totally silence the other, noise is introduced into the system.
It's entirely likely that the signal-to-noise ratio of the Wikipedia will drop (get worse) as time goes on, and it's not the fault of the users, it's the fault of the system and the admins.
But maybe a different woman who did opt to terminate her pregnancy might have
spared the world another Stalin or Hitler. This is the sort of speculative "What if?" game that neither side can win, so it's best not to play at all.
I think an assumption is being made that baby Adolf was destined from birth to become "Adolf Hitler, der Fuhrer and Killer of Millions", and that if only he hadn't been born the Holocaust would not have happened. But perhaps that's not true -- perhaps post-WWI Germany was in an inherently unstable state, and if Adolf Hitler hadn't come along to fill the role of Charismatic Leader, then the same role would have been played by somebody else. Hitler couldn't have murdered 6 million people by himself -- he had to have at least some support from the German population and government in order to do so. Without a Germany that was susceptible to his world-view, Hitler would have been just another failed artist/politician. So perhaps even if Hitler had never existed, that same support would have been available to the next guy -- who might have been better than Hitler, or worse.
Just a thought.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The point is Bush is using patriotic fervor as a tool to deflect criticism and get his agenda passed, an agenda that includes reduction of civil liberties and intimidation of American citizens who are doing nothing wrong. Hitler used the same sort of approach to gain power, then used violence to gain domination over his citizens. Don't we owe it to ourselves, to this country, to speak up when something looks fishy so that doesn't happen here? History repeats itself, you might have heard. If you can't accept that, you're a blind apologist and a fool.
It is civic duty to blow whistles where appropriate, but I'm more worried about Bush going the way of Abraham Lincoln (who absolutely shredded the Bill of Rights during the Civil War). Hitler was explicitly granted extraordinary powers by the German legislature to essentially ascend to dictatorship; our own congress has been tenative with Bush (example: yesterday's extension of the Patriot Act by a month when Bush wanted it declared permanent), and like Lincoln he's acted outside the boundaries of presidential power and ignored his critics.
Jingoism is rapidly fading from fashion as the public has been reminded that wars hurt people including American soldiers, and I'd expect more doves to join congress in the next election. Assuming the '08 presidential race goes as expected, neither Hillary nor McCain will continue to support the Patriot Act if it even survives that long (amusing aside: protestors were shouting through bullhorns denouncing Bush's '08 campaign in Berkeley a few months back). Bush doesn't have Lincoln's justifications for his actions, but the methods they have used and the violations of liberty they have caused are far more similar to each other than either has been to Hitler.
When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History
by Thom Hartmann
The 70th anniversary wasn't noticed in the United States, and was barely reported in the corporate media. But the Germans remembered well that fateful day seventy years ago - February 27, 1933. They commemorated the anniversary by joining in demonstrations for peace that mobilized citizens all across the world.
It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist; the most recent research implies they did not.)
But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation's leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn't have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world. His coarse use of language - reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state - and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he'd joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.
Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn't know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation's most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.
"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. "This fire," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion - "a sign from God," he called it - to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.
Two weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the leader's flag was everywhere, even printed large in newspapers suitable for window display.
Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation's now-popular leader had pushed through legislation - in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it - that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.
To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of People and State" passed over the objections of concerned legislators and civil libertarians, he agreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it: if the national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack was over by then, the freedoms and rights would be returned to the people, and the police agencies would be re-restrained. Legislators would later say they hadn't had time to read the bill before voting on it.
Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act, his federal police agencies stepped up their program of arresting suspicious persons and holding them witho
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation