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

Vandals

[mboverload]

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.

wikipedia ideas?

[ZaBu911]

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...

Re:wikipedia ideas?

[edremy]

Slashdot's mod system works well with trolls, but not with factual info. I can't count the number of posts I've seen marked +3 to +5 insightful with simply wrong information in them. I tend to notice these most often in science threads, especially global warming and evolution ones. Often, the worst offenders are folks trying to defend warming or evolution against the (badly informed) naysayers, but they simpy don't understand the topic well enough and thus end up claiming something that either isn't correct in the context or vastly overstates the confidence we have in a conclusion.

This is Wikipedia's biggest problem IMHO, far more so than the vandalization trolls. With the latter, you can fix it, but if an expert writes an article and then has it "corrected" by someone who understands the topic at a much lower level, how does this get fixed? Does the expert have to keep going through and removing "helpful" changes? How long will someone like this want to keep going before they just give up and go back to something more rewarding?

Under a /. type mod system for Wikipedia, dozens of idiot mods could effectively ban experts- the experts in a field are always outnumbered by the less well informed.

Semi-protection != Protection

[MostAwesomeDude]

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?

Re:No such thing.....

[slashdotnickname]

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.

Re:wikipedia!=encyclopedia

[yoder]

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.

Re:No such thing.....

[DiamondGeezer]

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.