Slashdot Mirror
A Look at the Editorial Changes on Wikipedia
prostoalex writes "New York Times Technology section this weekend is running an extensive article on Wikipedia and recent changes to the editorial policy. Due to high level of partisan involvement some political topics like George Bush, Tony Blair and Opus Dei are currently either protected (editorials are allowed only to a selected group of Wikipedia members) or semi-protected (anyone who has had an account for more than four days can edit the article). From the article: 'Protection is a tool for quality control, but it hardly defines Wikipedia,' Mr. Wales said. 'What does define Wikipedia is the volunteer community and the open participation.'"
If outfits like Britannica and other professionally edited sources of information are subject to the slings and arrows of political agenda and false facts, then there's no reason to expect Wikipeia to be somehow immune to this stuff as well.
Strive to improve, but realize that it's impossible to hit it right every last time.
Is it fascism yet?
Why are people so upset about this? I think that protection is good for controversial pages, if a majority of the Wikipedia community (the people who edit/take care of it actively) agrees that it's mostly balanced and true. It's not like they are banning changes on all of wikipedia, they just want people to wait a bit before editing or not being able to edit controversial pages.
Remember what happens when a page gets linked to slashdot, it takes all of 3 seconds for the picture to change to penes.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Why is this YRO? Wiki isn't a government organization. If they don't like what Joe Random does, they can't kick the door down & send him to the gulag.
Besides, it seems like sound policy.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Is that the NYT now cares about any "open" anything. In 20 more years, they might even vaguely get the concept.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
As a vandal figher on Wikipedia, I just want people to understand this. Wikipedia has so many vandalism edits it is amazing. I don't even bother checking on edits by users, IP edits are pretty much 1/3 vandalism.
It's a shame, but Wikipedia is at fault for trusting human nature to be good, when it isn't. We are a destructive species and Wikipedia is on the tipping point of being a big enough target for utter destruction.
where you have an official maintainer for the biosciences, another for European history and current events, etc. Maybe there could be a raw view and an edited view, but edited would be the default serve.
These changes are hardly recent. Protection policy was introduced in or before at least 2003. Semi-protection policy was introduced around January 2006. Several years ago the George Bush article kept being reverted back and forth between vandalized versions and unvandalized versions so much that they had just decided to lock the whole thing down, as was standard procedure, which would temporarily have the vandals leave until they came back seeing it was unprotected again.
In January, semi-protection was introduced, allowing only registered users with accounts older than 4 days to edit these highly vandalized articles. The registration form is what deters the vandals from vandalizing; they're too lazy to make such an effort. Current protection policy is used when there are edit wars between registered users. Having the page temporarily protected, as the article describes, allows a cooling off period and a mediation of the dispute for those parties until they come to an agreement.
The first time a page was protected, I heard, was in the project's first year, when even the main page was editable. They stopped that when popularity grew enough for there to be a penis on the main page during revert wars on it with vandals. The article is accurate, but the headline isn't.
Bush's article has been pretty much semi-protected since semi-protection was created, and it is unlikely to change until after he's out of office--probably longer. That article has more edits than any others, and most of those were vandalism/reversions. Sometimes it seems like every single newbie who comes along and discovers "OMG I H4X WIKIPEDIA" tests their abilities by blanking the article or adding some random obscenity. What the public and John Siegenthaler don't understand is that it's not the current state of an article that is important to Wikipedia's editors--only the future state, and what it has the potential to become... well, except for all the editors hung up on reverting vandals and temporarily blocking one of the billions of IP addresses that exist.
What would be cool is this.
1) Reminding users to cite sources every time they make an edit (perhaps require it for non-grammatical edits)
2) Being able to ban IP addresses and ranges from editing wikipedia
3) Allowing banned users, or users under certain IP ranges to request unbans for their accounts
4) Have two versions of articles: 'newest' and an 'approved'
* Active contributers who have been peer-reviewed with quality changes (i.e., changes in which they cite sources, conform to the wikipedia NPOV policy, etc.) should be able to fact-check an article and check it off as 'approved'
* Edits should affect the 'newest' version, and should go into a queue for approved contributers to be able to confirm the changes to the 'approved' version of the article
You could establish a karma score for users as well as editors, a la slashdot (moderating, meta-moderating ideas come into play). If a user makes an approved contribution to an article, +1 point. If a user makes an error, he gets +1 error point. If he reaches 5 error points, he must stop editin garticles. If he reaches +10 points, he may start approving articles. Of course this would need to be tweaked & tested but these are just some ideas...
PayPal $$ if you sign up for free offers (eBay, cred cards, e
It's one of those "I can't do it so nobody should do it" things. Whenever someone does something great, someone will come along and crap on it. It starts with building sandcastles and some bully kicking them to the ground and ends with patent wars.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
..can never be anything more than second hand information, what in a court of law would be called "hear-say". The methodology used for keep or delete articles is at best left up to the votes of opinions of the, more often than not, less than a hand full of people. Research is at best a seek and you shall find support for your opinion just don't see what you don't want to see.
Wikipedia is by no means "official" and its policies insure that in effort to keep the threat of lawsuits for wrong information, to a minimum. To put a stamp of "official" on information that is wrong for such an open collective of unpaid articles writers and editors would quickly open a very big can of lawyer worms.
So long as this is understood, wikipedia has some value but it must be understood that the value you get out of using it may not be as good as "official/professional" researched information but more likely better than individual opinions, comments or individual works found elsewhere on the internet.
With all this in mind, it really should be no supprise of the evolving use of wikipedia to build up and/or trash a politician or other public figure. It's the manifestd proof of the "hear-say" only policies of wikipedia.
I was talking about a quiz administered at the polling stations. If you pass, you can vote; if not, you can't. Spewing the same old garbage about "one man, one vote" is just going to keep the population dumb and out of control.
New York Times is complaining that Wikipedia requires users to register in order to be able to edit the content? Heck, I usually have to register just to READ NYT's content.
The semi-protection policy discourages vandalism by requiring editors to be registered with accounts at least four days old. Obviously, anyone who really wants to contribute to the encyclopedia will register and then wait four days (or, in theory, they are already contributors who have registered usernames).
Vandals are almost exclusively unregistered editors using only their IP addresses for identification. The semi-protection will block them from editing or moving (renaming) a page. However, vandalism must be VERY persistent in order for any kind of protection to be applied; typically, administrators will refuse most protection and semi-protection requests and reply, "Not enough vandalism, just revert instead."
People are making a big deal of this because they view Wikipedia, being as it is a completely new and unheard-of-before kind of information libre, as hypocritical when they block people or pages from editing. I guess they've never thought of the fact that they're only protecting ~200 articles at any given time. How many articles have Britannica and World Book opened up for editing and review?
~ C.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_crowds
I promise to be different...
Would know the latin word vaginae as well, and yes... only as a word and it's theoretical functionality.
First, it wasn't just the "technology" section, it was on the front page of the National Edition.
Second, Wikipedia is damned in both directions by the media: They are either too open and so all sorts of loonies can post whatever they want. Or, when the close up a bit, they are abandoning their own principles.
Anyone who hasn't read it needs to read DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism by Jaron Lanier and the spirited reply by Douglas Rushkoff, Quentin Hardy, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Larry Sanger, Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold.
Ry
The bottom line is that Wikipedia should _not_ be called an encyclopedia, rather it should be a "collection of facts contributed by anyone from around the world".
Current Wikipedia works like this:
- Any article not being heavily vanadalized can be edited by anyone.
- Any article being heavily vanadalized may be semi-protected against newly registered users, i.e. anyone having been registered for a while.
The semi-protection was deliberately designed so not even that will lock out anyone particular, since even new registrations become old enough soon enough. That's the intelligent part about it; being open (as long as you accept a delay after registration among a few select pages) while protecting against vandals.
Although Wikipedia is "open", I think that doesn't mean there can't be controls. The right controls just make something that's open work more efficiently. We have police forces in open societies, and put traffic lights on crossings there may have been overly many accidents at in the past, and when there's these, you're obliged by law to follow rules according to those. You usually don't just check in code in an OSS project without approval. Things simply don't work like there can't be any rules anywhere. Well, it does, if you accept a much heavier repair and maintenance work due to all the problems caused by a complete lack of regulations, but I have to wonder if the people complaining about Wikipedia protection feel like doubling or tripling their efforts in that case.
As long as Wikipedia implements sensible regulations I have no problems with it, especially if these regulations still mean that e.g semi-protected pages can be edited by anyone within time. That doesn't make it elitist or anything either, because no one needs to be granted access to edit or something like that and everyone is treated equally without discriminations.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
You've just realized that Wikipedia is built on a lie.
Something most of us realized years ago.
Think about it. Users are required to even submit an email address on Wikipedia, just a username and password to create an account. If everyone creates and sticks with an account, a pseudo-community can develop, as everyone is identifiable. I think it's actually a great idea.
I know this to be true.
A few years ago, quite unbeknowest to me, a grateful visitor created a Wiki entry for the amateur observatory I and a small group of friends own in New Zealand. It was a mostly innocuous entry, if a little less NPOV than it could have been, but certainly shouldn't have been a cause for concern.
All well-and-good, except that amateur astronomy is riven with the same petty and insane power politics as anything else which involves humans, and one unfortunate astronomical community member with a bipolar disorder, and a long history of causing strife, chose "our" Wiki article as his latest target of opportunity.
And so it began.
The first I knew of any of it was when complete strangers began contacting me, asking what the hell was going on. That's when I discovered we even had a Wiki article. By then of course the article essentially suggested that we were in fact members of the Mafia, and worse.
Being Wiki, it appears that "our" article had become a major first-referrer to our website, mostly via Google and all the Wiki ad-spam clones, so a lot of traffic was moving back and forth, as well as a lot of comments.
In the end it all got so bad that we asked - then begged - the Wiki rulers to delete the article and ban anybody from recreating it, or even mentioning us in other articles. Oh and we shut off access to not only our website but our physical site also, as the whole thing had turned into an extremely unpleasant bunfight involving not just much of the amateur and professional astronomy community within our own country but beyond as well.
With our Wikiprescence history, and after switching to a webhost capable of blocking the DDoS attacks (yes, you read that right...), things began to settle down for us. But never again will we have any involvement with Wikipedia in any shape or form. It's just not worth it.
Wikipedia is a wonderful concept, but I suspect it's mostly unworkable.
You shouldn't trust these kinds of articles about wikipedia, they almost always get things wrong.
First, it was that anyone can edit Wikipedia. People can slander others, obscenites can be thrown in, the work of a Nobel Prize winner can be edited by a 12-year old(Britannica).
Then, Wikipedia put in the semi-/protected pages. Afterwards, people bitched about how ironic this is, and how this proves Wikipedia is an example of mob rule.
I take Wikipedia for what it is, and that is a great(not perfect) codex of information that is well organised and free(as in beer).
Awww crap, looks like I get another indirect mention in a newspaper article about Wikipedia :-( I protected the article on Cuba over a month ago, and then, ... we all just sort of forgot about it. One way to improve Wikipedia would be to make a better system for identifying articles that have been protected for too long and deal with them accordingly.
Yeah, I am User:Cyde on Wikipedia.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
All Slashdot moderation does is supress posts that one or moderators don't like and boosts the ones they do. It stops the occasional GNAA and goatse and sometimes promotes a good submission, but most often it's just a limited form of group censorship.
Even if the first comment was flamebait, forking presents an intereseting partial solution.
Wikipedia is essentially open source content. It tries to draw on the strengths of open processes to produce "better" content.
Even in areas like software, reasonable people can disagree on "which way is better". When that happens with FOSS, we get a fork, or at least an alternative project.
With topics like George Bush, Bill Clinton and other lightning rods, I doubt that a large majority could even agree on who the reasonable people are, much less what the "right" content is. So, forking seems inevitably necessary.
That still leaves the problem of vandalism, but might make it a little bit less persistent, since some highly motivated "vandals" would have alternatives. I'm not sure why anyone would object to the basic idea of protection. After all, I can't go to some distro of Linux and overwrite it with my 'version' of the kernel, can I? I hope not, because my version of the kernel comes with biscuits and a soda and doesn't really help a cpu. The point is, people like me should be prevented from making changes to some things, absent strong evidence that we won't muck it up.
>Wikipedia is at fault for trusting human nature to be good, when it isn't
More precisely, Wikipedia trusts human nature to be 50 + epsilon % good. The jury is sstill out on that assumption, but there are a lot of people like me who make quick fixes to typos and omissions when we visit articles.
Already happening, according to some reports. Every now and then there's a post here on Slashdot with words to the effect "I'm a PhD in nonlinear squirgeamatics, I wrote a Wikipedia article about it, and it got 'corrected' by a pack of morons making errors that should embarrass an undergraduate in nonlinear squirgeamatics. I gave up in disguest and the article has probably gone downhill since".
Wikipedia is free information, Fuck can't have that now, can we just like the Free music. lets get this stright, this is just a waste of time and tax pays money for globelized bullshit of the capitalist whores that run are goverments. If we have to we will go underground just like music to get are free information illegally or legally. Just give up plz internet is here to stay and information (even if its in binary) will always be free and no group and no person can stop it.
there would be a true semantic structure in each article, authors would make statements to add ideas and those statements would be reified, that is each statement would have an author, be it AC. Then everyone would be free to build a confidence net and evaluate statements in this perspective. It should be resistant to gossips as - opposite to real world society - information could be tracked down to it's source.
\u262D = \u5350
Unfortunately, that's the only state any of us can read.
how to invest, a novice's guide
Opinions DO NOT belong in encyclopedias. Period.
-----
Sig Sauer
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
+3? Please. That's a troll if ever I've seen one. Way to go, inhabitants of /.
All too often, "neutral" POV means "Politically correct" or "in accordance with my beliefs". At one point, just about any modification to articles like the Bible and Homosexuality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_homose xuality) was deleted by those who did not agree with what was said in them.
But didn't find it. I learnd about Defensive vomiting though. Thanks Wikipedia!
(Some of the claims in the article seem a bit dubious, perhaps some of our male USian friends can enlighten me)
"Nobody has a 'right' to edit Wikipedia. "
Just as no one has a "right" to the public domain.
"As a private organization, it can restrict whoever it wants from using its services."
As can any organization that creates something unique from the public domain.
"Wikipedia does an extremely admirable job of being open, but no site of its popularity can be perfectly open and survive, and so it is taking perfectly reasonable and necessary measures to prevent jerkoffs from making it utterly unusable."
And as slashdot moderation proves, the cure is worse than the disease.
Of course, Wikipedia is an amazing feat. In my view, it is one of the profound ideas that can catapult human civilization forward.
That having been said, wikipedia management should have found a better way of dealing with the differing views, and perhaps even the vandalism. Could it really be that hard? I could imagine a method whereby popular editors have their own version of the entry, and you could choose which to read. Editors could even choose who was allowed to edit.
The problem with control is that we are all biased, and that should be the beauty of Wikipedia: it isn't tainted by our bias.
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
Otto von Bismarck once said, "the less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they'll sleep at night." The same could be said of Wikipedia.
o r_arbitrationo r_arbitration/Completed_requests
Still, those with a strong stomach might want to take a close look at the decisions Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee has made.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_f
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_f
Then you might be ready to ask, "who watches the watchers?"
How am I supposed to know what a forked version should be like if I don't discuss the matter with others? And if enough people agree and there's some sort of community agreement, then there is no noeed to fork it - change it from within. But I agree, sometimes some people have only stupid things to say, and they are the ones who should exercise some self control over what they have to say. Thanks for the vague advice.
There really is a cabal at Wikipedia and editors and administrators who do not tow the line find themselves enmeshed in arbitration and all sorts of things. If you think the "right" way then you are fine, if you think for instance that the FSLN page is so bad you want to go running to Encarta or Encyclopedia Britannica, then you are not thinking in line with the cabal, and you will be tied up in arbitration and so forth. And anyone who answers "well you can just edit it, anyone can edit it" is someone just showing their ignorance of Wikipedia - I have been on Wikipedia for years and know how it works and that is just nonsense. There are just bizarre cabal decisions, let me impart some of it here - according to the cabal, people who say bad things about the Moonies or Scientologists are troublemakers and have to go. But people who say bad things about Lyndon LaRouche are good, and people who defend Lyndon LaRouche are troublemakers. Now in my book, Moonies, Scientologists and LaRouchies are all nuts, but for some reason the cabal (by the cabal I loosely mean Jimbo, ArbCom etc.) has this attitude. I said something about how a pro-LaRouchie person was being persecuted once and cabal people began swarming around accusing me of being a LaRouchie and saying I had to be banned immediately. Wikipedia just goes into crazed witchhunts where they try to tag people as troublemakers and stop trying to have rational discussions. It's true some people tend towards troublemaking, but Wikipedia has managed to drive off some of the calmest most rational people you can imagine, much calmer and more rational than the people driven off.
I think an alternative to Wikipedia needs to exist with different editors and a different board and I work on alternative wikis more than Wikipedia currently.
The gp isn't even attacking wiki. they said some asshole attacked their organization. it wasn't wiki doing the attacking, it was just some random nutjob who used their wiki page as a weapon against them. i've heard of much worse happening to people on and via wikipedia.
Those special interest groups have already learnt that "a lie that is repeated 1000 times becomes the truth". That's why they have dedicated personnels to do the job. It's not possible for the un-organized society to argue with those guys.
As expected, "Falun Gong" page is already protected.
actually from my expiriance high traffic articles, even if controversial, are in rather good shape and fairly neutral. There are a lot of editors on both and neither side can afford to push its point of view to bluntly. The problem is mainly with "exotic" articles that not many people care about. I myself am a Ukrainian and while playing around with wikipedia I checked a few topics related to Ukraine and discovered that they are full of Russian bias. Upon further investigation I discovered that almost all of it is introduced by a small group of a few people but when someone tries to fix they bring in their compatriots, not linked previously in any with that article, and simply vote in a block. Since there are more Russians then Ukrainians (and even Ukrainians, Georgians, Poles, Slovaks, Belarusians, Balts and so on combined) they can quite simply write almost anything they like. btw I observed a similar thing with Armenians and Turks.
Bah, that liberal NYT... Just stick to Fox News, newbie. Fair and Balanced!
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Did Bronson Pinchot really jerk off on Johnson Ct. ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bronson_Pinchot
Yeah, wikipedia is evil. It's too bad you couldn't have just edited the offensive wikipedia entry yourself to eliminate the bogus claims and used the discussion page to insist that only claims from reputable published sources be in the encyclopedia. It's also too bad there is no RfC process that would have allowed you to get other users involved in watching the page for bogus content or to help deal with problem users.
Your words, not mine. I can't help it if you take all criticism personally.
We weren't even aware that the article existed until we began receiving enquiries about it, as a result of the malicious editing of others.
Unfortunately we don't have all the time in the world to spend defending our honour on the Wikipedia, unlike the parttime employed person who was attacking it. Vandals don't seem to have anything else to do in life. I can't even begin to imagine where they find the time for that crap.
Most of us involved with the observatory had only the vaguest notions or knowledge of the Wikipedia at that time. And as I said, we eventually resolved the problem by having the article deleted. The individual who felt it necessary to cause the problem still harrasses us to this day.
I'm as sorry as anybody that the noble Wikipedia isn't perfect, but the fact is that it isn't perfect, and never will be. (What is?). Unfortunately it's a near-perfect vehicle for those with a penchant for mayhem
whatever branch appears when you do a search or follow a link should point to the other in a big pink box at the top of the page. simple...
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Here's an example of a Wikipedia article that presents a contrarian point of view for a standard topic. While the contrarian article on which it is based is interesting and perhaps worth citing, Wikipedia should not state categorically "The Hawthorne Effect is still widely invoked, even after being proved incorrect." (The Hawthorne studies had flaws, to be sure, but those flaws hardly prove incorrect the general phenomenon that has come to be known and the Hawthorne effect.)
./ readers might find it the seed for a somewhat more dispassionate discussion of Wikipedia (as opposed to subject matter) issues.
The article is flagged as having been challenged, but seems to have languished in that state for some time, with no obvious movement toward resolution.
This article seems to be an anomaly. For the most part, articles on science and mathematics are informative and even handed. I was surprised to find this example, and I thought
Better would be if they allowed experts to "tag" "good" versions of the pages while allowing individuals to continuing editing. If someone wanted to only see things "tagged" as "good" by their editor of choice they'd be able to
I recently graduated, and many of my professors said they were generally impressed with the quality of information on wikipedia. Furthermore, while mathworld et al. often have the information, they all recommended wikipedia as being by far the most accessible.
Most of my contributions to Wikipedia would not be allowed under the new "no original content" policy. Some of it has already been deleted as insufficiently referenced. The problem is, the topics I cared to write about were things that weren't covered in great detail on the web. You won't find anything on the Pareto Conjecture other than what I wrote on h2g2; I no longer remember the book I read about it in, and there aren't any other articles about it on the web. Does that mean it's worthless information? I don't think so.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I will use Wikipedia if I'm looking up a topic that most people have not even heard of and are extremely unlikely to have any remote interest in. I will NOT, though, use it for any topic that may get on any person's or group nerves, which means most topics. In my experience, a bitter experience, Wikipedia is being used as a platform for propaganda by organised, dedicated and persistent groups with very biased and unreasonable agendas, and my time and life is far too valuable to devote to such a futile effort as buttheading with them when the Wikipedia system does not provide protections against that. And to anyone that says it does provide protections, I'll say shutup, without hesitation, just STFU; I've wasted enough of months of my life wading through them to know better. Such groups are passionate about their biases, seem quite adept at amassing their members and directing them towards any happening conflict, drowning the discussion in enough noise to mislead newcomers and intimidate unbiased individuals to leave, toppling votes, and otherwise gaming the system. I have better things in life to do than butthead in vain with idiots.
Bah, that liberal NYT... Just stick to Fox News, newbie. Fair unbalanced!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
It would be grand to see Slashdot promote my correction to the New York Times story, which is totally wrong on the facts. I don't expect the New York Times to issue a correction, of course.
The facts are that the policy changes that the New York Times writes about were NOT a tightening of editorial policy, were NOT a closing of some articles, but the REMOVAL of certain overtight restrictions, and the OPENING of some articles. Bah, why can't they get it right?
I can tell you that the reporter understood this fully, fought with her editors over it, and apparently lost. Fine. The Internet can get the story right, even if the NYT can't.
Here is my correction
Wikia
"Unfortunately we don't have all the time in the world to spend defending our honour on the Wikipedia"
This is key. We were in a similar situation regarding our software product being attacked by a competitor. It became obvious that our competitor had hired a full time internet propagandist who did nothing but go for us on forums, and monitor the wiki entries ruthlessly. Short of hiring a full time propagandist ourselves, we simply didn't have the time either, to, as you put it, "defend our honour".
Frankly, it looks to me like the one who wins the propaganda battle is the one who has the most time, and this applies to wikipedia.
That's actually the slogan of Wikitruth, but they have a point.
As a regular editor of Wikipedia, it's clear to me what the limitations of the approach are. It's really impressive how far Wikipedia has come. But it seems to have peaked in quality.
Articles on significant subjects tend to be edited until they're roughly correct. They then enter the "churn phase", where they're frequently edited with edits of varying quality. Over time, the overall result of the churning is negative, as the article slowly turns to mush. Every once in a while, someone comes along and cleans up some of the mess. The article's quality then fluctuates over time; on any given day, it may be anywhere from excellent to terrible, depending on recent edits. See, for example, Horse.
Most of the articles on important subjects have already been created. By now, most new articles don't add much of value. New articles tend to be spam, promotion of garage bands, entries for long-forgotten politicians, articles about minor schools, and atlas entries for state highways. Plus there's an endless flood of fancruft; Wikipedia is essentially duplicating IMDB and Gracenote, with a lower level of accuracy and less searchability. There's way too much detail on games, comics, and fan stuff; every Pokemon has a full article, and almost everything from Star [Wars|Trek|Gate], however minor, has an entry. That's where the "million articles" really come from.
OK, you didn't call it evil, you called it an "ancient curse." It sounds like your problem is with the person harassing you, not with Wikipedia. Some of the evidence for that is the fact that even when you removed Wikipedia from the equation by getting your article pulled, the guy kept harassing you. I'm not saying it's not annoying at times -- it's true, keeping lies off of wikipedia can be a fulltime job -- but there are ways of challenging harassment.
I can't believe you FC idiots are still doing that. It wasn't even remotely funny the first time.
So having an "open community" is fine until people start exercising their freedoms by saying bad stuff about the president and other powerful people? Top down editorial control like this just shows how full of it wikipedia is. The openness is just a way for wikipedia inc. to get free content. After getting the free content the leadership/rulers of wikipedia then sort through it, throwing out what they don't want(what doesn't go along w/ their point of view). So, yes, "protection" DOES define wikipedia.
Most people agree on the basic facts of life...so what if wikipedia allows anyone to enter and write "The sky is blue?"
"Well AC, perhaps you should create an account on [slashdot] and [correct] the incorrect information. You can cite your information and everything. That is the great thing about [slashdot]: If something is wrong, or something needs to be updated because it is time sensitive material, you can [post] it.
You can also just go bitch about it [here] instead of doing anything. I guess [slashdot] and voter turnout do have somehing in common: A bunch of people bitching about how things are but not willing to doing anything about it."
Well I'll be darned. Wikipedia really is Slashdot.
What is the point of a 4 day hold?
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in mud. Soon, you realize the pig is dirty, and he likes it.
I think you forgot to add the "netcraft confirms it" part.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Wikipedia is mostly a good and accurate resource of information. It's the hot controversial articles that are suspect. They become dominated by "gangs" of like-minded editors that skew the information towards their point of view, reject sources that disagree with their agenda, and revert edits by anybody else. For example, the articles on Marijuana are dominated by a marijuana legalization advocacy group who downplay the harmful effects and reject studies that say otherwise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marijuana
Does that include the word "gay"?
Maybe he meant gay, maybe he didn't. What did this have to do with the topic?
These same folks are now trying (with much success) to redefine "marriage", again to their own ends and to my detriment - I can't find a woman either, although I'm hetero. I want to marry my right hand and deduct it as a dependant. I'm deeply in love with my hand, we're very happy together.These same folks are now trying (with much success) to redefine "marriage"
Well marriage is a legal term and also a legal concept (apart from anything else). There are three seperate questions
a) should we broaden the set of rights and obligations that embody the legal concept M of marriage to include committed relationships between members of the same sex (i.e. have legal equality between Civil Unions and Marriage).
b) Is this union called marriage?
b) If not, should we call this union "marriage".
Take thesis A: "The law must be completely gender blind". If we accept A, then the law must be able to answer the question "are we to recognize this couple as being legally M?" knowing only that the couple is consenting (and of age etc.). Libertarians would say no, the government should keep out of M entirely, however this position does not seem to have any popular support. Thus supporters of thesis A would have to support the extension of the concept of M to homosexual couples as well.
What should we call M? Well since 90% or more of M will still be what we call marriage it makes some sense to change the legal meaning of the term of marriage to include our new version of M for convenience sake - much as the Turkish government redefined the Lira to mean 1000,000 (old) Lira - or we could start calling the concept M civil unions or whatever.
Now you may disagree with thesis A, however A is an example of a commonly held thesis that would support the extension of the legal concept of marriage.
Despite what you may have heard from feminists, nobody is arguing that women should be legally equivalent to anything else men can uses as a sex toy, and so your ridicule of this line of argument does not undermine anyone's actual position on this matter.
To undermine the position that homosexual unions should be treated the same as heterosexual unions you would have to undermine support for thesis A and various other arguments such as "if homosexual unions get reduced social welfare benefits when they are down on their luck, why shouldn't they get reduced taxes when they are well off?".
IMHO, the people playing syntactic games are the people who argue that we shouldn't treat homosexual unions the same as marriage because "marriage is defined as between a man and a woman". That is like saying "we shouldn't hire Jane because the dictionary says you have to have a willy to be the best *man* for the job".
Wikipedia: Its not yours.
Its not a democracy. Its a pet project of a totalitarian web master.
Complain about it all you want. But nothing will change.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that Americans overall are not that bad, especially South Americans. But the ones living in the US portion of North America do tend to have geography problems.
What do you mean? "Estados Unidos Mexicanos" or "United States of America"?
This is not my sig.
It's free!! and Worth every penny!!
\\\TRUEFOE///