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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.'"
It is a sound policy, the debate over semi-protection policy lasted for several weeks and covered many arguments both for and against. I think in the end we came up with a rather well balanced and effective policy.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
It is the plural in Latin. Standard English, however, has adapted the word to its own morphology, "penises".
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.
"1) Reminding users to cite sources every time they make an edit (perhaps require it for non-grammatical edits)"
It used to say that, but some foolish admin decided to remove that notice. I've put it back.
"2) Being able to ban IP addresses and ranges from editing wikipedia"
That's already possible. What's your IP address? You can see for yourself.
"3) Allowing banned users, or users under certain IP ranges to request unbans for their accounts"
Also currently possible.
"4) Have two versions of articles: 'newest' and an 'approved'"
This, of course, is where the gold is at. This idea has been in the works for months now. I'm not sure when the developers will actually release it, but it should definitely improve the site, and bring us closer to stable content and civil discussions among editors.
> Until Wikipedia adopts basic high-school level academic standards of requiring a reference for all factual claims, it will remain a sea of vomit.
"Verifiability" is one of Wikipedia's three content-governing policies: "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. This means that we only publish material that is verifiable by reference to reliable, published sources."
The vomitous editors just aren't keeping up with policy. This is changing, though - we're seeing more and more edits challenged for lack of references and for "original research."
Also, some of the anonymous/new-editor edits come from determined vandals, who will edit with multiple IP's, or will create multiple new accounts. That also increases the proportion of vandalism that comes from new/anon edits.
The only problem here is the (extremely small) probability of viewing a page whilst it has "fuck" on it - this could perhaps be solved by having a "stable" version, or a warning for pages which have been recently edited, or are receiving many edits.
But this has nothing to do with your claim that it "should _not_ be called an encyclopedia, rather it should be a "collection of facts contributed by anyone from around the world"." Will "fuck" remain on the page? No. "Will someone catch it?" you ask? Yes, they will. A fact is only as good as it's source, so if you are worried, you can check the reference. This applies to Britannica just as much as Wikipedia.
You shouldn't trust these kinds of articles about wikipedia, they almost always get things wrong.
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
>may not be as good as "official/professional" researched information
It may not be. But how can you tell?
The Encyclopedia Britannica has a longstanding reputation for accuracy, but do we see their change logs and internal debates? "Official" information is just like closed-source software. It may be good but you can't inspect it. Wikipedia is just like open-source software: it may have (and will have) any quality level you can name, but you can see where the maintenance hot spots are and you can fix it yourself.
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?"
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_fo r_arbitration/Climate_change_dispute_2/Workshop#Pr oposed_Principles_and_Facts_by_SEWilco and that this was ignored so the Arbitration Committee could do what it first wanted to do. Including one decision which was not discussed, and my being told during Arbitration that it was best if I "quits making a big fuss" instead of participating in the Arbitration case.
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.
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
"Tundra" isn't a Latin word. It comes from Lappish, an indigenous language of northern Scandinavia. It means frozen land, and as such, had no plural form.
"Sauna" comes from Finnish. It's not Latin either. As such, its plural is "saunat."
It already exists.
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
if you're clever enough to do that, you're too clever to write 'fuck' in wikipedia.
usually.
~~~~
2 1337 4 u!