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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.
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.
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.
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!"
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
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.
uhh...
http://www.snopes.com/glurge/twoquest.htm
-Rob Ewaschuk