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.'"

Comments

Re:YRO?

[Alkivar]

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.

Re:What's the fuss?

[CRCulver]

It is the plural in Latin. Standard English, however, has adapted the word to its own morphology, "penises".

Recent editorial changes?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:wikipedia ideas?

[brian0918]

"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.

Re:Vandals

[interiot]

No, new users on the whole tend to vandalize much more often than editors who have been editing for several days. New/anonymous users have nothing to lose, whereas established editors want to improve their reputation a bit, and therefore do have something to lose, and therefore they rarely vandalize or intentionally disrupt articles. (a decent reputation may let you run for admin eventually, but more importantly, it lets you make well-intentioned edits that are controversial (eg. "hey! so and so wasn't born in 1711, they were born in 1712!"... if that was a person's first edit, that was very likely to be a vandal edit... if that was a person's 150th good edit with no prior history of vandalism, it was probably fixing a mistake)

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.

That article is horrible

[gkhan1]

We've been having a discussion about it on the wikipedia mailing list and Jimbo himself wrote about it on his blog.

You shouldn't trust these kinds of articles about wikipedia, they almost always get things wrong.

Slashdot has the chance to get it right

[jwales]

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