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Wikipedia vs Congressional Staffers [Update]
There has been quite a bit of recent reporting on the recent troubles between Wikipedia and certain Congressional staffers. In response, abdulzis mentions that "an RFC, Wikipedia's mediation method to deal with 'disharmonious users', has been opened to take action against US Congressional staffers who repeatedly blank content and engage in revert wars and slanderous or libelous behavior which violates Wikiepdia code. The IP ranges of US Congress have been currently blocked, but only for a week until the issue can be addressed more directly."
And now Congress will vote to make freely-editable online encyclopedias illegal. Freedom of speech loses in a landslide. :D
Or perhaps we can come to an agreement where no one edits other entries for the purpose of skewing information. That would make me smile.
Do we need any further evidence that congress people and their staff have too much time on their hands? I hope in the contentious atmosphere that plagues Washington these days that people from all sides of the political spectrum can agree that Congress is given too many resources to accomplish too little.
Next they'll be wasting all their time on Slashdot.
I'm a big tall mofo.
No, it's called a FOLLOW-UP. This article contains more information than the previous one.
I mean, the editors screw up enough, why call them out even more than we have to?
Actually, when you think about it, a successful politician is not really that different from a successful troll. The idea with both is to somehow stir up an issue that people are rabid about. In the case of a troll, it is just for sheer fun or whatever, but when politicians do it, it gets them into office.
What disturbs me more is the idea that the people we elect to Congress behave childishly enough to get Federal IP addresses blocked from a major website. Quite honestly, I move to give literacy tests before giving voting privelidges...
- Nick
DC underlings all hang out together, drink together, live together and brag incessantly to each other about who is the most important. My guess would be that this has nothing to do with the legislators themselves and everything to do with with interns generating ammunition for trash-talking at Lulu's. The Senators themselves aren't organized enough to be doing this in such large numbers, nor do they know what Wikipedia is. It's the 19-year-olds doing it.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Look, I think the political creatures in Washington are essentially pork-feeding, selfish, backbiting wh0res generally, but let's be honest - they are not alone.
The IP ranges of US Congress have been currently blocked, but only for a week until the issue can be addressed more directly.
This is simply WRONG. I'd wager that a HUGE number of people posting in Wiki are self-interested, or are grinding some sort of political axe.
Just because John Smith isn't actually EMPLOYED by the DNC doesn't mean his revision about President G.W. Bush is automatically based on an altruistic desire to post the truth. One minute reading any intarweb forum will tell you that much.
Roberta Johnson could be posting a revision to the Ted Kennedy article because she's an ardent Republican that hates him. Her edits are somehow more 'valid' than that of a staffer in Cheney's office?
Wikipedia is an open document. The revisions are clear and publicly visible. Why is it all right to censor and prohibit posters whose motivations are obviously suspect, while completely (naively?) ignoring the gazillions of posters whose motivations are probably no less base, but not obviously so?
This is wrong.
-Styopa
Some would disagree with you that the tragedy of the commons applies in this case:
"When people reflexively apply this model to open-source cooperation, they expect it to be unstable with a short half-life. Since there's no obvious way to enforce an allocation policy for programmer time over the Internet, this model leads straight to a prediction that the commons will break up, with various bits of software being taken closed-source and a rapidly decreasing amount of work being fed back into the communal pool.
In fact, it is empirically clear that the trend is opposite to this. The trend in breadth and volume of open-source development can be measured by submissions per day at Metalab and SourceForge (the leading Linux source sites) or announcements per day at freshmeat.net (a site dedicated to advertising new software releases). Volume on both is steadily and rapidly increasing. Clearly there is some critical way in which the ``Tragedy of the Commons'' model fails to capture what is actually going on." -- Eric Raymond
Between this article and previous articles concerning the locking of Wikipedia pages, I can't help but wonder if what is happening amounts to some kind of evolution. Depending on how Wiki solves this, what we may see is the system evolving to include some form of the old fashioned, but sometimes maligned model of peer review. Maybe I'm wrong, but it is an interesting process to watch -- especially for somebody (like me) who thinks peer review is good thing.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. -Richard Feynman
It's a sad state of affairs when we have to block our own goddamn house of government for vandalising public property.
It's not that they have too much time on their hands. They consider this a big enough priority to spend time on it instead of other tasks. A politician's first priority is usually their public image. Legislative tasks come second. That's the real problem.
Developers: We can use your help.
Wikipedia has some really cool content, but the more generally appealing it becomes, the more it will attract the attention of vandals, propagandists, scammers, spammers, compulsive liars, and other pushers of misinformation.
The takers far outnumber the makers.
Wikipedia is a valuable resource, but its value will increasingly become tied to the credibility of its authors. Traceability is key to this credibility, and if that means authors must stand or fall on what they write. That may mean authors lose a right of privacy but so be it.