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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'm sure theres a joke there when you lump George W. Bush, Hitler and Jesus together...
...but I'm not going to crack it because there are 2 kinds of zealots out there waiting to lynch me for it.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
I can't believe He Man didn't make the cut after the Penny Arcade comic about wikipedia.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is post is a near word-for-word copy of my entry on Digg. The irony is that I originally submitted the story to Slashdot first, and they rejected it!
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.
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.
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.
I wish they would switch the email feature on, so that Wikipedians are informed of changes who do not log in every day.
This wikipedia-related article is a stub. You can improve Slashdot by deleting it.
- There's no place like 127.0.0.1
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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?
And my grandfather, of course, abided...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
The biggest difference between G.W. Bush and Hitler is that Hitler is widely considered one of the most skilled orators of all time...
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.