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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.'"
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.
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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You know you're a geek when you know the correct plural in latin of a tool you never use. :)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Until Wikipedia adopts basic high-school level academic standards of requiring a reference for all factual claims, it will remain a sea of vomit.
Where is your reference for this claim?
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.
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.
This is exactly what needs to happen at some point. Commentators like to refer to Wikipedia as the "open source encyclopedia", but open source projects don't just let anyone contribute. They evaluate patches, and after contributors have a proven track record, they're allowed to commit patches directly.
With that said, people need to stop comparing Wikipedia to Brittanica as if it's some sort of holy grail of quality to reach. Wikipedia is already better than Brittanica. There are two main uses people have for encyclopedias: as a casual source of information and as a starting point for research. Wikipedia is a better casual source of information because it provides far more information about more topics than Britannica does. The articles are also longer and more in depth. I have never looked up something in Wikipedia and not found an article for it, while that has happened several times with traditional encyclopedias. It's only natural that a digital reference will be able to cover more topics than a printed one due to the lack of space limitations. As a starting point for research, many Wikipedia articles list references, which gives you primary sources to go to if you need to dig deeper than what is in the articles.
So why exactly should Wikipedia be striving to be like Britannica? It can do better.
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.
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.)
Opinions DO NOT belong in encyclopedias. Period.
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Sig Sauer
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
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