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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
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.
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.
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.
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
..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.
New York Times is complaining that Wikipedia requires users to register in order to be able to edit the content? Heck, I usually have to register just to READ NYT's content.
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.
Would know the latin word vaginae as well, and yes... only as a word and it's theoretical functionality.
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
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!
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.
The only problem here is the (extremely small) probability of viewing a page whilst it has "fuck" on it - this could perhaps be solved by having a "stable" version, or a warning for pages which have been recently edited, or are receiving many edits.
But this has nothing to do with your claim that it "should _not_ be called an encyclopedia, rather it should be a "collection of facts contributed by anyone from around the world"." Will "fuck" remain on the page? No. "Will someone catch it?" you ask? Yes, they will. A fact is only as good as it's source, so if you are worried, you can check the reference. This applies to Britannica just as much as Wikipedia.
You shouldn't trust these kinds of articles about wikipedia, they almost always get things wrong.
Awww crap, looks like I get another indirect mention in a newspaper article about Wikipedia :-( I protected the article on Cuba over a month ago, and then, ... we all just sort of forgot about it. One way to improve Wikipedia would be to make a better system for identifying articles that have been protected for too long and deal with them accordingly.
Yeah, I am User:Cyde on Wikipedia.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
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.
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.
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)
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....
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.
But didn't find it. I learnd about Defensive vomiting though. Thanks Wikipedia!
(Some of the claims in the article seem a bit dubious, perhaps some of our male USian friends can enlighten me)
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
Otto von Bismarck once said, "the less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they'll sleep at night." The same could be said of Wikipedia.
o r_arbitrationo r_arbitration/Completed_requests
Still, those with a strong stomach might want to take a close look at the decisions Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee has made.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_f
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_f
Then you might be ready to ask, "who watches the watchers?"
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!
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
Wikia
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'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.
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.
if you're clever enough to do that, you're too clever to write 'fuck' in wikipedia.
usually.
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2 1337 4 u!