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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.'"
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
The whole idea of Wikipedia is that with enough readers/contributors, things generally tend to improve--more eyes makes all errors shallow. So why lock pages at all? High-volume pages attract vandals, but they also attract well-meaning people to fix them up. Pages linked from high-traffic sites should be the ones that improve the fastest, surely?
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
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.
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.
Have you ever tried editing a page on a wiki where edits are flying in at what feels like a hundred a minute? There are several problems with this. First of all, about half of edits to a high profile page will be vandalism, and half will be reverting to a previous version. A very small percentage will be adding information to the article.
When someone wanting to add information to an article comes in and edits a completely unprotected George W. Bush article in this example, in the time it takes them to add that information, five more edits have happened. The first vandalized it. The second reverted to a previous version. The third added information in a biased way, the fourth neutralized the information and added a source, while the fifth again vandalized it. When that user clicks "submit," they get a notice that there has been an "edit conflict."
Their previous version that they tried to submit might be saved on the previous page, if they're using a good enough browser, but if they did something like correct a typo, they have to correct those typos all over again while ensuring the newly added information stays there. Semi-protecting the page is an alternative to fully protecting the page that deters vandals that are too lazy to fill out the registration form, thus ensuring not only that less time is spent on reverting, but that people willing with registered 4 day old accounts willing to add information will be able to do so without an "edit conflict" notice.
Also, high-volume pages tend to have a relatively high number of newcommers. And, there's a at least a perception that if a page is left to newcommers, that it won't be maintained as well as if it had a more even mix of newcommers and established editors. (eg. it may not be 100% obvious to new users how to revert vandalism if they do spot it... new users may not know about NPOV, and may not be sure whether they should remove blantant POV statements... high-traffic pages may have edit conflicts, and that may frustrate well-meaning users attempting to fix vandalism...)
Another thing is that for articles like George W. Bush... it kind of sucks if 80% of history is vandal-revert-vandal-revert-vandal-revert... it makes it harder to review legitimate edits.
To add to this, as an editor of Wikipedia for well over a year now it is always a pleasent surprise how many non-registered users simply commence to fix typos, improve grammar or language wording and so forth.
We may be a destructive species, but we are also very constructive; if Wikipedia is such a great target for destruction, wouldn't the core community of trolls and generally disruptive persons have had more victories by now? You imply that the encyclopedia is teetering on the brink; with a growing team of dedicated persons and articles improving rapidly it is a struggle to see a logical basis for that particular assertion.
Because no one wants to sit there reverting an article every five minutes because a jackass keeps putting a penis on the George W. Bush/Tony Blair/Christina Aguilera page, or replacing the picture of the newly elected Pope with Hitler, or changing the Hitler article to "JEWS SUCK LOLOLOL."
I'm surprised they're not a little stricter.
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!
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.
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".
Opinions DO NOT belong in encyclopedias. Period.
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Sig Sauer
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Experts have biases and are incorrect as well. Being able to edit an experts post (especially a self-proclaimed expert rather then a real one) is fundamental to Wikipedia's survival.
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
Yeah, but if they let anyone edit the NYT website, they could end up letting any old liar deseminate untrue information. Fortunately, my good friend Jayson Blair tells me that the NYT's internal checking mechanisms are so well done that there's simply no way anyone could just make a load of shit up and have it published in the Times.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
"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"
I have to disagree. If we were a destructive species something like Wikipedia wouldn't be possible at all. The problem is that a small group can do great harm. 1% of the users are enough in a open system like wikipedia to give the impression that people tend to vandalize just for fun, but the big majority is either helping or at least not hurting the project.
I really don't get why Wikipedia doesn't introduce a trust-system. Maybe something like a page which is open for anyone, one which is only open for editors which have proven to be trustworthy (ala web of trust) where they can pull good content from the open page (you could make the level of trust needed to do this edits dependand on the article) and a stable version, which is created from the dev. site. Then the user has the choice which site he wants to view.
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
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.