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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.'"
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.
Yes, but I'm whingeing that this isn't Your Rights Online.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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
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.
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
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.
What Wikipedia should do is have an editor branch for each article. All editing would occur on the normal branch of an article by everyone (as is done now with non-locked articles). Whenever the article reaches a good stable point, as agreed on by community discussions, then an editor would be invited (if not participating already) to merge a requested version of the normal branch onto the editor branch. Editors would consist of "trusted" users, picked by some sensible criteria.
As far as the user's experience... looking up an article would bring the user to the normal-branch version (as is done now) and a link would be present if an editor version exists (with 1 million plus articles most won't have an editor version for a while). Maybe the user can specify the branch type when searching.
The main idea here is that good stable copies of an article would be archived seperately from the normal(editable) version.
If outfits like Britannica
Wikipedia is the FURTHEST thing from something like Britannica as you can get! You PAY for a copy of Britannica, and they in turn PAY people who are experts in their field to provide REALIABLE information!
are subject to the slings and arrows of political agenda and false facts
I am sure there may be some level of bias in information provided by the people who write things for Britannica, but if there is false facts in a professional publication it is purely because someone didn't do their JOB! Unlike wikipedia, where that is just an accepted way of life. In the professional world people are paid to provide reliable, as un-biased as possible, information. It is there JOB, and their employers expect them to do this job well. If they do not do this job well then they will get fired and that person will no longer be able to suly the quality of the company's product. The end goal is selling reliable information to the customer, so quality control is of the upmost importance. Yes, many experts on various subjects write for wikipedia, but due to it's open nature you cannot trust that each peice of info you are reading has been carefuly researched by an expert. Plus there are many people who THINK they are experts on something but are NOT! These people have ready access to modify wikipedia's content, but would probably not even be able to get their foot in the door at company like Britannica.
Wikipedia is a great pop culture database, I don't think it will ever be useful for any thing beyond that. You cannot just hop on wikipedia and do your research for home work, as you cannot fully trust it's information. Just look at all the students who are getting in trouble for trying to use wikipedia as if it where a legitimet resource. Now even wikipedia is warning them not to trust the info on wikipedia! So if you KNOW you cannot fully trust it, what good is it? Outside of the pop culture info, where obtaining reliable info is less critical. Sure, free info is nice, but if you want good info it's worth paying for some times...
I'm not saying professional encylopedias don't contain some level of error, what I am saying is that error level is MINIMAL compared to something like wikipedia. The bottom line is, if you cannot trust an encylopedia for homework, well, then it's not much of an encylopedia now is it!
encyclopedia - A comprehensive reference work containing articles on a wide range of subjects or on numerous aspects of a particular field, usually arranged alphabetically. Wikipedia is a real encyclopedia. Sure, anyone can contribute to it, and they can write a bunch of nonsense. Editors, however, usually erase these changes soon after they are made. I imagine that people check the facts on wikipedia articles more than they would on Britannica. People assume since scholars wrote the articles, the articles are somehow immune from errors, bullshit, or shady referencing. That is simply not the case. People just don't question the scholars as much. A recent study in nature demonstrated that wikipedia had only a few more errors than Britannica on average. These new changes seem to be just new ways to complement wikipedia's current methods to eliminate bullshit and subjectivity.
encyclopedia Pronunciation (n-skl-pd-)
n.
A comprehensive reference work containing articles on a wide range of subjects or on numerous aspects of a particular field, usually arranged alphabetically
Is there any mention in any definition of encyclopedia that it cannot have the word "fuck" in it, or that it can only be compiled by certain people (or a certain kind of people)? There are as many different kinds of encyclopedias as there are subjects, and they are all compiled, managed, and written differently.
Of course it's an encyclopedia, just as much as Britannica, or World Book. It is just managed differently, and I myself use it regularly just as I would any other encyclopedia, using other sources of information to cross reference and back up information that I find.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act!" -- George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
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.
I don't understand what it is people find so threatening in the fact that an open source, freely editable database of human knowledge accessible to anyone with internet connection could possibly be reliable; what with over a million articles editted by tens of thousands of various experts worldwide. Really, are we just looking out for the unpaid recipients of obscure degrees who can only find jobs writing highly regarded articles for lofty books? Are we just so paranoid that we think that thousands of malicious hacker-children everywhere sit before their computer screens foaming at the mouth as they toyingly meddle with wiki articles?
Wikipedia is the best example of benevolent human cooperation found on the internet. The purpose is noble, and the method by which it has blossomed into what it is to day is inspiring and exciting for the future of information and media flow over the information highway. And it's certainly a bit more useful than just a cache for pop culture tid-bits...
Here's my challenge to you: let me see you get on a wiki-aeroplane, where it's all been built by an army of non-experts from around the world, and watched over by non-engineer overseers to protect from regular vandalism by people who'd like to see people crash and burn, and hopefully by the time it leaves the runway the vandalism will be minor.
Besides Boeing and other professional aerospace companies also have a motto of
"Strive to improve, but realise that it's impossible to hit it right every last time"
Just in case you think I'm being facetious, Jimbo Wales has recently cheerfully admitted that he get 10 e-mails a week from students who complain that they got an F because they cited Wikipedia and the citation turned out to be wrong. And Jimbo says "For God sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia"
The other remarkable thing about Slashdot is that this army of nerds who will mark down this post, would never accept a wikipedia model for writing software where anyone anywhere can write, edit, delete code at any time.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
You know, Slashdot's moderation system was old when I was young give or take two decades. Moderation exists in irc and usenet as well in the form of channel operators and select newsgroups respectively. Moderation is a good thing and Wikipedia will probably do well evolving their own moderation style, syntax, and categories. As your parent post goes, different default branches can be served to difference audiences depending on their role (reader, editor, moderator, ?). Additionally meta-data in other branches could create trees that could contain information such as editorial history or maybe aggregate information (Gb sent, size of all files, moderation history, ?). All contained within a nice web application that handles the mechanics and operation of carrying out the associated voting and content management that Wikipedia is rich enough to need.
Is it web2.1 yet?
8^{
Shh.
Wikipedia has anounced that they will call the public version 'unstable' the intermediary version 'testing' and the final edited version 'stable'
seriously though, that is not a bad idea. I would be very happy to see some sort of 'weighted confidence level' associated with whats contributed to wikipedia, with a lower rating for contribution from most people, which would be the default viewing threshold. Then in your preferences, or at the top of all articles, have a link to allow you to filter to higher level contributions.
Of course this may have problems with lower level contributors trying to update higher level content and such, but 2-3 levels of depth could prove useful.. if slashdot comments have proven anything over the years its that not all contibutions are created equal..
Editors would consist of "trusted" users, picked by some sensible criteria.
This won't work because there are many established gnomes (Wikipedia's nick name for trusted users) with well established posting histories that also have an agenda. Their expertise is not in the subject matter but playing the wikipedia system for often for revisionist purposes. They often reguritate popular myth over facts.
What is needed is a method of independent expert review and/or fact checkers.
The question is better for what. Wikipedia has more articles, many of them are fancruft entries on garage bands written by their members.
The problem with applying the open source model of a select mumber of editors to wikipedia is that they need vastly more participants.
There is a problem with vandalism though, the spanish inquisition article is regularly replaced with 'nobody expects'.
The bigger problem is POV peddling and quite often you can tell that an 'editor' is actually a paid flack of some politician. Read the 'Katherine Harris' article to see this, there is a series of edits from an editor who claims not to think that Ed Rolins is not a notable GOP strategist, Jeb Bush's comments that she has no chance of winning should not be included and that the fact she had a $2,800 dinner with a corrupt defense contractor currently waiting sentencing for admitting bribing Cunningham is not a notable political issue.
The Cindy Sheehan article attracted so many opposing POV peddlers that the article itself was protected and thus out of date for most of the time it was relevant.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I'm also Greek, we apparently know a lot about penes :P
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
At the same time, I think requiring all statements to be sourced before placement kind of defeats the purpose (or at least main benefit) of Wikipedia: that it can give you the "word on the street" -- what you need to know -- about a topic. Unsourced statements which are original research are definitely a hazard, but if you had to wait until someone dug up a source for everything, Wikipedia would not have picked up the way it did. As long as most editors are well meaning, the inclusion of unsourced statemtns until it can be sourced or deleted is on balance good. Many of the statements I've read in articles have been unsourced (but later verified by other sources) and I've learned much more through their inclusion.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
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.
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.
Just browsing through the history, I found this edit, which was around for about 7 minutes. I don't know if it is the edit the GP was talking about, but it has about the same subject matter. I think that a 7 minute lapse isn't too bad. Unfortunately, I found a couple more edits with similar content. This one lasted 47 minutes, as it was vandalised only 1 minute after it was corrected from another by the same user. As far as I can tell, those are the 3 edits that show signs of vandalism involving the word penis, with a total time of about 55 minutes.
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
I'd argue strongly that the Internet has already brutally massacred the market for Encyclopedias. There was once a time where the only way you could learn about obscure topics was to use one, but today, just type a few words into Google and you've got more information than you'd need to write a whole book on the subject.
:)
With a few exceptions, of course. For example, my Liptak cannot be replaced with the Internet because 99.999% of people wouldn't have the foggiest idea what any of the stuff in it is.
It's been a long time.