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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.
..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.
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".
I imagine that people check the facts on wikipedia articles more than they would on Britannica.
Bullshit. People don't check things worth a damn on Wikipedia unless it's on something controversial or something that has some editor who gives a damn. And in particular, people don't check up on cited references, which is the latest trend in trying to lend legitimacy.
For instance, the article on "Voter turnout". The numbers given in the sidebar are wrong. The source given is not the primary source (which is unacceptable. Statistics for several countries are given which aren't even given in the cited source. But not only that: A lot of the numbers given are not the same numbers as in the source given. And on top of that, the numbers in the source don't even match the official statistics or Wikipedia's other pages on the subject.
Now look at the Talk page for that article. It's a Featured Article. Despite the fact that these flaws are pointed out there. Not only that, they were pointed out before the article was featured on the main Wikipedia page. Did any of that prompt that stuff to be fixed? Apparently not. The flaws pointed out still seem to be there, AFAICT.
Talk about shady referencing!
A recent study in nature demonstrated that wikipedia had only a few more errors than Britannica on average.
Bullshit. It wasn't a "study in Nature", it was a rather cursory examination that Nature did on their News/Editorial pages, not a peer-reviewed study. (And a lot of the 'flaws' in Britannica were not in the Encyclopedia Britannica itself, but in other Britannica publications on their website.)
I'd really like to see an end to the "X should not be called a Y" argument. "MySQL shouldn't be called a database!" "PHP shouldn't be called a programming language!" "Wikipedia shouldn't be called an encyclopedia!" Etc. Folks, this kind of argument is just plain dumb. You can argue all day about whether MySQL, PHP, Wikipedia, or anything else are good implementations of their respective types, but clearly they are these things by any reasonable definition of these words. In general, I get awfully damn tired of people trying to redefine words to suit their own ends.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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....
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
So you'd like to exclude any and all encyclopedias that may be made out of date when/if the definition of "planet" is changed? How about all those written around the turn of last century which included racial reasoning for various abilities? Or the textbooks which until the last part of the 20th century claimed that Christopher Columbus was the first European to "discover" the Western Hemisphere?
Historical accuracy is always in debate. The point of an encyclopedia or any record isn't to be absolutely right the first time, it's to be as right as possible and then easily fixed in light of new information. Sure there are those on Wikipedia that don't try in the first place, but no one has ever been immune to stupid or lazy writers/fact checkers. The great thing about Wikipedia though is that it can easily be fixed, without having to go find all the old copies and destroy them, or wait until it's economical to produce a new edition.
Words have power. Arguing about the meaning of words, and how concepts are represented by words, is a natural part of the development of language. When we fight over words, we are helping to shape the language of the future.
I don't claim to have thought of this - I just finished listening to Bruce Sterling's excellent address on The Internet of Things, where he makes an interesting argument about early computers. They were described by many people as "thinking machines", and much of the effort expended in researching and building them was shaped by this idea of their nature. Sterling makes the point that a "thinking machine" is probably not as useful as a machine that is good at ranking, sorting, tagging, etc. - in other words, Google. What if we had thought of computers as something other than thinking machines? Would their development have been different? Would we be further along now if we had done so?
Maybe the statement "Wikipedia is not an encylopedia" is saying something really important about Wikipedia.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
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.
Well AC, perhaps you should create an account on wikipedia and change the incorrect information. You can cite your information and everything. That is the great thing about Wikipedia: If something is wrong, or something needs to be updated because it is time sensitive material, you can change it.
/. instead of doing anything. I guess Wikipedia 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.
You can also just go bitch about it on
I keep telling myself I'm not the desperate type.
People bring up vandalism a lot, but I don't really think that vandalism is really that big an issue on Wikipedia from a user's perspective: it seems to be handled pretty quickly and well. It's a pity that most of the Tor proxies have been blocked from editing as a result, but that's just how it goes, I guess.
In many ways I would argue that Wikipedia has more information on many subjects than a conventional encyclopedia; while most conventional ones stop at giving you a brief overview of a topic, there are some WP articles that are surprisingly thorough (they are almost always on basically non-controversial or technical topics, in my experience). Also, the ability to hyperlink and cross-reference articles alone (and more importantly, heavy use of this ability) makes Wikipedia superior in my opinion to reading or using any conventional encyclopedia that I've used.
Wikipedia isn't going to put Britannica out of business; at least not overnight. There is a market for an encyclopedia that is rigorously edited, fact-checked, written in a consistent tone, and is stable in its content. However, there is a seemingly much greater market for an encyclopedia that isn't rigorously edited, that in fact anyone can add information into, is written in a variety of tones and tenses, the content of which changes constantly, but is free: both to view and to use secondhand.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
I suppose you never looked up technical terms on Wikipedia. Recently I have been interested in output the PC screen to TV, and Wikipedia has such entries as `480p', `composite video', `component video', `S-video', and so on. Has Britannica such items?
To say the least, Britannica is better for things like classical studies. It lags behind in modern stuff.