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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.
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.
It is a sound policy, the debate over semi-protection policy lasted for several weeks and covered many arguments both for and against. I think in the end we came up with a rather well balanced and effective policy.
The problem is, is that this seems like a few bad apples ruining it for everyone else. This happens all the time in real life. DVDs are encrypted because they figured people would copy them unfairly. And some people do. The problem is that it makes them harder for everyone else to use in the process. The question then becomes how much protection is too much? If they blocked out editing of all wikipedia content then it would kind of defeat the purpose of the entire website. If however they only choose to block editing of certain articles that get a lot of false information in them to get a political agenda across (either way) then, it's probably a good thing that articles are not wide open for everyone to edit.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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...
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Slashdot, circa 1925...
"Why is this YRO? The MPAA 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."
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
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.
I would like to point out that by your own admision every last encylopedia, text book, and other refrence is a secondary source and by that nature "hear-say" and worthless. Being a secondary source is not a bad thing, since these sources are necessary. In trials certain types of secondary sources are quite admissiable, they are called "expert witnesses."
Indeed, professional research is by no means any more credible than the wikipedia. Its all a matter of sources and the credibility of the organization. With Wikipedia I would not trust an artical that doesn't have good sources. Of course there are few organizations I'd trust if they couldn't provide proper sources.
You shouldn't trust these kinds of articles about wikipedia, they almost always get things wrong.
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....
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!
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.