Not As Wiki As It Used To Be

jonney02 writes "The BBC NEWS is running a story about how Wikipedia plans to take back control due to the recent onslaught of malformed articles." It's always been a scary balance between allowing total anonymous participation in a web forum, and preventing yourself from being overrun. I don't envy the Wikipedia designers one bit.

Comments

Sources

[HoosierPeschke]

Wiki is a nice, centered information solution. The biggest problem I see for articles that aren't instructional is a lack of references. Some writers to a good job, but it seems that articles of fact should cite where those facts come from. After all, it's not Slashdot...

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[log2.0]

I agree! Its a great source of info. However, I think we should not allow anonymous edits! I think it would help a lot. An account IS free after all.

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[interiot]

If there's an article that obviously needs better sources, feel free to add {{unreferenced}} to an article that has no sources whatsoever, or otherwise add {{fact}} after a sentence that seems like it's badly in need of a source to back up the claim made.

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[Yusaku Godai]

IAWTC. I never saw what the big deal was about allowing anonymous edits. Besides, they're not even completely anonymous, as it does log your IP address. Accounts are free, and people should be required to get one (so they can easily be banned once they start causing trouble).

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[shreevatsa]

That is official policy on Wikipedia: See Wikipedia:Verifiability. Let me quote:

This policy in a nutshell: Information on Wikipedia must be reliable and verifiable. Facts, viewpoints, theories, and arguments may only be included in articles if they have already been published by reliable and reputable sources. Articles should cite these sources whenever possible. Any unsourced material may be challenged and removed.

Anytime you see something that does not have a reference, put {{Citeneeded}} or {{Fact}} after the sentence. You can also put {{Unreferenced}} to cover the entire article.

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[zakezuke]

Some writers to a good job, but it seems that articles of fact should cite where those facts come from

I could not agree more. One issue is the fact that wiki is not a citable source at many accidemic institutions, but having clear sited sources. At times even when people are corrected, they don't bother updating wiki.

Case in point

Here is a case where a man seems to remember an Episode of Urusei Yatsura, an odd ball 80s Japanese animation series, which seemed to pay hommage to Bruce Lee in the form of a yellow tracksuit. At least in the Animigo dvd edtion, the tracksuit seems to be most orange. Now I'm all for sighting pop cultural references, and given my experence with this series it would not shock me if this is a Bruce Lee reference... but after asking wiser authorities on the subject... like those who actually had a copy of the episode... and after seeing a screenshot where it was clearly orange... the gent didn't take the time to correct it. While this trivial even for trivia, it seems to me that without a more authorative source such as the person who wrote the manga or scripted the anime, it seems that one shouldn't say with absolute certainty this is a bruce lee reference. I've not corrected it my self as I can't say with any honesty that this orange jumpsuit is or is not a Bruce Lee reference.

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[Zenaku]

Accounts are free, and people should be required to get one (so they can easily be banned once they start causing trouble).

I hope you were joking. Don't you mean, "Accounts are free, and people should be required to get one (so they can easily be forced to JUST OPEN ANOTHER ONE when they start causing trouble)?" Requiring a freely obtained login will not strip user's of their anonymity, and as you pointed out, Wikipedia already tracks the ip address for each edit.

Simple fact of the matter is that even though tracking ip address doesn't uniquely identify a user, it is the very best that any site can do without resorting to requiring credit card information to confirm your identity. And personally, I won't enter my credit card info into any site that isn't selling me something.

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[Anonymous Coward]

That is official policy on Wikipedia: See Wikipedia:Verifiability.

Bwahaaha... oh yes. Good one. I'm a three year veteran of Wikipedia (with 4 featured articles behind me) who recently packed it in because I was sick of the bullshit and idiots swamping Wikipedia, and having to listen to people say things like "believe in the Wiki", as if a Wiki is some magical force that gravitates towards wonderfulness. I spent those years watching good editor after good editor get fed up and leave Wikipedia because they just got sick of seeing their long history of contributions being disregarded and see blatant vandals and sockpuppets getting away with murder. I spent a lot of time doing AFD, recent changes and newpages too. Let me tell you, there are no policies on Wikipedia. Get enough shitheads together and you can make anything stick -- policy be damned.

When my time came, I was editing a bio article... and saw yet another attempt to insert malicious nonsense into it. I looked ahead and saw the whole bullshit "process" playing out before my eyes over the next few weeks... and I just couldn't be bothered anymore. So I left -- three years work behind me that may as well have been flushed. One more good editor used up and thrown away in the name of ensuring that fuckwits and trolls can have a nice playground.

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[LiquidCoooled]

We could all be forced to enter our AOL id number in :D

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[HoosierPeschke]

That's a great after thought but if it was a prerequisite, it would filter out most of the bogus information in the first place. Wiki is a great tool but it is not accepted as a resource (personal experience) because there is no trail of resources therefore defeating it as the great Internet encyclopedia it should be.

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[mdwh2]

However, I think we should not allow anonymous edits! I think it would help a lot. An account IS free after all.

Right, so now all the vandals get accounts.

The proposal is that anonymous edits will be hidden until marked okay by logged in users. With your solution, we've no longer got this distinction, so we're back to people vandalising again.

The idea is that we can make use of the fact that vandals are more likely not to bother registering. Another example is that I pay more attention to recent changes made by anonymous edits. However, as soon as everyone has an account, checking for vandalism becomes far more time consuming.

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[UbuntuDupe]

Also, I've seen people start using {{dubious}} for claims that need a citation and seem not to be right, but that you aren't ready to delete, just to signify less reliability.

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[Yusaku Godai]

Of course they can open another one. They can keep opening accounts and keep getting them closed. Believe it or not, people do get tired of doing that eventually. It does act as a deterrent. It's also often pretty easy, when you're tracking a troll on Wikipedia, to tell when a banned user reregisters an account, and to simply have then banned again before they can cause any more vandalism.

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[interiot]

It is a prerequisite. It is always appropriate to ask other editors to produce their sources. The burden of evidence lies with the editor who has made the edit in question, and any unsourced material may be removed by any editor.

It's not quite a prerequisite in that every single fact, no matter how obvious, has to have an academic journal backing it up (for instance, the claim that tires are usually found on cars should be obvious to most people). But Wikipedia:Verifiability is definitely one of Wikipedia's most important core policies.

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[Kadin2048]

However, as soon as everyone has an account, checking for vandalism becomes far more time consuming.

I'm not sure this is a fair statement. When you have logins, you might have a better chance of tracking vandals across pages. So when you find one instance of vandalism and see what user did it, you can ban that user, but then you can look at their past changes and see if they've caused any other vandalism that you've missed.

Otherwise, it's pretty easy (and I think frequent) for the same vandal to make multiple attacks from a few different computers (say at school, at home, and at the library) and banning one IP wouldn't do anything, nor would it show you any of the other instances of vandalism. And of course, it results in a lot of "innocent" IP's getting banned.

With accounts, there's nothing stopping a person for signing up for a bunch of them, but you have a second way of tracking them -- IPs and their account. Assuming you record both, of course; but you could pretty easily track them together if you wanted, and then when you find a vandal account, see what other accounts have been using that IP address. You wouldn't want to instantly ban them (what if it's another innocent person, who happens to have used the same computer?), but you could scan through their edit histories to see if there's anything that's obviously vandalism; if it is, chances are it's a duplicate account. You could also compare the password hashes to see if they're the same; again, it wouldn't be necessarily indicative of a duplicate account, but it would be a big red-flag.

Anyway, I think it makes the process for tracking down vandalism a little different, but not necessarily that much harder. Of course, it gets easier the more information you log, so you have to balance the obvious privacy concerns.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Any anonymous contribution is subject to abuse. Allow it, and it's only a matter of time before some weirdo has JUST POURED HOT GRITS DOWN THEIR PANTS. Thank you.

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[David Gerard]

In practice, most of our anon edits are perfectly good edits - and people don't really want to go through the hassle of creating yet another web page login just to correct a typo.

However, also in practice, anons don't get no respect, so people should make a login if they want to contribute something substantial.

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[David Gerard]

I found this hard to believe until you got to the AFD bit.

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[pmc]

"the claim that tires are usually found on cars should be obvious to most people".

Hmm - obvious but wrong. The number of bicycles in the world is more than double the number of cars so tires are usually found on bicycles. The number of tires not on cars is much greater than the number of tires on cars.

I know it seems a pedantic point, but it's not when it is a context of an encyclopedia.

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[jd]

Oh, that is very true. For myself, I've written a few articles and have tried to provide references. Sometimes two or three sources to the information. I've also contributed to a bunch of articles. Where I am uncertain on the data or the relevence, however mildly, I put the suggestion in the discussion page and not the master page.

Have the articles I've written been subject to vandalism? Sure. The logs also show that fairly substantial vandalism was completely eliminated within a matter of days. That's not bad going for pages on some truly obscure, regional information. We're not talking about stuff likely to get a hundred visits an hour, I'd be amazed if the articles got a hundred visits a month. For readers to spend the time to undo damage, refine the page (there have been numerous truly wonderful additions to the articles) and contribute some excellent material is (to me) proof that the Wikipedia system works fine even for stuff that is rarely visited. (Those who contribute to the less-popular pages can consider themselves thanked. General knowledge can be found anywhere, so the true power of a system like Wikipedia is felt when more obscure material that would normally be scattered and incoherent - if it existed on the Internet at all - is readily available.)

I would like to see reference enforcement added to Wikipedia, but it is unclear how you'd go about doing that. You can check a link exists, but the book and paper references would be hard even to verify to that degree, and AI text analysis systems are not nearly advanced enough to tell if a reference has anything to do with the claims in the article, although it might be possible to eliminate some definitely invalid references. No automated validation of articles is possible at this time.

It might also be good if Wikipedia also provided a grammar checker. They are far from perfect, but it would be useful for catching some of the more basic errors. A spellchecker would be good too, for the same reason. Again, perfection isn't necessary, it merely has to reduce the number of uncaught errors to make it worthwhile. Requiring approval would catch very little outside of the specialist knowledge of the approver and the more general-knowledge stuff. (This is why journals use peer-review, where the reviewers are - by definition - peers in the same specialist field. It is also why newspapers - who tend to rely on sub-editors and editors who do not have specialist knowledge - are forever apologizing for article errors.

Wikipedia hasn't the resources to provide a full nth-degree cross-checking peer-review system. As such, changes to the submission process will really contribute little. Having validators for Wiki syntax, grammer and spelling would likely correct a far greater number of errors with far less effort. Validators would also add insignificant latency compared to full reviews. Yes, I understand that Wikipedia is in an unenviable position as a result of vandalism creating libellous content. However, Wikipedia has some grounds for claiming common carrier status at the moment, as it just carries the content and does nothing more. If it had a review process, it would lose any such defence, so any libel that DID slip through the cracks would be a far greater risk.

All in all, then, I think Wikipedia is reacting under intense pressure but is diving in entirely the wrong direction and may actually put itself more at risk with this idea.

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[Overly Critical Guy]

Actually, I've seen a rampant increase of this lately, where every article I come across has "citation needed" markers all over the place. It makes me distrust any of the information. I've come to rely less and less on Wikipedia as its popularity has grown (except if I'm looking up episode guides for 80s cartoons or something).

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[Anonymous Coward]

RickK, is that you, you pompous, self-absorbed, insufferable douchenozzle?

Get over yourself already.

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[Baricom]

Hmm - obvious but wrong.

The claim is ambiguous. I interpret the author's intent to be that most cars have tires, not that most tires are on cars. Fixing this sentence would be an excellent opportunity for a user to contribute to Wikipedia.

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[tajmahall]

This is kind of a stupid policy to insist on. Wikipedia as I see it has two main benefits over other references:

1. Accessability

2. Vast amounts of common knowledge (as a result of #1)

And the latter is the really unique part, since if you just want to know what something is or what the popular perception of something is, Wikipedia is almost certain to know. Before Wikipedia you would've been left in the dark because for casual inquiries it's not worth the time to do research, and for most subjects it's really unlikely that anything has been published anyway.

Articles on topics where there are good sources available (like Biology pages) are a different matter, but these are the vast minority, and it should much easier to apply restrictions to just these. Seems like a good feature would be requests for an article to have its restrictiveness bumped up, in the case that someone is making good faith edits and seeing others significantly reduce the quality. This as opposed to just flagging someone else's bad edit and hoping that somehow it gets corrected.

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[mdwh2]

When you have logins, you might have a better chance of tracking vandals across pages. So when you find one instance of vandalism and see what user did it, you can ban that user, but then you can look at their past changes and see if they've caused any other vandalism that you've missed.

But you can do this with anon users by looking at the IP.

Otherwise, it's pretty easy (and I think frequent) for the same vandal to make multiple attacks from a few different computers (say at school, at home, and at the library) and banning one IP wouldn't do anything, nor would it show you any of the other instances of vandalism. And of course, it results in a lot of "innocent" IP's getting banned.

And it's even easier for a vandal to have several accounts, and banning one account wouldn't do anything.

Anyway, I think it makes the process for tracking down vandalism a little different, but not necessarily that much harder.

I'll accept that, but that's my point really - whilst people might say it helps stop vandalism in some ways, in other ways it is worse, and there is no overall benefit. But on top of that, you potentially lose good edits from users who can't be bothered to get an account (I have seen many good edits from anons). If overall it doesn't help the vandalism issue, why introduce the restriction?

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[log2.0]

This was what I really meant.../. people can be edgy sometimes :D

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[Achromatic1978]

Or of course, any one of several thousand Magic:The Gathering playing cards that are all meticulously documented... ;)

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[shmlco]

And make those accounts use vaild non-web based email addresses and that will only be activated upon receipt. Valid, non-thow-away emails, domains, and IPs give admin's a lot more control. Yes, it limits random small corrections by anonymous folk, but it also limits random acts of vandalism.

Elephants are making a comeback

[BadAnalogyGuy]

So letting anybody edit content is resulting in bad content?

If I were living on Sesame Street, I would probably be just as shocked to learn that Snuffy was real as I am to hear that people vandalize publically accessible data.

Next story: The RIAA doesn't like file sharing and is looking into means of curbing it.

Re:Elephants are making a comeback

[rtconner]

Uhm.. read. If you read and learn, you'll find out the vandalism is not the problem.

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[unity100]

So who will guarantee that the administrators will have a high culture rating and knowledge to discern truth from fiction ?

And who is going to guarantee that they will not prevent anything from publication if it does not fit administrators' political, religious views or outlook on life ?

Huh ?

Has dmoz been successful ?

NO.

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[saboola]

This goes back to "and who is policing the police?". If there is human involvement, then all things human will naturally be involved (emotions, agendas, etc..). There is nothing that you can do about it except to just trust that the system "works", at least most of the time.

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[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

And who is going to guarantee that they will not prevent anything from publication if it does not fit administrators' political, religious views or outlook on life ?

Noone's going to guarantee that. It's wikipedia, there are no guarantees.

The question is whether ngoing vandalism outweighs the potential for abuse by the administrators. German wikipedia appears to think it is. We shall see.

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[halivar]

How does Encyclopedia Britannica do it? Or the NYT? For one thing, Wiki'ers are supposed to cite their sources. If sources are cited or don't check out, edits don't get made. That's the way it ought to be. Statements of fact should always be allowed, and statements of opinion should be quotes from notable figures (such as a historian or something), and the person making the statement should be identified.

Just my $0.02.

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[Eivind]

There is a however a common-sense limit to this.

Wikipedia (nor any other encyclopedia that I know of) doesn't give any sources for its claim that, for example, Norway borders on Sweden, that it has a "very elongated shape" or that it is "generally perceived as clean and modern".

Giving sources for *every* claim you make quickly degrades into nonsense. It should be sufficient to give sources for any claim that isn't patently obviously true. (to anyone with a knowledge of the field anyway) One could actually well argue that the last claim I mention, what Norway is "generally perceived as" doesn't really belong in an encyclopedia, it's very subjective anyway, certainly it's not an undisputable fact.

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[MindStalker]

Currently there is nothing to determine anyone who post information credit. What I gather this whole admin approval thing will do is simply the admins will scan changes and note for obvious errors or vandalism. People will be able to see these changes according to the articles update, before admins approve them. The thing I want to know is will regular users be able to see what was rejected. Then users should then be able to report abuse by an admin.

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[tomstdenis]

There is most likely a treaty which specifies the borders of Norway w.r.t. Sweden....

Just saying...

Tom

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[MindStalker]

dmoz was only unsuccessful because they did very little to promote themselves, and they refused to have a consistant easy to remember url (well they do now, but not at the beginning). It could still resurface.. If people knew about it.

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[StarvingSE]

At least if users were required to sign in in order to edit, malicious edits could be reported by user name and/or ip address, and they could be banned from editing if they get reported so many times. I believe the administrators role is to just keep a watch on the malicious reports and ban appropriate parties.

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[GundamFan]

There is one thing that can be done; peer review. I am not talking about college proffesors in tweed jackets (but I am sure they would be welcome). The problem I see in Wikipedia is that the "rules" the comunity has developed seem more important to the registered users than presenting nutral, correct and well referenced content.

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[$RANDOMLUSER]

That reminds me of the Gowachian (sp?) riddle from one of the Frank Herbert novels:

Q: Who governs the governors?
A: Entropy.

I think this applies to Wikipedia more than just a little.

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[Vraylle]

Who indeed. An article for my online game was deleted for failing to conform to some obscure rule that essentially distilled to "You're not popular enough." There was not even the suggestion that anything in the article was even remotely inaccurate. Glad to see them yanking an article for such solid reasons rather than, you know, fixing errors and outright lies in other articles.

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[T-Ranger]

NO INDEPENDENT RESEARCH!

Clearly, you dont cite the treaty, you need to cite someone else who discusses the treaty.

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[gkhan1]

Ofcourse there is a stylistic choice made when we don't included sources for things like that. If someone comes along and says, "That's BS! And here is why..." we should always be prepared to provide a source. And it is very easy to find sources of statements like that, you can just look it up in, like, the CIA world factbook or something, they probably have it (I haven't checked so I could be wrong, but you get my point). If nothing else, they have a map. There have been indeed a lot of discussion regarding this on the wikipedia mailing list.

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[gEvil (beta)]

If sources are cited or don't check out, edits don't get made. That's the way it ought to be.

Hmmm, that almost sounds like some sort of editorial control or something...

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[elrous0]

The standard in academia is, basically, a citation for any idea that is outside basic survey knowledge (and, of course, for quotes or paraphrases from a distinct source). So if I said "Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860," I wouldn't need a citation. But, if I said "Some historians have argued that Abraham Lincoln shared a proto-Dorian view of blacks with many Southerners" or "Abraham Lincoln wrote, in 1859, that..." a citation would be expected.

-Eric

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[RobotRunAmok]

How does Encyclopedia Britannica do it? Or the NYT?

They FIRE people. People LOSE THEIR JOBS. If someone abuses or games or otherwise plays loose with the facts they risk MAKING LESS MONEY.

Money. You want capital 'T' Truth? Make it about the money.

The wikipedia "model" as it stands now is all reward (big ego boos, "Look Ma, I edited Luxembourg!") and very little risk (Dood1: "Yo, I just got banned from posting in wikipedia!" Dood2: "Like, D00d, you are so-o-o-- cool! That rawks, man! And screw them!"). The day a writer of a wikipedia article loses his source of income for doing a bad job is the day wikipedia begins to be credible.

You want "community"? Go to a parade or fireworks display. You want an encyclopedia of facts? Pay people.

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[Intron]

Are you sure it wasn't for the "no advertising, no self-promotion" rule? I have deleted references to major companies from Wikipedia pages that were clearly just inserted as free advertising. Your game looks OK, and you already link it in every /. post, isn't that enough?

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[tomstdenis]

How about I cite someone who may cite someone who cites a paper which cites a person who cited the original news article in which the treaty was cited?

Tom

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[geoffspear]

Right. The rule that subjects of articles in Wikipedia must be notable is "some obscure rule" in much the same way that the Constitution is "a technicality" when the police get in trouble for violating a suspect's civial rights.

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[Anonymous Coward]

If there is human involvement, then all things human will naturally be involved (emotions, agendas, etc..).

Agreed; let's let the dolphins regulate wikipedia as they're next on the list.

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[jerryasher]

Sorry but that's not how it works at the Wikipedia, because at the Wiki, there is Facts, Opinions, NPOV, and endless battles over whose NPOV is more POV than N and so my NPOV IS REALLY THE ONLY NPOV and that other guy's NPOV IS POV POV POV POV!!!!!!

Check out the history of cyberstalking, for one. See how repeatedly it morphs into a completely bland and useless article that makes no mention of the use of an false accusation of cyberstalking as a means to suppress dissent.

Try adding mentioning, with citations, that people can be falsely accused of cyberstalking. Watch how that is reverted away. That has happened repeatedly on this article. On July 11th, a section containing the DOJ description of cyberstalking and how it compares to physical stalking was added, along with a section containing a link concerning the problem of false accusations, and the use of the accusation of cyberstalking itself as a means of well, stalking. Note how in the span of 15 days, Aine63 repeatedly attacks the article, until by July 21st, there is no indication that the DOJ itself say that cyberstalking has no universal definition but that stalking laws generally require a credible threat of violence. And also gone by July 21st is any mention of the problem of false accusations.

So who is the cyberstalker here? Is it Aine63 who stalks that article to keep out for his/her own reasons any discussion of false accusations? Or is it me because I a) used the compare feature to find out why a section was removed, b) noted Aine63's involvement, and here state that Aine63 is a Wikinazi, who has a definite POV and should be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.

I wonder why Aine63 is so worried about false accusations as to remove their discussion from the wikipedia.... What a fucktard though.

If you read the talk page you find out that this has happened repeatedly. Someone puts in sections about false accusations and things like that, and it gets expunged by some sort of article stalker. In fact, the discussions of this behavior have themselves been removed from the talk page. Why is the wiki so worried about talking about false accusations? Well you might look at how the wiki itself has been used to promote false accusations against John Seigenthaler.

My sense is that the Wikipedia ultimately is doomed due to its insistence on Neutral Point of View articles and all of the fights that that causes. The traditional media is encountering the same thing with the bloggers. An open, but non neutral point of view is far superior in terms of presenting information AND context than a supposedly neutral, objective, point of view that can only fail to provide context and that hides a hidden agenda.

Because let's face, to claim that cyberstalking is not subject to false accusations is just bullshit, and definitely not a neutral point of view.

So what have we learned here? Wiki's NPOV is fatally flawed. Wikiality, truth based on majority rule is fatally flawed. Aine63 is fucktard that probably uses the false accusation of cyberstalking as a tool in his/her life.

I don't know how their new editing rules will prevent Aine63's malicious attacks, we shall see.

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[Anonymous Brave Guy]

One could actually well argue that the last claim I mention, what Norway is "generally perceived as" doesn't really belong in an encyclopedia, it's very subjective anyway, certainly it's not an undisputable fact.

Perhaps, but one could also argue that for someone who's looking for a broad overview of a subject such as would be found in an encyclopedia, that sort of general perception is of great value (as long as it's true, of course).

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[format1337]

So it's like six degrees of citation?

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[tepples]

Clearly, you dont cite the treaty, you need to cite someone else who discusses the treaty.

You mean like the treaty implementation acts? In this case, the books of statutes published by the contracting states are considered reliable sources as far as Wikipedia is concerned.

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[Vraylle]

Because the article was for my game, I didn't post in the Wiki discussion about its removal. I did follow it, however, and the "no advertising, no self-promotion" rule was not cited, whether it applied or not (I'm sure it did, as I created the original article by request). The WP:Software rule states plainly that a company putting its own article in Wikipedia is not forbidden.

What I don't "get" is if an article is factually correct, why delete it? Why should it matter if a company put an article there itself, as in your example, as long as it is correct? Trust but verify. This seems especially sensible with so many reports of error-laden articles elsewhere.

As for my Slashdot signature being "enough", I don't post all that often, and "enough" isn't really the issue for me.

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[Vraylle]

Are you seriously attempting to put those two items on equal footing?

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[geoffspear]

In terms of obscurity, yes. Read the First Pillar of Wikipedia.

In terms of the morality of violating each, of course not.

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[Anonymous Coward]

DMOZ was betrayed by highly positioned spammers. Gambling appeared on the front page, and with cross links in many prominent subpages. Similary, GLBT links. There was also the mass addition of Topix links. For these reasons, Google demoted DMOZ off their front page. They couldn't have this spam appearing when they were going to do their IPO.

Directories have had their day.

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[lokiomega]

Sure and when some company pays you a little money to leave out that tiny fact about some harm their product does that affects millions of people... Money solves everything right? Forget about integrity.

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[David Gerard]

Yes, it's called third party verifiability: can it be shown that anyone else cares?

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[Vraylle]

I'm relieved to hear the second.

On the first, I really don't see how those examples compare in obscurity. The constitution is readily available, spoken about often, and generally taught in school. In contrast, I'd never heard of the "First Pillar" until you mentioned it here. It's not on the home page, nor in the pages that follow the "Editing" link that you find there (none of the 11 tutorial pages). The link path I finally found to it was Article -> Policies and Guidelines (at the bottom of the edit page, well below the actual edit area) -> "Other Concise summaries of key policies" section -> Five Pillars. To know about it I would have needed to follow a lot of miscellaneous links until I encountered it, or have searched for it by name once told. IMO, that's quite a bit more obscure than the Constitution of the United States.

Reading the First Pillar, I don't see where that was violated by the article in question. The article was not source documents, trivia, soapbox, etc. Sources were cited and the article was facturally accurate. Am I missing something here?

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[geoffspear]

I'd argue that the percentage of Wikipedians who know about the notability guidelines for articles is probably larger than the percentage of Americans who know their constitutional rights.

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[Infernal Device]

Norway borders on Sweden, that it has a "very elongated shape" or that it is "generally perceived as clean and modern".

I have heard rumors that Norway does not, in fact, wash behind it's ears.

Re:Approved by administrators before publishing ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, you say that's the standard. Can you site that?

Re:Approved by administrators before publishing ?

[AeroIllini]

How about I cite someone who may cite someone who cites a paper which cites a person who cited the original news article in which the treaty was cited?

You must be a blogger.

Re:Approved by administrators before publishing ?

[Maru Dubshinki]

Well, the species name is "Gowachin", so "Gowachian" seems pretty reasonable to me. Incidentally, is that from Whipping Star or The Dosadi Experiment? I've only ever read the latter.

Re:Approved by administrators before publishing ?

[9x320]

Wikipedia has a process for electing administrators from amongst the experienced Wikipedia editors in the community. They also have a process for removing them when they misbehave. A problem might be that they aren't even required to give their real name, let alone their qualifications. One might suggest that standards should be stricter and professional experience should be required in order to tighten standards, but most of the 900 administrators already elected would disagree for obvious reasons.

These administrators also tend to be the ones that say that administrators make up too much of a percentage of the community for the amount required to maintain the project, and thus restrictions on promoting future administrators should be encouraged.

Re:Approved by administrators before publishing ?

[Maru Dubshinki]

"Because Wikipedia aspires to be a great encyclopedia, not Jimbo's Big Bag o' Trivia" is the short and blunt answer. The problems we've had with Runescape articles alone...

Re:Approved by administrators before publishing ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of curiosity, who did EB fire when Nature released their study pointing out some of the errors in EB (unless you really think Nature screwed up on each and every identified error), and has anyone been fired over http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Errors_in_t he_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica_that_have_been_cor rected_in_Wikipedia ?

Re:Approved by administrators before publishing ?

[kimvette]

Why, did the manatees finally quit?

Re:Approved by administrators before publishing ?

[Iaughter]

The wikipedia "model" as it stands now is all reward (big ego boos, "Look Ma, I edited Luxembourg!") and very little risk (Dood1: "Yo, I just got banned from posting in wikipedia!" Dood2: "Like, D00d, you are so-o-o-- cool! That rawks, man! And screw them!"). The day a writer of a wikipedia article loses his source of income for doing a bad job is the day wikipedia begins to be credible.

The open source development "model" as it stands now is all reward (big ego boos, "Look Ma, I edited the linux kernel!") and very little risk (Dood1: "Yo, I just got banned from the dev list!" Dood2: "Like, D00d, you are so-o-o-- cool! That rawks, man! And screw them!"). The day a developer of an open source project loses his source of income for doing a bad job is the day opensource software begins to be credible.

Re:Approved by administrators before publishing ?

[Eivind]

Well, what would then, be a suitable source for the claim that Norway is "generally regarded as clean and modern"

I don't really doubt that it's more or less true. But I'm not sure one could easily find authorative sources to confirm it.

Re:Approved by administrators before publishing ?

[Eivind]

That is the argument in favor of including such statements, yes. Atleast up until someone disputes them. (and I don't think anyone will honestly despute that Norway has a shared border with Sweden, or that we're "generally regarded" as modern.)

Corruption

[tygerstripes]

Power corrupts, some being more susceptible than others - give everyone the power to make changes, and you can guarantee they will not all be entirely scrupulous or responsible.

So you need some form of regulation to curb corruption. You introduce editors, moderators, whatever.

And then you have to ask: who watches the watchmen (quis custodiet custard or summat)

(Cue the usual /. Wikipedia flame-war)

Re:Corruption

[RobotRunAmok]

give everyone the power to make changes, and you can guarantee they will not all be entirely scrupulous or responsible.

"Scrupulous and responsible"!?! Dood! How about "old enough to shave"? More edits to global geo-political articles in wikipedia are crafted in a week as a result of dares made in the backseats of school buses than in a decade's worth of Britannicas. Why not just take the ten most altered articles each day and have the people watching MTV's Total Request Live call in and vote for the changes in history they most want to see?

Re:Corruption

[Xlylith]

Everyone else...
Using something similar with /. Meta-Moderation, perhaps?

Re:Corruption

[Luscious868]

Who watches the watchman? Easy, let the community do it by making each step of the editing process as transparent as possible. Everytime someone submits a change the proposed submission, whether it's ultimately accepted or rejected, should be accesible somewhere along with the reason for it being accepted or rejected. If an editor is clearly biased it will visible for all to see. If enough people complain the higher ups in the organization can look into it and remove the editor if they find sufficient cause.

Re:Corruption

[uioreanu]

Why not cut away the unreadable cvs-diff-like Recent Changes page and put instead an innovative topic map GUI that allows a quick overview of the recent changes and hot topic/trends? Then open this "map" to the regular users; so each can cross-check the recent changes so that vandalism/errors get cut away faster

Re:Corruption

[jez9999]

As far as I know, the 'History' section of each article does just that.

Re:Corruption

[maxwell demon]

Hey, that's a great idea! Even better: Make a new WikiTV show! People can phone in to make suggestions for changes, and then there's a phone poll to decide if those changes make it into Wikipedia. Also, invite prominent guests who change their own Wikipedia entries during the show, and at the end, people can phone in if the resulting article should become featured.
Of course there must be something to win in the show. Maybe one of the people phoning in gets randomly selected to win an admin account. :-)

Re:Corruption

[Cylix]

This is all true unless a large number of the "community" is against you. Fairly quickly you can find yourself on the outside of the wall.

So here is what life has taught me, "Wikipedia hurts the underdog and there is Slittle you can do about it."

At least that is my experience with wiki-crap.

Me, I've given up on it and relegated it to the trash bin. For the longest time I didn't understand why so many people actually hated it, but then I started to realize there were issues.

My last effort to clean up some wiki entries specifically targeting my company were met with a roll back and a warning. (It's pretty much a joke at this point what is written there.) Look, the underlying issue happens to be this... if you are a minority voice in the community you will not be heard. It goes a step further and actually turns wikipedia into a mobilized war machine that can actually be used against you by the thousdan monkeys pushing from behind.

At least, those are my experiences...

Nope... not giving out the link... I don't need anymore headache.

Re:Corruption

[Anonymous Coward]

The correct principle you're looking for is "tragedy of the commons", more typically streamlined as "people are fucking morons". You only need spend twenty minutes perusing the IMDB reviews for movies with contentious political content (start with 'V for Vendetta') to become depressed at how many can't see the world in any sense larger than their own person little causes. Even a strongly self-correcting mechanism like Wikipedia can't, as it's reach and popularity increases, withstand forever the coordinated onlsaught fanatics, astro-turfers, nitwits on a lark and just plain headcases trying to enforce their particular world views.

Re:Corruption

[ronanbear]

Wiki could have a metamod system like slashdot. Interested/willing editors could be randomly shown anonymous (and other) edits to articles on their watchlist and other related articles. They rank the edits. Anonymous IPs (and accounts) where edits were rejected would be subject to closer scrutiny by coming up more often. It would be a really fast way for wiki editors to do a few good edits a day in 5 minutes.

I also think that wiki should do a tutorial/ quiz which shows people examples of proper and improper editing and the best way to respond. Naturally, it would have to be voluntary but it would serve to help editors become more confident about making edits. Perhaps, edits which are repeatly metamodded well could be used as examples of good edits. It would certainly speed up vandalism detection and some people would be very good at double checking lots of minor edits.

Re:Corruption

[frantzdb]

If worst comes to worst, the GFDL watches the watchmen. If you want to fork Wikipedia with unrestricted editing, you are within your rights to do so.

Re:Corruption

[David Gerard]

You write it and it'll go in!

I'm serious - the Mediawiki software really needs contributors. PHP is easy, PHP with MySQL is harder, programming a database while not crippling service on a top-20 website is harder still. But Wikipedia needs developers. If you have a clue about Wikipedia and the ability to write code fit to run a top-20 website, Mediawiki wants you.

http://www.mediawiki.org/

Re:Corruption

[David Gerard]

I do press for Wikimedia in the UK, and had pretty much exactly this happen - I was interviewed on Irish radio by George Hook, who wondered why his article was semi-protected. I unlocked it live on air on his request, so we could see what happened ;-) If you check the article history, it's held up surprisingly well - some vandalism, some low-quality random crap, but it's lasting pretty well. I left a note on the talk page to leave it unprotected so Mr Hook could see just what happened to his own article.

The main reason for this sort of attention is that, in the wake of the Siegenthaler kerfuffle, the English Wikipedia now has a really hard-arsed living biographies policy - the basic rules (neutral point of view, verifiability, no original research) apply, but they're very strongly enforced. It seems to be working and keeping us out of trouble so far.

Re:Corruption

[smallpaul]

Look, the underlying issue happens to be this... if you are a minority voice in the community you will not be heard.

I'm curious what other collaborative exercises you have participated in where the voice of the minority is elevated above the voice of the majority. Does Brittanica seek out scientists who disagree with the mainstream theories (except for very specific articles on their alternative theories, which Wikipedia also supports)? Wikipedia gives you a chance to make your case. Would you know how to do that with Brittanica? Wikipedia is not perfect nor perfectable because humanity is not perfect nor perfectable. But it is nevertheless useful.

BTW, I'm surprised that you could not at least get the entry to support your position as a minority position. It is very typical in wikipedia to have paragraphs of the form: "Some believe that ...". This allows the minority position to be referenced without being endorsed by the majority. "While most Wiccans practice magic, a few do not, and do not identify as witches." That sentence discusses minority positions on a minority religion.

Usually such a compromise can be crafted unless the combatants have serious axes to grind.

Re:Corruption

[TheLink]

What happens to the history if the article is deleted?

Beavers

[Guaranteed]

You mean to say that Beavers don't REALLY explosively attack people with their menacing teeth? Damn...

Re:Beavers

[Mattintosh]

Sure they do. Any time you say "Nuthin'!", a beaver will attack you and bite your nipple off. Bonus points if the beaver is unconscious up until the nipple-biting part. More bonus points if you hold it up by the tail during this ordeal.

FOSS approach probably better

[halivar]

I like the idea of there being "gatekeepers" who keep the "canonical" article, pulling from various "dev branches", a la Linux development. I think Wikipedia could use this more mature approach now. In the beginning, of course, it benefited greatly from its openness, but now it's time for editors to start provided more focused guidance.

Re:FOSS approach probably better

[mancunian_nick]

I like the idea, too, of people being able to contribute and expand a 'database' with any interesting and/or informative information on a particular subject that they may be knowledgeable about but of course an 'open' policy will bring its problems at times, perhaps, from those who post with the best of intentions but topically inaccurate information or those who are simply trying to be destructive in some way.

Perhaps an alternative using the best of both worlds [a matter of opinion of course] is to maybe use something along the lines which the Internet Movie Database http://www.imdb.com/ does and allow users to add their input but instead of going 'live' right away, would be looked at/approved/whatever buy the admin/moderators or whoever who then post it to the database or, perhaps, refer it back to the author for them to either forget it or re-research it or ammend it etc when they could then re-submit it again if they wished.

It's a tricky one admittedly and I guess when push comes to shove, it's up to Wikapedia to do what they feel is right but as long as articles/submissions etc aren't being rejected, as someone else rightly said, based on their own predjudices, beliefs etc, maybe that's a fair alternative?

Re:FOSS approach probably better

[GrEp]

I agree. Versioning whenever the editor gets around to it is much more scalable than putting holds on updates until an editor has time to look at them. To me the question is that of user interface. Personaly I would default to the un-moderated version, then have a button to rollback to the last editor approved version.

Re:FOSS approach probably better

[beaverfever]

"In the beginning, of course, it benefited greatly from its openness, but now it's time for editors to start provided more focused guidance.

And lo, hopefully the deathknell of web 2.0 has been rung. I have been predicting that it won't be long until the overload of simply way too much unfocused content on sites like digg or myspace will quickly wear people out and remind everyone of the benefits of having professionals provide editing and focusing of information. Having someone provide oversight and separate the wheat from the chaff is a service, a value-add. Maybe somebody brilliant at some dot-com will think of it and believe it's a new idea, patent it and call it web 3.0.

Web 2.0 tried to sell the lack of editing and focus as a value-add, but I think it goes against what people really want (as opposed to what they say they want - the phenomenon recognised in marketing). Wiki leads the way again.

Re:FOSS approach probably better

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Having someone provide oversight and separate the wheat from the chaff is a service, a value-add. Maybe somebody brilliant at some dot-com will think of it and believe it's a new idea, patent it and call it web 3.0.

I think I've got prior art. :-)

Re:FOSS approach probably better

[nine-times]

I agree with this (and in fact have been advocating it for a while). However, I think the key thing is that you need to keep the Wikipedia pretty much as it is, and then build a new site that's pretty much the same thing, but the "stable" branch. You take each page, run it through some sort of editorial process, and dump it on the new site.

I know it's a bad call from a branding perspective, since the name "wikipedia" has become quite well known. However, it only makes sense because this "stable" branch would, in fact, be a very different project, and wouldn't really be wiki-ish.

Re:FOSS approach probably better

[Julian Morrison]

If they're doing nothing but troll-whacking, maybe. But, the whole point of wiki is that many specialists cumulatively out-think any generalist. Which means: no generalist can be qualified to vet the contributions of all specialists.

Ya dance with who brung ya

[SlappyBastard]

Wikipedia is making a mistake. The wiki model brought Wikipedia to the dance, and Wikipedia is now running off with another guy. This usually ends in gun play.

Re:Ya dance with who brung ya

[hey!]

Wikipedia is making a mistake. The wiki model brought Wikipedia to the dance, and Wikipedia is now running off with another guy. This usually ends in gun play.

No, it usually ends in the girl and the new guy being happy for a while, while the old guy makes such a pest of himself complaining to his buddies that they suspect she might have had the right idea when she ditched that whining cry-baby. But of course men are useless when you bring them problems they can't fix; if that sounds rendundant to you, then clearly you're a man.

Re:Ya dance with who brung ya

[Ekimus]

But of course men are useless when you bring them problems they can't fix

Please enlighten me who is usefull when one is brought to a problem one can't fix?

Re:Ya dance with who brung ya

[kahei]

The point is that if you bring a man a problem, they will try and fix it and either give up or get annoyed when they can't. Whereas if you bring a woman a problem, they may not be able to fix it but they will emit sympathy, cups of tea, agreement, and words of encouragement.

The above, at least, is a point of view held by certain weepy females who would rather be told that they are right than actually solve the problem :) I think the grandparent poster is poking fun at this point of view. Other possibilities include:

-- Grandparent actually holds this point of view and is therefore probably a Sensitive New Man, gawd help us.
-- Grandparent was alluding to this point of view, but neutrally.
-- I am wrong and the grandparent post was about something unrelated.
-- Grandparent's post is part of some horrible conspiracy, too vast... too UBIQUITOUS... for us to fully percieve.

On reflection, I favor the last possibility.

Re:Ya dance with who brung ya

[ultranova]

No, it usually ends in the girl and the new guy being happy for a while, while the old guy makes such a pest of himself complaining to his buddies that they suspect she might have had the right idea when she ditched that whining cry-baby.

If you cry you're a whining crybaby, if you don't you're insensitive. Kinda explains why sex drive needs to be as strong as it is to ensure the survival of human race. I sure wouldn't have anything to do with the damn thing if women weren't so... full of mathemathically interesting curves ;).

But I wonder if a woman that's been ditched for another and is crying about it gets called a crybaby ?

But of course men are useless when you bring them problems they can't fix; if that sounds rendundant to you, then clearly you're a man.

And if a self-obvious statement seemd like s great insight to you, then clearly you're a blond.

Singerely,
Ultra Nova
In a cynical mood tonight.

Re:Ya dance with who brung ya

[SlappyBastard]

Long time fan of curves. Big shout out to all the fat bottom girls!

Anyhoo ... Solving problems is our natural predator instinct as a man. Either that mammoth dies or we're all screwed. This happens to adapt fairly well to civil society, except for the part where we flake out and beat the shit out of things (even then, more than a few cars have been fixed by this method).

In fairness, shaken baby syndrome would be a lot more common if women approached frustration the way men do.

Being called useless without a problem to solve isn't an insult to me!

In truth, aren't you kind of useless if you DON'T have a problem to solve? Isn't a person who has no problems they are currently involved in solving ... useless? I mean, what the hell else are they doing? Are they independently wealthy? Lazy? Dumb? Manic?

Is that sexist? Perhaps. It would certainly explain the old phrase "tits on a bull" as an analogy for uselessness.

I don't know. I was raised by a mom who drove truck and later was a mechanic. She can't stand most other women. Maybe women wouldn't be so marginalized if they learned to break a tire off a rim (my mom's a friggin pro).

Of course, this is probably why I always have really shitty relationships.

Which, brings us back to those elegant mathematical curves you mentioned.

Re:Ya dance with who brung ya

[David Gerard]

No, Bill Thompson is being Bill Thompson. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2006_proposed_appro val_for_anonymous_edits is from the horse's mouth.

Re:Ya dance with who brung ya

[hey!]

Grandparent's post is part of some horrible conspiracy, too vast... too UBIQUITOUS... for us to fully percieve.

You are close, oh so close. Perhaps one more step and the veil of ignorance will be ripped asunder, and you too can be part of the conspiracy.

Consider, oh novice, this truth: the sage, when he wishes to hide a needle, does not turn to a haystack. Any fool with a magnet will defeat him. No, the sage hides his needle in a box of needles.

The problem with classic conspiracy is trust: when plotting nefarious and secretive acts, you should realize your co-conspirators, like you, are the kinds of people who do nefarious things secretively. Therefore in the classic conspiracy, you'd be a fool to conspire with anybody foolish enough to conspire with you.

This problem is solved by the modern conspiracy, which eliminates the element of secrecy. Instead, you are open about the truth, but in a special way: you lie in such an outrageous fashion that nobody but an utter moron believes you. In the modern conspiracy you should take care not to cover your tracks. Your lying won't be pointed out because (1) nobody likes a snitch and (2) nobody likes to be told the obvious.

In the modern conspiracy, you eliminate the wasted energy of hiding information, the scrambling to keep your plots standing as their foundation of secrecy is undermined. You build your plans on the most solid foundation imaginable: mental inertia. Truly the tendency of people to go through the motions familar to them is a perpetual motion machine, from which the wise conspirator can derive boundless energy to power his plots.

subuse level 2

[sugapablo]

subuse.net/level2 is completely free of any rules. Unlike most wiki's it doesn't even have a purpose. Wikipedia wants to be a wiki-encyclopedia, so when people stray from entering encyclopedic worthy entries, the wiki model fails.

But when a forum is completely anonymous, and completely without an intent on what the content should be, you have something that never needs "control taken back".

Besides, anarchy can be fun! :)

Re:subuse level 2

[1u3hr]

But when a forum is completely anonymous, and completely without an intent on what the content should be, you have something that never needs "control taken back".

Until it gets found by the porn link spammers who have destroyed many unregulated wikis elsewhere.

Re:subuse level 2

[sugapablo]

Maybe ForumBan will take off and help. It's helped me with some drug advertising bots.

Re:subuse level 2

[1u3hr]

Iy's only got 37 IPs listed... If it did take off, they'd attack it and pollute it.

Re:4 months...

[0123456]

"The wikipedia page about Luxembourgish language has been containing libelous statements about the former Luxembourgish Minister of Pubs^H^H^H^HEconsomy since January..."

Here's an idea: maybe you could, like, remove it?

Who watches the watchers?

[Billosaur]

Under the new approach, page edits will no longer be immediately applied to pages but will instead have to be approved by an administrator before they become visible. Vandalism or changes which are not approved will not appear.

This is a major shift, from a "publish and fix" policy to one of prior restraint, where a cadre of privileged users will supervise what appears.

It is still only a proposal, so it is not yet clear if the new checks would be applied to every page, but this is obviously being considered seriously by Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales, and the site's Wikimedia Foundation.

And who decides who will be part of the cadre? Jimmy? I think we can see from his past actions, that he may not be the best judge of who would make the best administrator. I think they need to take a vote within the ranks, and let the editing community decide, then give Jimmy a limited number of vetoes to remove people he doesn't want.

Re:Who watches the watchers?

[DaoudaW]

And who decides who will be part of the cadre?

Hey, I've got an idea. Let's do something based on the Hindu concept of rewards for good deeds. We could call it "Karma". Like if someone had done a bunch of editing that nobody disapproved of they could accumulate points and after they get a certain number of points they earn the right to approve changes... we could call that "moderating."

Re:Who watches the watchers?

[Improv]

What past actions are you talking about?

Re:Who watches the watchers?

[Kuciwalker]

We could call that "Slashdot", a paragon of neutrality, free of any bias.

Re:Who watches the watchers?

[nine-times]

.... and then we have meta-moderation, and maybe we should have moderation of the meta-moderators. Then who polices the meta-meta-moderators?

Now, I agree that it might be useful to have some sort of Karma system in the Wiki that allows you to have some editors be more "trusted" than others. However, karma is more likely to benefit those who write the most popular things, and not necessarily those who write the most true things. In Slashdot, it's about entertainment as much as information, so it's not so much of a problem. However, Wikipedia is supposedly aiming higher than that, and wants the info to be accurate.

Re:Who watches the watchers?

[poot_rootbeer]

But then who watches the watcher watchers?

My Slashdot karma is excellent, and I meta-moderate almost every day, but I haven't gotten any mod points in years. I suspect I had that privilege taken away from me by one of the Editors after chastising him one too many times for abusing his position and attaching his opinions to the untouchable story submission instead of leaving a moderatable comment like the rest of us do.

As long as administrative roles are a necessity, there will always be opportunities for administrative misbehavior. And I don't expect servers to run themselves anytime soon.

Re:Who watches the watchers?

[9x320]

I think they need to take a vote within the ranks, and let the editing community decide

Administrators are already elected by the community. Administratorship has been claimed to be like a "janitorial" job, at least if it's done right. Delete an article marked for immediate deletion. Look at an Article for Deletion debate and close it according to the consensus. Looking at the discussion page of an article to see if the community has reached a decision has been reached on updating an article should be just another "janitorial" job. Processes have recently been put in place that allow the community to vote to demote an administrator. There are approximately 900 administrators.

The next step above an administrator is a Bureaucrat. Bureaucrats have powers to promote users to administrators and bureaucrats at the community's request, to change a Wikipedia username at that user's request, and to flag accounts as being used by "bots," computer programs designed to check for common spelling errors, revert obvious vandalism, or add a link to the same Wikipedia article in a different language. Stewards are a level above bureaucrats and have the power to change the status of anyone on any Wikimedia project: Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikisource, Wikispecies, Wikiquote, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikimedia Incubator. Bureaucrats and stewards are also elected by the community.

As the above positions are supposed to function as "janitors," Wikipedia also has an elected group of users that are the final authority in resolving disputes among Wikipedia users called the Arbitration Committee. At the beginning of Wikipedia, the committee was entirely appointed by Jimmy Wales, but since then gradually each "seat" on the Committee has been opened to be decided in an election. There is only one seat left that was appointed by Jimmy Wales, and his "term" ends in 2007. Thus, in this area, Wikipedia is becoming more open and democratic.

Charged with managing the entire Wikimedia project is the Wikimedia Board of Trustees. Two seats are elected, two seats are appointed by Jimmy Wales, and one seat is held by Jimmy Wales, chairman of the Board for life. The Board has elected a vice-chair from amongst themselves that would take over if Jimmy Wales suddenly died or was assassinated, but it isn't publicly available who that is. One Board member that had been elected by the community has resigned, and several more elected seats are now being added to the Board. Wikimedia is currently in the middle of an election for these seats.

There is a vast bureaucracy behind the Wikipedia "anarchy." Look over here and you'll see they even have little rubber stamps ("templates," they call them) that they throw on discussion pages to mark an article's quality.

Backlog

[Wellington Grey]

Under the new approach, page edits will no longer be immediately applied to pages but will instead have to be approved by an administrator before they become visible. Vandalism or changes which are not approved will not appear.

With the thousands of edits that happen on wikipedia per second, I don't see how this change will do anything but create an impossible backlog.

-Grey

Re:Backlog

[rbarreira]

I agree with you, but Wikipedia doesn't have thousands of edits per second. Not even per minute. Check this out. 3.6 million edits in June means 120000 per day, or 5000 per hour.

Re:Backlog

[LoudMusic]

With the thousands of edits that happen on wikipedia per second, I don't see how this change will do anything but create an impossible backlog.

Because when people quickly realize that their changes are being monitored and filtered they'll stop making defacement changes to the site.

Re:Backlog

[Yusaku Godai]

I think it would be completely futile to do that for every edit, as you say. But it wouldn't be a terrible idea for some of the more contentious articles--especially technical ones that are frequented by non-technical editors. Just go take a look at the edit history for the Evolution article. It's just riddled with vandalism and and stupid edits that have had to be reverted. Sure, the reverts usually happen pretty quickly, but there's always a brief period when the disinformation is displayed.

Re:Backlog

[David Gerard]

When vandalism doesn't immediately put MR JOHNSON IS GAY LOLOLOLOL in the George W. Bush article - when vandalism has greatly reduced public visibility - the incentive to vandalise is greatly reduced.

Re:Backlog

[David Gerard]

We already have a lot of editors who aren't great writers or researchers, but feel they can contribute to the project by watching for vandalism. And so they do. So we do in fact have the people, and this will help them by giving them a list of all edits from not-logged-in and newly-registered editors only.

Re:Backlog

[David Gerard]

It will actually help the recent-changes patrollers a lot. See the actual proposal - it'll give the recent-changes patrollers a handy list of newbie edits to deal with first. It's not watertight, but it doesn't have to be - it just has to help.

Re:Backlog

[VanessaE]

In addition to always requiring a valid login, one way that I think would sharply reduce the possibility of a huge backlog of edit proposals would be to simply not allow any edits to be submitted until the most recent one(s) have been, at the discretion of one or more qualified "Final Editors", either manually rejected or manually merged into the article. I realise this could keep the less active people from getting their edits into the system before the more active/influential people do, but it also stops the vandals outright.

It might be better to set the depth of the edit queue to, say, 5 edits per article per day globally, and then set a second limit that applies to individual UIDs; say 3 edits per week per article, per UID. I realize this sounds like the method commonly used to control flooding on an IRC chat, but why couldn't the technique be adapted for use in Wikipedia? That way no matter how many people of a common interest are trying to edit an article, there wouldn't be much chance to vandalize it. I'm working off the idea that, statistically, there will be more people that will provide "good" edits than those who would seek to vandalize, which should, sooner or later, allow the "good" edits to become more visible to the Final Editors.

No matter how this is set up, the Final Editors will be kept pretty busy, and some submitter is going to bitch about these limits anyway, so why not start by setting it to something fairly strict so that the Final Editors don't become overwhealmed, and then adjust the limits as necessary.

Re:Backlog

[Maru Dubshinki]

No. It's an interesting idea though - in the same way that Warhol worms or global thermonuclear wars are interesting, that is, in horrible the effects could get. I can't even begin to explain why this system would kill Wikipedia dead but I'll adduce a few possibilities

#corruption and groupthink
#Exodus of the substantial contingent of editors who believe in the openness ideals
#massive bandwidth increases in that each edit needs to be approved which is at least 2 HTTP requests
#the perfect conditions for bot-generated editting DDoS attacks (only an edit is needed? heck, the edit doesn't even need to be vandalism!)
#Countless articles being neglected and "locked"; this is pretty much self-explanatory. Weren't we just discussing over on the NetBSD article about CVS locking of files was greatly impeding progress (and this is code, where the problem would be even less than for a project dependent on casual labor, since articles don't actually *do* anything and so aren't their own reward like programming can be)?
#A massive restriction on the most prolific editors, who frequently edit a favorite or current-project article dozens or hundresd of time, to say nothing of all the other editors ....etc.

I Appreciate Them

[eldavojohn]

I don't envy the Wikipedia designers one bit.

Well, consider what they've done. They created something in which anyone can store any information about anything. And it seems to work to some extent. Yes, there are drawbacks but ... well ... a lot of times my research into something I don't know about starts at Wikipedia. Especially if it's something obscure because the links at the bottom of the articles are the most pertinant.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I envy and appreciate the designers of Wikipedia.

Now, I know you're going to post some examples in response to this of just crazy outlandish things (see GW's page if it isn't on lock down) but all and all, I appreciate what they've done for me.

To illustrate the shortcomings, however, enjoy this Onion Article.

Re:I Appreciate Them

[yankpop]

'envy': a feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by another's better fortune.

It's not a synonym for appreciate. You can appreciate what they've done without envying the tricky situation they are now in with respect to the balance between open access and vandalism. I don't think the poster was saying anything negative about wikipedia.

yp.

Re:I Appreciate Them

[Anonymous Coward]

You forget, Taco and slashdot used to work together with and promote Everything2, a wiki predecessor. They kiboshed the association quickly once OSDN bought them. He's sorta been there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything2#History_a nd_society

Re:I Appreciate Them

[David Gerard]

The actual proposal (not the Bill Thompson version) does in fact answer your concerns. Including the George W. Bush article being opened for general editing again, rather than being in semi-permanent semi-lockdown.

The implosion begins

[MikeRT]

I like Wikipedia, but it's based on a fundamentally flawed premise which is that it allows every bozo to contribute. That's what the blogosphere is for, but that's not what an encyclopedia is supposed to be based on. Do you really want people without credentials to be contributing?

Now here's my suggestion on how to fix it. They need to hire a few full time staffers with their donations and have them handle written applications to contribute to Wikipedia. Let anyone with sound credentials contribute, but require that they prove that they have some idea of what they are talking about. Then, allow anyone to sign up for an account that allows them to post thoughtful critiques if they have some informal knowledge and have good reason to believe than an "authoritative source" may be inaccurate. If they just troll, block them after a few warnings or something.

Re:The implosion begins

[Eivind Eklund]

Yes, we really want people without credentials to be contributing. There's a bunch of work that people without credentials can do perfectly well, and there's some of those without credentials that are more competent in the field than those that DO have credentials. This is especially obvious in the computing/programming area.

We also want those with credentials to be able to contribute without the hassle of having to prove their credentials, as that would cut off 90%.

Eivind.

Re:The implosion begins

[ari_j]

The problem is that credentials are rarely relevant to the broad array of information Wikipedia covers. For instance, I wrote the article about the headbolt heater, which is the device that causes people from warmer climates to ask people from colder climates if their cars are electric (as its 3-prong 110-volt plug typically dangles a few inches out of the vehicle's grill), but I have no qualifications in the field of headbolt heaters outside the fact that I happened to know about them and find some good information about them. In another example, I am a law student and found an article or two that was written by a practicing attorney but needed some clarification.

In a purely credentials based system, I would likely not have been allowed to edit the work of a more experienced person in my own field. To allow otherwise would be to defeat the entire purpose of the credentials system, as an amateur hobbyist in any field would have to be allowed to edit the work of a seasoned professional, and that's essentially what already exists.

Re:The implosion begins

[autophile]

Now here's my suggestion on how to fix it. They need to hire a few full time staffers with their donations and have them handle written applications to contribute to Wikipedia. Let anyone with sound credentials contribute, but require that they prove that they have some idea of what they are talking about.

Dear Sir:

I hereby submit my application, attached, to become a contributor to Wikipedia. Specifically, that section of Wikipedia that deals with the 1970's. Specifically, 1970's American television. More specifically, 1970's American television commercials. Specifically, the 1979 American television commercial for Planters Peanuts depicting a man being chased for his delicious nuts. Although many of the people who worked on this commercial are dead, dying, ill, or on vacation in Belgium, I was part of the janitorial staff at the editing house where this particular commercial was cut, and during my very long breaks, I observed with a keen and jaundiced eye the cutting of this animated gem. I am also neither dead, dying, ill, nor on vacation in Belgium.

I look forward to your quick acceptance of my editorship. I have some very interesting revelatory facts about Mr. Peanut that I would like to add to the article.

Yours,

(name redacted)

Re:The implosion begins

[Anonymous Coward]

They tried that. It was called "Nupedia", and it failed miserably. It's the reason Wikipedia was formed.

Re:The implosion begins

[stevesliva]

In a purely credentials based system, I would likely not have been allowed to edit the work of a more experienced person in my own field. To allow otherwise would be to defeat the entire purpose of the credentials system, as an amateur hobbyist in any field would have to be allowed to edit the work of a seasoned professional, and that's essentially what already exists.

Yup, that's why a trust-based system is better. We-trust-you-not-to-make-shit-up-and-talk-out-of-y our-ass system.

Re:The implosion begins

[fitten]

Yep. I believe this one one of the original arguments as to why Wikipedia would ultimately fail. Go dig up some of those and see what responses you get... Many arguments for it were optimistic/utopian... for such a good project the goodness of mankind will prevail! Many of the arguments against it were realistic/pessimistic... human nature will turn it into a cesspool.

Re:The implosion begins

[lubricated]

yeah, good job on adding a reduntant article.

Re:The implosion begins

[Anonymous Coward]

fixed that for ya.

Re:The implosion begins

[ari_j]

See how easy that was? I had not heard it called a "block heater" often enough to think to check for such an article. The entire quality of Wikipedia is greater now as a result of (a) my knowing the history of the device and the pre-invention alternatives and (b) someone else knowing that the terms "block heater" and "headbolt heater" refer to the same device. If either (a) or (b) had not been the case, or if either one of us were not allowed to contribute because we lack some arbitrarily-specified credentials, the total information content and quality would be less.

Re:The implosion begins

[Anonymous Coward]

And THAT is exactly why I bothered to fix it. :)

In keeping with the spirit of the wiki, and to express my disagreement with this proposed new policy, I fixed it anonymously. (It still needs a bit more cleanup, though.)

Re:4 months...

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS]

He tried to, but now the page is full of ^H^H^H^H

Let me demonstrate something for you

[BadAnalogyGuy]

You are a total fucking moron. You think that just because people have a login ID that they are somehow all of a sudden more likely to treat others with respect and behave with decorum? Were you sucking dick while they were handing out brains?

Sincerely,

Logged in person

Re:Let me demonstrate something for you

[Arancaytar]

Good example, but vandalism is pretty well covered by the system already. It is easy to detect and easy to repair. The biggest danger to Wikipedia's quality are claims that aren't easy to verify, usually concerned with specialized fields that few people are familiar with. The best argument for account registration is not to keep out deliberate troublemakers, but to make it easier to trace factual statements to the one who made them and ask followup questions for references or credentials.

If a scientific article is amended with a certain statement, it would be useful to have a user name attached to that edit, so the user can be asked to clarify where the information is from and what credibility the source has. An IP address is not so easy to contact.

Re:Let me demonstrate something for you

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I learned about this from Thomas Friedman.

Re:Let me demonstrate something for you

[sherms]

In running my own Wikimedia. I've found that despite the all the input. With all the automated watch scripts. It is still difficult to detect minor vandalism like linking [[Problem Faults|Bush]]and of course many others. But it sure has been nice when its locked down for in house documentation. But again that wasn't the only purpose of wiki. Its supposed to be able to run in the open as well.

Re:Let me demonstrate something for you

[The_Wilschon]

Somewhere or other, on a page which was trying to convince people to register as users on wikipedia, I read the claim that having a registered name gave you more anonymity than just using an IP address. Unfortunately, I can't remember where that was anymore, and I'm late for class so I'm not going to look it up.

Re:Let me demonstrate something for you

[David Gerard]

Everyone can see a not-logged-in IP, but if you use a login then only a very few people can see what IP you are using.

Re:Let me demonstrate something for you

[David Gerard]

As we at Wikipedia are painfully aware, there are vandalbots designed specifically to attack Mediawiki installations, create sleeper accounts to wreak havoc a month later, etc., etc. It's amazing just how creative complete dicks can be sometimes.

Re:Let me demonstrate something for you

[LifesABeach]

You know, if one were not to allow non quantifiable modifiers like good, bad, or better; How would wiki articles look like? If one would only allow the use of a persons name, NOT a business or government name with respect to some action, how would that look like? Maybe wiki could have a "Wiki-Press-Release" web site. These Wiki Press Release sites would link to wiki pages which would be factual, and verifiable in essence, (dry reading, but sometimes needed ). Having wiki factual pages link to other web sites would complete the facts. I know that people have got to sell, and express their opinions; But to hide or lie, is a waste of time, energy, and a drain of our limited resources.

Re:Let me demonstrate something for you

[owlnation]

...but vandalism is pretty well covered by the system already...

This statement is pure conjecture. If true, it is also only likely true for full-frontal blatant in your face acts of vandalism. Small specialized planned acts of deliberate manipulation may not be so easy to detect if skillfully done. One would need to be an expert in the subject to notice such - are experts available for every field? And again , as many have already pointed out - who watches the watchers? When the experts are the manipulators, we're all screwed.

Re:Let me demonstrate something for you

[sgt_doom]

Excellent points --- the bio entry on Einstein is the best and most accurate I've seen anywhere, while the entry on Richard Armitage is sadly lacking in real content. Also, the entry on the urban transportation conspiracy (proven by the Senate hearings -- under oath -- of former execs from Sunoco, GM and Firestone) comes to a completely specious conclusion based upon those Senate hearings.

Re:Let me demonstrate something for you

[kimvette]

Why the hell is obvious humor in the form of irony modded down as troll? That should be either +5 Funny or +5 Insightful (depending on whether you view it as a joke, or view it as Exhibit A as to why simply having an account does not deter misbehaving)

Stop wasting mod points. Every time you spend a mod point modding a post down, God kills a kitten. Or something.

Re:Let me demonstrate something for you

[ta bu shi da yu]

And to make it crystal clear what this means: if you log in as a sock puppet/normal user noone will be able to track you down by your IP address except for, of course, David Gerard :-) If Brian Chase (the Seigenthaler vandal) had registered an account, he never would have been tracked down by Daniel Brandt.

Experiment in human nature

[hernyo]

Wikipedia could be called an experiment in human nature: assuming that everybody does their best (and no evil) is just like one of the principles of communism (everybody should do their best at work, despite their motivation, salary, etc). I did never believe it could possible work as well as it did.

I did not research this but I assume that in the beginning mostly more educated people used it and they tend not to abuse it too much. As it became widely adopted and used, everybody started to use it, meaning a higher percentage of people who would like to abuse it.

Unfortunately I don't believe that a [global] experiment in human nature can survive... Check out Winterbottom's movie, "24 hour party people".

Re:Experiment in human nature

[phlegmofdiscontent]

As in society as a whole, Wikipedia is adding checks and balances. Where society has police and the justice system to combat criminals, Wikipedia is using administrators to combat juvenile assholes and manipulative bastards who vandalize pages and add biased/untrue information to entries. Wikipedia was utopian in the past, and that never lasts. Now it's becoming more realistic.

Re:Experiment in human nature

[LauraScudder]

I don't know if Wikipedia ever resembled a utopia, I think it used to operate more like any small society: if one asshole started to dick everyone around the whole community would tell him to leave, and an admin would enforce that. Most of the "policing" structures now are basically the same sorts of things that grow up in community no longer small enough for everyone to know everyone else's business.

Wikipedia has actually hung on to some surprising small society-type things. For instance, a significant number of indefinite blocks are still done under the remarkably informal "exhausted the community's patience" clause of the blocking policy. (Usually starts with a handful of people discussing what to do about a problem user in a high visibility spot. If somone proposes that their patience is exhausted, everyone is asked if they object to a block. If not then an admin does it. If the blocked user can't find an admin who thinks he deserves another chance then he's supposed to get the picture.)

Re:Experiment in human nature

[David Gerard]

Well, there's nearly a thousand admins on the English Wikipedia. If someone is unable to convince A SINGLE ONE out of ONE THOUSAND PEOPLE that he should be unblocked ... then I'd say that might be a reasonable clue that he needs to learn better how to play with others.

(And there's a fair bit of agreement between admins, but there's also a tremendous amount of disagreement, so if you ask two admins something you'll get four answers. So if someone is dead set determined they've been hounded out by admin group think ... then they're probably not going to do too well at Wikipedia anyway. Editing Wikipedia is a privilege, not a right.)

Re:Experiment in human nature

[LauraScudder]

If someone is unable to convince A SINGLE ONE out of ONE THOUSAND PEOPLE that he should be unblocked ... then I'd say that might be a reasonable clue that he needs to learn better how to play with others.

I'm always surprised at the number who don't get it. Obviously the admins are in collusion to exclude this one particular person because they're all prejudiced against X (nevermind that 95% of the admins haven't even given X enough thought to form an opinion on it).

Re:Experiment in human nature

[arwel]

As someone who's quite early in the alphabetical list of Administrators, I sometimes get requests to overturn a block. I've never yet been persuaded that the block was unjustified.

Re:4 months...

[mgblst]

Why? He probably put it there. If you aren't with us, you are against us.

Everyone loves an analogy!

[dougjm]

I see what you're saying.

But if we modify the analogy so that wiki IS the dance and that all the people meet at the dance and pair off and settle down, they don't need to go to the dance anymore.

What I'm saying is that after the initial wiki process is over for a given article you could say that - as long as people agree that it's a complete and up to date article - the wiki process could be closed since there is no more to be added at the present time.

I'm not saying that this would work but I can see on both sides of the line.

Re:Everyone loves an analogy!

[Gospodin]

What I'm saying is that after the initial wiki process is over for a given article you could say that - as long as people agree that it's a complete and up to date article - the wiki process could be closed since there is no more to be added at the present time.

Great, but: who decides when to "close" the article? (Maybe this could be automated when no changes have been made after X amount of time.) Also, how does an article get re-opened when new information comes out?

No matter how you do this, you're going to introduce editorial controls. Not necessarily a bad thing, but OP was advocating going back to the original completely open editorial policy.

Re:Everyone loves an analogy!

[MerrickStar]

The problem therein is the sheer volume of articles that can never be completely up to date, at least not for long.

For example, I'm sure the entry on say, Latin, won't need to be updated very often. But to the other end I'm sure that the artcile about George W. Bush will need updating somewhat frequently, at least for the next few years.

To impliment a 'closed when current' concept, you would have to allow many to remain perpetually open, and due to human nature, and by that I mean the need to disagree, it's the ones that would need to stay open that are usually the most contriversial, and thereby most likely to be changed/vandalized

Re:Everyone loves an analogy!

[dougjm]

I absolutely agree but wiki doesn't nessesarily just aply to wikipedia - a lot of FOSS now use wiki as the basis of their manuals - which is great but you could see why in that context the wiki element is the tool that lets the substance form and then it's closed until new software updates etc.

I think wiki and wikipedia is great but its strongest point is its biggest weakness - registration of users helps reduce misuse but that isn't the most satisfactory answer either.

The most interesting thing about wiki is the debates and arguments that go on on the discussion pages - it's that plus boards like /.'s that make me feel that there is any debate left in the world now that our glorius leaders seem not to listen to what people say or how they feel - that would be the worst thing if we were to loose that too.

Re:Everyone loves an analogy!

[Anonymous Coward]

What I'm saying is that after the initial wiki process is over for a given article you could say that - as long as people agree that it's a complete and up to date article - the wiki process could be closed since there is no more to be added at the present time.

Oh, no! We are out of knowledge. Quick, close the wikipedia.

How awful

[el_womble]

This is damning of our society. A central, organised resource where people are free to contribute should be the pinacle of the internet - but it isn't - its a place where politicians, corporations and zealots spread their lies under a banner of truth.

But I guess this is art imitating life. Wikipedia was a democracy - and this proves that not all people are equal and that power is a much greater force for bad than knowledge and freedom is for good.

Re:How awful

[BenjyD]

It's hardly damning. In order for Wikipedia to be perfect, it requires that every single human being with access to the internet is perfect. That's obviously never going to happen, so Wikipedia has the odd problem. I'm amazed the site exists at all.

Re:How awful

[ajs]

To quote the BBC article:

Wikipedia is, and will continue to be, a work in progress, a best effort by thousands of people to create an accurate, impartial and useful repository of human knowledge. As such it has succeeded in covering more topics, in more languages, than any other encyclopaedia.

But it necessarily contains errors, some placed there deliberately by writers with a specific agenda and others simply mistakes that have gone unnoticed.

No, Wikipedia isn't perfect, but taken on the whole, it's one of the best references on everything out there. Specific references on narrow topic are often better, but that's certainly to be expected.

What stuns me is that, even having a fairly bright cadre of programmers working on MediaWiki, the idea of a real, branching revision control system hasn't taken hold. It seems that the best way to deal with vandalism and inaccuracy in general would be to have all changes made on branches (individual branches for anonymous editors, and perhaps a unified dev branch for logged in, longer-term editors), and merging of branches could be another part of the editing process. MediaWiki needs to become a revision control system and document management system that supports a real, if distributed, editorial process.

Re:How awful

[goldspider]

People are free to contribute lies under a banner of truth. That's the very nature of Wiki, for better or worse.

Not enough randroids anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could it be because the widened user base isn't faithful enough to the sacred credo of objectivism compared to how much Wales' flock of randroid sheep once was?

Keep it as it is!!

[tritonman]

I say keep wikipedia as it currently is, you can add a disclaimer to the top of every page saying that the information is freely edited and may be false, but if I wanted an encyclopedia that was completely written by a bunch of elitist self-important ivy-league PhDs, then I would just dust off my encyclopedia brittanica books.

Re:Keep it as it is!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only are you entirely correct, Wikipedia is full of self-organized bias groups that are disproportionately represented among the administrators, bureaucrats and other positions of authority.

For example, a very large number of the most prominent administrators, bureaucrats and arbitrators are members of the "Wikiproject Judaism". This project has a commendable goal of improving coverage of Judaism, but it also inserts and protects the pro-Israeli bias present in virtually every article written about the middle east. Adding an "approval layer" is only going to make this bias stronger and less correctable.

(And before the accusations fly, not being pro-Israel enough is not a good excuse to call someone an anti-semite. I'm neither pro-Israel nor anti-Israel.)

Re:Keep it as it is!!

[Maru Dubshinki]

Isn't the disclaimer already there?

They have my sympathy.

[porkchop_d_clown]

I had tried to create a user id for myself on wikipedia, in order to update an article I was reading, and was immediately banned, along with my IP. I was quite angry because there was no warning - and I complained. A response came quite quickly, politely informing me that the name I chose violated some pattern matcher for inappropriate names. I was still annoyed, but after they released the IP block I created an appropriate account and put a "watch" on the article I had wanted to update.

Over the following weeks, this relatively low-profile article was vandalized several times; each time it was corrected but also represented a vulnerability to people reading the page. One attack, in particular, deliberately reversed the sense of several health and safety tips, making cautions into recommendations and recommendations into cautions.

Re:4 months...

[rbarreira]

I'm sorry but I can't find anything libelous on that page. Yes, I checked a version from a few days ago, so it's not the case that someone reading slashdot fixed it.

Amazing?

[ACAx1985]

It's somewhat amazing how, at a major university, I still sea at least 50% of my fellow students handing in midterm papers with blue underlined links crediting Wikipedia as a source on their Works Cited page. Unreal.

Re:Amazing?

[ACAx1985]

see* .. That's what I get for watching that shark show on the Discovery Channel while typing on SD.

Re:Amazing?

[Pantero Blanco]

I don't see the problem. Even if they only use information from it that is supported by other sources, shouldn't they list it as a source? Aren't they supposed to find more than one supporting source for claims, anyway, which would alert them to inaccuracies?

Re:Amazing?

[schnutz]

Here's a thought...wikipedia is a great starting point for gathering information but folks should know to take it with a grain of salt! Personally, I've used it to scour for information on a lot of research projects and it provides me (usually) with great links and information. However, I need to discern whether the article is legit or total bogass. Consider the source!

Re:Amazing?

[David Gerard]

Speaking as someone who's worked his arse off for Wikipedia for the last three years ... I heartily endorse this comment. Wikipedia is not perfect and doesn't pretend to be. It's pretty good, but there's no substitute for thinking and checking the listed sources yourself. What, no listed sources? Then take it with a bigger grain of salt. Etc.

Re:Amazing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing how, at a major university, you could still spell "see" as "sea". Unreal.

Society?

[porkchop_d_clown]

It has nothing to do with our society. On the other hand, it has everything to do with our species.

Re:Society?

[el_womble]

I only half believe that. While it is impossible to deny that our species is polluted with short-sighted agressors I believe that they are the minority. Most of the people I know are loving and caring who would go out of their way to avoid deceiving or hurting people for personal gain.

It is our society, they way we form groups and heirarchies that has decided that minority of agressors show 'leadership' and 'strength' and that these qualities allow them to demand a greater percentage of the wealth and a greater freedom in mates.

Was our human instincts that formed this society? I would say that it was the instincts of the agressors who enforced their rule through fear rather than the majority, as most people are happy to bundle through life without a 'leader'.

Re:Society?

[porkchop_d_clown]

only half believe that. While it is impossible to deny that our species is polluted with short-sighted agressors I believe that they are the minority. Most of the people I know are loving and caring who would go out of their way to avoid deceiving or hurting people for personal gain.

And yet, the history of all societies is driven by such people.

It's banal to remark that even monsters love their children - banal, but true. I'm pretty sure the people who trash wikipedia wouldn't treat their own homes or families that way.

George W Bush says...

[abscissa]

Don't let the (trolls?/terrorists?) win!

Maybe if Wiki ran under Ninnle!

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sure that Ninnle Linux would be able to solve just about all of their problems.

Wikipedia needs a way to recognize professionals.

[TheNoxx]

It needs a ranking system that seperates hobbyists and dabblers and amateurs from specialists, doctors, and professionals, and gives them voting power on articles in their field accordingly.

Why Digg will never surpass Slashdot

[h2oliu]

I have seen arguments that Digg will take over slashdot. But when a site grows, it always faces these types of issues, and editorial oversight is the only defense.

Re:4 months...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's an idea: maybe you could, like, remove it?

uhm, because wikipedia isn't his pet project on the internet but jimbo wales's?

Re:4 months...

[Arancaytar]

Can't find it - not even its removal in the edit history of the last month or so. ...or do I need to give my sarcasm-meter another kick?

Re:4 months...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry but I can't find anything libelous on that page.

You aren't confusing that former minister of Economy with the Grand Duke's brother, are you?

Meta-moderation of wikipedia

[daranz]

I think a better decision would be setting up something akin to the meta-moderation system here on slashdot. Instead of designating users to do the reviewing, why not let all users (or at least those that had an account for a while) review random edits from wikipedia. You could then assign higher weights to edits of users whose edits are often marked as incorrect/vandalizing in the moderation system, and make them come up more frequently on the not-so-random list of edits to review. That way, you'd keep control in hands of the contributors, and vandalizing edits of obscure pages would have better chances of being caught. Of course, such a system would not be perfect, but on the other hand, peer-review by a smaller group of people that you trust wouldn't be that perfect either.

Re:Meta-moderation of wikipedia

[Andrewkov]

The big problem with that is people mod up comments that *sound* insightful or interesting, with little regard to accuracy. Just look at some of the +5 comments around here that are plain wrong. A system like that might help with vandals and trolls, but might not help much with accuracy of the articles.

Re:Meta-moderation of wikipedia

[lokiomega]

Sounds like a good idea. Paying staff to review articles is not a smart move. Peer-reviewed articles would remove most obvious vandalism. More emphasis on citing works should remove the rest. Keep the wiki in the hands of the people!

Point taken.

[Arancaytar]

Yes, it is not [i]always[/i] easy to detect vandalism.

Re:4 months...

[Anonymous Coward]

But there will be soon...

Probably a good move

[blantonl]

.. but how will they staff it?

I think the Wiki concept is perfect for a niche application, such as documenting a software process, or a software project, or some other specific topic that has a focus. I use a number of corporate Wikis and hobby related wikis for these exact types of topics. However.. in Wikipedia's case, it is a whole different ballgame.

The problem with Wikipedia is that the folks that *now* are most inclined to contribute to Wikipedia are the ones that stand to benefit from their contribution, either by pushing an agenda, or disparaging another source. Granted, there are a number of contributors that are active with good intentions, but I suspect as Wikipeda continues down the path of letting *anyone* contribute immediately, that subsequent contributions will be more skewed towards revert wars and subtle edits to existing content vs. new content and contribtions.

The reality is, all the editing of existing content will become more of a platform to introduce opinnions and agendas vs usable content. Not to say that there aren't contributors that will continue to give good content, but what might have been 5% of agenda pushing 2 years ago is going to be 40% now with the critical mass of information.

Wikipedia is making a good move and the social dynamics will be interesting (i.e. Managing and Staffing this new model)

Re:Probably a good move

[David Gerard]

The actual proposal answers this question.

Re:Probably a good move

[David Gerard]

Congratulations on conclusively proving it can't possibly work in theory.

Thankfully, it mostly does in practice, because most people don't in fact seem to be malicious.

What did we learn?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

What we learned here is that even with login IDs, people are no more likely to behave better, contribute more, or be a better citizen than they would be if they were anonymous.

On top of that, there are many misanthropes who are just as happy giving approval to blatant attacks on other members of a community as they are approving well-written articles.

There is no magic bullet, but requiring login IDs does not even come close to being a useful method of community building. At least in the Wiki world.

Re:What did we learn?

[Americano]

What we learned here is that even with login IDs, people are no more likely to behave better, contribute more, or be a better citizen than they would be if they were anonymous.

To me, it would seem that the question of Login IDs boils down to a matter of how much "noise" you're willing to accept with your signal. While login IDs are certainly no panacea for bad edits (stupid & malicious people can get login ids just as easily as smart & conscientious people), I'd be interested to see if there's any data that supports this statement one way or another. I'm not aware of any... but it would certainly make for an interesting set of numbers to look at.

I do think that requiring Login IDs would help prevent systematic abuse by a particularly determined malicious user, but it certainly wouldn't address the issue of spin & bias by individual submitters who might not even REALIZE the extent to which they might be distorting the actual facts of an issue. Do you lock someone out because they cite Ann Coulter, or Al Franken, as a source? Does a citation link to Little Green Footballs or Daily Kos get someone banned? And the other issue with logins is, if you require them, would that hava a chilling effect on the overall rate of submissions to Wikipedia?

I'll admit, Wikipedia is often my first source when I go looking for information on a topic, because it's convenient, and I can quickly get an overview of a topic, and dig in deeper using the "External Links" section of the article to get more information from a variety of sources. Anybody who starts & finishes at Wikipedia for their research deserves whatever ridicule they may find themselves the target of.

More than one way to find information

[The Second Horseman]

Now, not everyone is going to remeber Usenet in its heyday, but having a good faq maintained by a moderator or long-time contributors posted once a month, plus discussions worked well. Once dejanews (the archive Google ended up with) came along, it made it even easier to search. Nice combination of reference and discussion. Just as many crazies, but kill filters took care of those for you. And it's far easier to make sure you avoid seeing nothing but amazon front stores, price comparison sites, etc. when doing a search through Usenet than on the web in general.

Is it a reference? Not exactly. But it grew over time, changed, etc. Wikipedia will as well, but it launched as something grandiose, with a certain "Pay attention to me!" tone. Wikis are great - but need some sort of focus.

Re:4 months...

[RobotRunAmok]

Here's an idea: maybe you could, like, remove it?

Here's an even crazier notion: Maybe, if he wanted to interact with content on the Internet, he'd be playing friggin' EVE Online? Maybe -- and this is a stretch, stay with me on this one -- he just wants to consult an encyclopedia and get some geo-political information without the risk that it has somehow been altered by a twelve year-old on a dare made in the back of a school bus?

Speaking truthiness to wikiality

[billthom]

I wrote the BBC piece, and it's generated a lot of discussion on the WikiEN-l mailing list, as well as some correspondence between me and senior wikipedians around the question of whether the German proposal amounts to making the Wikipedia *more* or *less* wikilike. My blog posting goes into more detail. At the moment Jimbo and I have agreed a truce- we disagree over the implications, and I accept that he sees what's happening as an improvement not a restriction.

Good idea, I second it

[kahei]

Hm, to my great surprise, that actually sounds like it would work. The analogy is good; Wikipedia is like a large open source project where EVERYONE has commit rights and where commiting requires a single click.

I would imagine that a fairly structured system would be needed, with provision to make sure that editors who die or lose interest don't result in permanently stagnant articles, and so on; but these are all things that OSS projects have faced in the past and they are relatively well understood.

Now, if I may illustrate a small problem: I bag Cardiff (because I hate Cardiff), Tibet (because China has an eternal right to cleanse non-Han from the face of the world and everyone should know that), Dickens (because I think I know a lot about Dickens although I sometimes confuse him with Ted Kennedy) and Ancient Greece (because I know that no one person, or even one group of people, knows enough to fully describe Ancient Greece, so the partial description might as well be mine).

Still, even given that, I think 'gatekeepers' of articles, topics and regions might be the way to go.

Again: Wikitruth.info

[wowbagger]

In case anybody wants to look up some of Jimbo's actions from another perspective, go to Wikitruth.

It is to Wikipedia what DailyKos is to conservatism or Instapundit is to liberalism - a completely biased site decrying the flaws in a philosophy. As such, take its claims with some skepticism and salt, feel free to reject them, but do at least consider them before you reject them.

Note: I am not associated with WikiTruth - but I feel they make some good points.

*sigh*

[WWWWolf]

From relatively early in its existence it has been possible to ensure only administrators edit a page, but recent changes make it harder for ordinary users to create and update pages on the site.

For reference, this is supposed to be about the semi-protection. Which just happens to involve registering an user account and showing, just for a few passing moments, that you are capable of appropriate conduct.

That is, if you want to edit the couple of popular articles that happen to be semi-protected at the time.

There's 196 semi-portected articles at the moment in English Wikipedia. There's 1,355,706 articles. There's 70 articles at the moment that are full-protected, as well as handful of articles that show up in article count but are actually protected against recreation.

It still leaves you (...calculations, calculations, I'm a bit bad at math...) over 1.3 million articles for you to completely vandalise if you don't bother to spend a whole two minutes registering an user account.

You don't even need to confirm your email address.

And the separation of approved / unreviewed edits has not yet, as far as I know, even been implemented in MediaWiki.

Sorry if I sound a bit tired. I just find it a little bit vexing that people get stuck on small things like "hey, it says 'anyone can edit', and I get this error message that says that I can't". This is what happens when someone realises that you need some control. Regrettably, utopias where everyone can do anything don't work - human nature being what it is, you need some control. It's almost like saying "Oh, sure, everyone can come in our country!... except for people who don't have a passport and visa... and people who try to cross the border at a funny place... and armed, hostile soldiers of another country... obviously... But apart of that, everyone can come!"

So read "a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" just like you would read "a city where everyone can perform on the streets." (don't be surprised if, in such city, the police asks you to get the hell away from the way of the traffic and move to the sidewalk like everyone else.)

Secondly, what the heck is wrong with the concept of reviewed versions? It doesn't prevent anyone from editing the stuff or even seeing the unreviewed edits, it just prevents people from seeing stuff we don't know to be good. It's a quality control measure, not a barrier to contributing.

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

Give up the "wiki" nature of Wikipedia, and it's just not special anymore. Users will gladly go elsewhere. Where did Google come from? Everyone thought Yahoo! had the web locked up, until they started straying from what people came for. Now that you have the benefit of thousands of hours of work from anonymous volunteers, you want to change the fundamental nature of the marketplace they've contributed to. Well I can tell you that a lot of the volunteer corps, including registered users, don't want their marketplace of ideas changed, so they'll either go elsewhere, or create the elsewhere that is what Wikipedia used to be if it is changed.

Reviewed versions are subject to incredible personal bias. And it interferes with the instant mental reward for being able to say "wow, I fixed that", even if someone comes along thirty seconds later and reverts your change.

Lose the wiki nature, and you become Encarta. They "permit" edits, but they are reviewed before posting.

In other words, there's a HUGE difference between permitting edits from the general public, and inviting edits from the general public.

Re:*sigh*

[WWWWolf]

In other words, there's a HUGE difference between permitting edits from the general public, and inviting edits from the general public.

I'm a member of the "general public". Wikipedia folks, bless their kindness, made me an administrator. I guess we have a slightly different definitions of "general public" here.

My point was that Wikipedia is still permitting edits from anonymous users but restricting the anonymous users in places where they're making nuisance of themselves under the guise of anonymity. That happens on a tiny fraction of the pages.

In my view, Wikipedia wouldn't get anywhere without rules. If there weren't any rules, we wouldn't have anything but vandalism and copyright violations. Even the name of the project limits the stuff: We're Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. That alone limits the scope of the project. We have a policy that says vandalism is most annoying, we have a policy that says copyright infringements must be removed and people should write their own stuff. From early on, Wikipedia has had its rules that limit its "wiki nature".

And specifically, Wikipedia has had, and will have, rules that are supposed to deal with personal bias, with stable versions or not. I don't think it will be the Wrong Version mk. 2.

Too many Interest groups are ruining it.

[Shivetya]

Damn freaks won't stay on their hate filled message boards and have to use public areas to stir up trouble and sow FUD.

I have caught some of the crap that occurs and most of it is from one side. Still both sides engage in it and its just nuts. Best are the pieces on foreign people who are controversial and alive.

Frankly they don't have a choice. Wiki was fine until everyone who had a chip on their shoulder and the anonyminity of the internet to hide behind found it.

Hell verification at the level of banking would probably be required to keep it civil. The selfishness of these prima donnas is such that they would ruin such a great resource for the rest of us.

Don't let this happen!

[Churla]

How can you people not see this?!?!?!

It's the liberal media trying to destroy our TRUTHINESS!

Accurcy

[Lex-Man82]

I've been reading Slash Dot for a few weeks now and have noticed that most of the articles posted aren't based on any kind of verifiable fact, just some raving fan boy journalists opinion. So what chance does Wikipedia have?

Re:4 months...

[wile_e8]

Here's an even crazier notion: Maybe, if he wanted to interact with content on the Internet, he'd be playing friggin' EVE Online? Maybe -- and this is a stretch, stay with me on this one -- he just wants to consult an encyclopedia and get some geo-political information without the risk that it has somehow been altered by a twelve year-old on a dare made in the back of a school bus?
If he just wanted to get information, how did he know it was libelous? If he doesn't want to fix problems he knows about but still gets upset about the errors, maybe he should find a better reference for information about the Luxembourgish language instead of one that relies on its users to correct errors.

Global Classification

[serano]

When it comes down to it, we collectively agree on what "truth" is. Wikipedia is struggling with how to be an encyclopedia of our knowledge, when we don't collectively agree on what our knowledge is or what the facts are in the first place.

One way or other, the editors at Wikipedia are in the position of being arbiters. They can either be "benevolent arbiters of fact", essentially deciding for us what truth is, or they can be referees making sure the rules Wikipedia establishes are followed but taking a strictly neutral stance on content itself.

They are mostly taking the latter approach, which I think is the best path to stick to. I think they should more conscientiously pursue this path and communicate clearly that they are not an arbiter of fact.

Wiki Truthiness

[gelfling]

Wiki is a wonderful example of people shaping information to reflect what they want it to represent instead of what it actually represents. It's really a self referential reference to the internet in general. Things mean what you want them to mean, fact is whatever you're willing to assert loud enough and people are experts if they say they are.

How do you do the hierarchy?

[drew_kime]

I like the idea, but information isn't as hierarchical as code. In code, you can have the networking maintainer, the encryption maintainer, the sound maintainer, etc. Sure, they sometimes have to work together where these sections touch.

But who would "own" the Taiwan page: the politics maintainer or the geography maintainer? Who would "own" Intelligent Design: science or religion?

I'm not asking this to shoot down the idea, because I like the idea. I'm trying to figure out a structure for choosing maintainers that would make it work.

Re:How do you do the hierarchy?

[digitalgiblet]

I suspect the best organization structure would be an editorial board.

This would parallel FOSS pretty well since you have a group of people who have commit rights. The trick would be making the group large enough to handle the throughput. Finding a balance between academics and non-academics would be a challenge. Kind of like getting lions and hyenas to work together on a project: they just don't like each other... Each has great arguments why the other is unsuitable, but a balance of the two would be crucial to the success of such a project.

Forking the TEXT of Wikipedia would be no problem, but the IMAGES are another matter. I kicked around the idea of putting together a mobile device package for education and including the Wikipedia but ran into two problems: 1) the images are all submitted with their own rights and licenses (text is covered by one licence) and 2) nothing makes parents/teachers/other adults unhappy like finding out that the handy encyclopedia they either bought or downloaded for free for their child has buried within it information that is sexually explicit, hate filled, or just plain wrong.

Look at it this way, practically anyone can vandalize the Wikipedia, but over time it tends to "self heal". Great. But that means that on any given day a certain percentage of it is in need of "healing". Someone could say that Christopher Columbus was a dirty <insert hate category> who had a tiny <insert sexual reference> and who definitively proved that the earth was <flat|cubic|made of marshmallow cream>. It is all well and good that someone will repair that, but if Johnny writes his paper based on what it said when he last looked at it, then Johnny's going to repeat 5th grade (and possibly land in counciling).

Another benefit of "versioning" the info is citability. If I were a teacher I would not allow a student to use Wikipedia as a reference for a paper. Why? Let's say little Johnny cited the Wikipedia in his Columbus the Dirty <hate category> paper. When I go to check the little nimrod's reference, it doesn't say that any more. Great it got cleaned up, but how can you cite a reference to a moving target?

Now if there were a versioning system and Johnny had cited "Wikipedia 2.7", and I could go back to that version to check his references, then I could accept his paper. Also the fact that the version would be fact checked and edited before versioning would make it a much more valuable reference work. The "healing" process would occur before publication.

Of course this implies that some group of people with the interest and ability to do so would actually get involved. The task of editing all of Wikipedia would be gargantuan. But even if a new "version" were made every 2-3 years, it would be a very valuable "people's encyclopedia".

Re:How do you do the hierarchy?

[DragonWriter]

Look at it this way, practically anyone can vandalize the Wikipedia, but over time it tends to "self heal". Great. But that means that on any given day a certain percentage of it is in need of "healing". Someone could say that Christopher Columbus was a dirty who had a tiny and who definitively proved that the earth was . It is all well and good that someone will repair that, but if Johnny writes his paper based on what it said when he last looked at it, then Johnny's going to repeat 5th grade (and possibly land in counciling).

I think I was taught at the time I was assigned my first "research paper" in elementary school that general encyclopedia entries were not generally acceptable sources.

If I were a teacher I would not allow a student to use Wikipedia as a reference for a paper. Why?

Because its an encyclopedia?

Let's say little Johnny cited the Wikipedia in his Columbus the Dirty paper. When I go to check the little nimrod's reference, it doesn't say that any more. Great it got cleaned up, but how can you cite a reference to a moving target?

Proper citations of web pages, including citing dates for sources that aren't stable, are part of most guides to citations. Teachers should be teaching students to cite them properly, and to create printed copies of any material they cite showing the date and URL. (Of course, material produced by web applications that you can't navigate to by a URL is a problem, but generally that's not something you'll want to cite, at least in an elementary/middle-school paper.)

Of course this implies that some group of people with the interest and ability to do so would actually get involved. The task of editing all of Wikipedia would be gargantuan.

No, it would be entirely unmanageable without killing Wikipedia; Wikipedia is bigger than most encyclopedias and adding new material at a rate that no practical review process would ever catch up. There's plenty of professionally edited general encyclopedias, both in dead tree versions and online. Wikipedias unique value is in not being like them.

Re:How do you do the hierarchy?

[Maru Dubshinki]

Wikipedia is already versioned - what do you think the edit histories are? A non-branching project (if I understand the version controlling people's terminology aright).

If you want to cite an article reliably... you cite a particular version! Just like you would with software, ex. "GNU Emacs 21.3", not "Emacs". "Revision 72389600 of article Bloodlines", not "Bloodlines".

The cite button/linked-to-page on the toolbar already explicitly tells you that this is how Wikipedia is supposed to be cited.

Re:How do you do the hierarchy?

[digitalgiblet]

" No, it would be entirely unmanageable without killing Wikipedia; Wikipedia is bigger than most encyclopedias and adding new material at a rate that no practical review process would ever catch up. There's plenty of professionally edited general encyclopedias, both in dead tree versions and online. Wikipedias unique value is in not being like them."

I do not disagree with you at all. My point was that doing so would be difficult to the point of being unlikely. I do not think that anyone would undertake such without a profitable business model, and you are absolutely correct that at that point you have just another encyclopedia company.

Your point that Wikipedia's value is that it is not like the professional encyclopedia companies is correct. You and I may differ in our opinions of what its "unique value" is. I personally use it frequently for personal reference. For that use, informal reference, it is exceedingly valuable as long as the reader is at least somewhat skilled in reading critically. If I read in an entry that South Africa is populated entirely by leprechauns, I am capable of discerning that I am most likely looking at a vandalized page, and would look at the revision history. A third grader, perhaps, might not. If I read the article on leptons and read "There are three known flavors of lepton: the electron, the muon and the gluon." I would not know that a vandal had replaced "tau" with "gluon". I know just enough about particle physics to know the word "gluon" but not enough to know that it is wrong in this case.

Another poster pointed out that you could cite a revision number with Wikipedia, so I stand corrected on that point. Last time I wrote a research paper, citing online references was not an option because there were very few of them and almost no one had access to them. I have to smile at how quaint microfilm and microfiche seem now... If I remember correctly general encyclopedias were allowed as sources in elementary school. I could be wrong since it has been a very, very long time since I wrote a research paper myself and my children are not yet old enough to have been required to write one. My point here is that if we agree that certainly ONLY elementary students might be able to use it as a reference, it would be a dubious source since they have probably not learned enough critical thinking skills to weed out the bad information. Of course there is no better way to learn critical thinking skills than a string of "F" papers with increasingly harsh rephrasings of "This is obviously a vandalized entry, moron" written on them in blood-red ink...

One last thought, and I'll move along quietly... I have been watching with interest the One Laptop Per Child project. The gist is $100 laptops to go to developing countries for each school child TO REPLACE TEXTBOOKS among other things. One of the highly touted ideas is to include a copy of the Wikipedia so the students have access to a wealth of information. Think about that for a second. Imagine that the Wikipedia is quite possibly YOUR ONLY SOURCE OF INFO about practically everything in the world. You could literally have a generation of children in Thailand who grow up convinced that South Africa is populated by leprechauns. Yikes. That is an extreme example that would probably be caught by the teachers, but what about my lepton example? Not that specific case, but imagine how many SUBTLY vandalized pages or politically spun pages would exist in any copy of the Wikipedia that might serve as a whole nation of children's only source of info. Scary.

I think we agree that the Wikipedia is an incredibly useful tool when taken for what it is. You just have to understand its nature and use it appropriately.

Re:How do you do the hierarchy?

[digitalgiblet]

I stand corrected.

Re:How do you do the hierarchy?

[DragonWriter]

The gist is $100 laptops to go to developing countries for each school child TO REPLACE TEXTBOOKS among other things. One of the highly touted ideas is to include a copy of the Wikipedia so the students have access to a wealth of information. . Think about that for a second. Imagine that the Wikipedia is quite possibly YOUR ONLY SOURCE OF INFO about practically everything in the world.

The computer may be to replace textbooks, but the idea is not to use Wikipedia to replace textbooks. Its to have electronic texts delivered to the computer to replace dead-tree textbooks; Wikipedia is one idea to provide general reference material with the computer that would be better than the current general reference material (i.e., nothing) many of the students receiving it would have, not an idea for a one-stop replacement for textbooks and classroom instruction.

Establish a baseline version

[foniksonik]

IMHO the WikiPedia team needs to establish a procedure for flagging a version of a document as 'verified' and make it a special edition of the document which is uneditable for a period of time. This would act as a sort of checkpoint for the data. This would require a periodic audit of articles by an objective team who's job it would be to verify the current state of the article, lookup references and facts, etc.

This need not stop the ability of people to add new data.... in fact they could continue adding to the article while it was being audited.... but at the end of the audit the team would have compiled a 'verified' version which would then be the standard baseline version that could be used as a 'reference'.

Additionally a diff routine performed against the latest live copy and the reference version could send out a notice to WikiPedia editors that a substantial change had occurred which could mean that the article is due for another audit...

Principled vs. Useful

[Starker_Kull]

Much as I would like to see Wikipedia hew to its original idea of "anyone can edit anything", experience seems to demonstrate that if Wikipedia is to remain a USEFUL reference, as opposed to a merely entertaining/misleading one, some sort of restriction is necessary to rein in the 5% of the contributors who are asses and trying to promote a personal agenda vs. the 95% who want to enlighten and inform.

I frankly vote for the useful model. There are plenty of useless websites out there already. I'm glad they are experimenting with the right balance between user contribution and editorial control, because there is NOT an obvious answer, and the most practical choice may only be determined by experiment.

Hope they can figure it out.

You can't be serious

[Anonymous Coward]

"Here's an idea: maybe you could, like, remove it?"

Here's another idea; the libel edits keep re-appearing.....
Most people don't have time to babysit a webpage when the vast majority of people using it aren't concerned with truth, NPOV, and feel the need to include every irrational, biased, unfounded criticism or charge in an encyclopedia.

How about this compromise?

[LargeWu]

Wikipedia's greatest strength AND flaw is that anyone can edit a page.

So what about a pseudo-Slashdot meta-moderation solution: Have a team of moderators that cover a broad subject area (e.g. History, Mathematics, Science, Politics - these can be defined as broad or narrow as one likes). Their job is to reject any edit that is obviously malicious, incorrect, or politically motivated. This does not require in-depth expertise about every possible topic under that subject area. Then, users can meta-moderate the moderators. Moderators with low karma ratings could be replaced.

Ya ditched a lot of people at the dance?

[SlappyBastard]

Because, um, ya know ... er ... your comments about men and such ...

You scare me!!! Go away!

Mom!!! Mom? hey!'s pickin' on me!!

More serious, the marketing metaphor is an advisement that you stick to your plan or else you wait until a more appropriate time to end the relationship. Same thing as going to a dance.

Fact checking in real encyclopedias

[Nyenyec]

No, real world encyclopedias don't cite all their sources, but they do double check every statement they make in the article.
Here's a podcast from Wikimania 2006, where the editor in chief(?) of Worldbook talks about their fact-checking process. He clearly states that they check every fact and statement in at least two reliable sources.

MP3

Re:Fact checking in real encyclopedias

[DragonWriter]

Yes, and this is why (despite having not much greater overall accuracy, and much less scope of coverage, generally), commercial encyclopedias charge money for their flagship products, while Wikipedia is free.

You can't have the top-down control (and the benefits it brings, which are real though perhaps not all that cost-effective) of a traditional publication, and the distributed, informal, open nature (which has its own benefits) of Wikipedia.

Given what encyclopedias are generally good for, at least to me, I think Wikipedia has generally the better, more effective model. I've certainly found more useful coverage for things that actually concern me through Wikipedia than through traditional encyclopedias.

Re:Fact checking in real encyclopedias

[David Gerard]

The German Wikipedia (where this experiment is being run) has done three release versions on CD and DVD, and sold over 20,000 of the third one at 10 euros (US$12) a copy. That's real people paying real money for wiki-generated content, and is directly comparable to DVD editions of Encyclopedia Britannica or Encarta.

Re:Fact checking in real encyclopedias

[LauraScudder]

One thing I like about Wikipedia in comparison to traditional encyclopedias is that we can and should be transparent about the sources we use. Whereas the perception of authority of an encyclopedia is based on their name alone, we have to rely soley on transparency in authorship, writing process, and sources. I prefer that system.

Re:Fact checking in real encyclopedias

[Achromatic1978]

Not true. The 10 euro distribution of DVD covers distribution and production costs, and not much more. People are generally paying for the convenience.

Also, not sure how you 'directly compare' that 10 euro cost versus the DVD version of EB which retails at 60+ euro.

Re:Fact checking in real encyclopedias

[David Gerard]

I compare them as a DVD-ROM encyclopedias. Whether the 10 euros goes on profits, costs or beer and hookers is irrelevant — it's still 10 euros being paid by the consumer for a DVD-ROM encyclopedia.

Britannica frequently has sales, by the way, where US readers can buy the DVD for US$25.

Citing Wikipedia is like...

[Anonymous Coward]

...citing a random stranger walking down the street.
Besides, encyclopedias aren't sources for academic papers anyways.

"which would alert them to inaccuracies?"

Wikipedia is inaccuracy.

Peer review is how it works now.

[Comboman]

There is one thing that can be done; peer review. I am not talking about college proffesors in tweed jackets (but I am sure they would be welcome).

Peer review is how Wikipedia has always worked, though in Wikipedia everyone is a peer. I assume what you are suggesting is some way of ranking peers, but that is not as easy as it sounds. Sure, a professor of astronomy from UCLA is the peer of a professor of astronomy from Harvard, but what about an experienced amateur astronomer or a high school science teacher? Are they peers with the profs? Are they peers with each other? If the article is about economics rather than astronomy, does that change the peer relationships? Are they all trumped by a first year economics student? And how exactly do you prove your credentials on-line, especially if they are not academic credentials (work experience, hobbyist, enthusiast, etc)?

Re:Peer review is how it works now.

[tepples]

And how exactly do you prove your credentials on-line, especially if they are not academic credentials (work experience, hobbyist, enthusiast, etc)?

Link to work that you have made using those credentials. For example: Proving my credentials in Game Boy Advance programming

Re:Peer review is how it works now.

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps some sort of weighted user rating system could work. where a rating by an established high rated user (supposedly an authority in the matter) would count more than joe sixpack's.
there is the possibility of abuse, but it could be a viable solution for peer relation establishment.

Re:Peer review is how it works now.

[shimage]

This is how I thought academic "cred" worked. "Cred" is what you get for producing works (that is, publishing articles) that a large number of people respect. Once you've established yourself by doing that sort of thing for awhile, then you can start reviewing other people's papers. It doesn't really matter what your degree is in, so long as what you say is useful. This doesn't mean that every good idea/paper gets the attention it deserves, but it keeps most of the crackpots out. Of course you need to start with a bunch of people you trust are experts of the given field, which can sometimes be a problem in very specialized fields. I don't see why you need to verify credentials beyond keeping track of identities.

Re:Peer review is how it works now.

[swillden]

For example: Proving my credentials in Game Boy Advance programming

That doesn't prove anything. First, there's no way to prove that the work really belongs to the author of the site. Second, there's no way to prove you, the slashdot poster, have anything do to with the site or its contents. Now, I accept that you probably are the author of the site and the games on it, but that's because I'm a trusting soul, not because you've proven anything.

Sorry for nitpicking...

[Arancaytar]

But Wikimedia is the foundation that owns Wikipedia. MediaWiki is the name of the software it uses.

A wiki is simply any system that allows free editing and complete archiving of edit histories, and is neither necessarily an encyclopedia, nor run by Wikimedia, nor powered by MediaWiki.

End of nitpick.

OT: WTF is "Digg"?

[mcmonkey]

I couldn't tell you if Digg will take over Slashdot, because I couldn't tell you what Digg _is_.

I've been to Digg--it seems to be some sort of story aggregator such as Slashdot or Fark, but they use some made up language that sounds like something out of South Park. You can 'digg' a story, and some one 'diggs' your 'digg', and the 'digger' 'digging' a marklar, I mean 'digg'.

I understand, for example, google gets used as a verb, as in, "I'll goggle that acronym." But when you go to the help on Google, it talks about searching, not googling. When I went to help on Digg, it was all about 'digging'. That's not very helpful if I don't already know when it means to 'digg'.

Can someone give me a Digg-to-english translation of wtf is a 'digg'?

Re:OT: WTF is "Digg"?

[mcmonkey]

Bad: replying to my own post.

Good: coming around back on topic. This is infintely more helpful than any help on the actuall Digg site.

Re:OT: WTF is "Digg"?

[mavenguy]

Check out a timely article, posted on digg itself, that gives the skinny on how it works there.

Re:OT: WTF is "Digg"?

[mcmonkey]

Wow, that's a pretty phat skinny. Thanks. Why isn't there a 'help' or 'about us' page at Digg.com with similar content? (If there is such a page, it wasn't easily found when I looked.) Or is it a l33t thing? 'If you have to ask, then you can't digg. Dig?'

Anyway, just a quick nug to keep it on topic: When Steven Colbert pulled the wikipedia stunt on his show, some folks held that up as an example of the wiki-system working. The pages targeted by Colbert were locked down before large spread abuse occurred.

While that may be true, it still doesn't address what I think is a more central question to wikipedia operation: how do we know what was on the locked pages was worth protecting? If the information was wrong to begin with--through random mistake or malice--does it really help to stop systematic abuse?

The BBC story is completely wrong

[jwales]

I don't really know what else to say about it.

We are introducing some changes, yes. The changes are specifically designed to make us MORE of a wiki than before.

We used to have to protect articles. We didn't like that, so we moved to what we call semi-protection. We still don't like that, so we are moving to non-vandalized-version flagging.

Each of these steps was specifically designed to make Wikipedia MORE of a wiki.

Sheesh.

--Jimbo

Re:The BBC story is completely wrong

[David Gerard]

In more detail: the internal FAQ.

Re:The BBC story is completely wrong

[/dev/trash]

So you're just gonna be a regular elitist web site. You should try Kuro5hin. They care.

Suggested Alternative Names

[CheeseburgerBrown]

Given the imminent new nature of the beast, I'd like to suggest some new names for the project (since we're diminishing the wiki part of Wikipedia).

- Webcyclopedia
- Nixipedia
- Wikipedian't
- Quasiwikipedia
- Wonkipedia
- Analpedia
- AllYourBaseAreBelongToPedia
- Alternapedia
- Hippipedia
- GrainOfSaltipedia
- 'Pedia
- Wikipedia II: The Electric Bugaloo
- Stickipedia
- Nazipedia
- Pedia Pedia
- The Resource Formerly Known As Wikipedia
- Disney's Mickipedia

Why dont they have an auto moderation system?

[Dark_MadMax666]

I never understood why they allowed anonymous edits first place . - It would not deter absolute majority serious about contributing .In fact I think many people like to have list of their contributions easily tracked from personal page.

  Now they imho should also have a moderation system(similar to slashdot) -where random people would get chance to moderate articles/specific edits .People with low edit-karma should have their edits placed in "cesspool" and not let in unlet review by respected member of the community. And unlike slashdot on wikipedia you can actually give more power to truly competent people ( like more moderation powers, give them moren rights in domain the have proven to be competent, etc. ) encyclopedia is not about every Dick, Joe and Jane opinion, it is about facts and correct information. If some dick is unhappy he cannot smear perfectly good articles with his incompetent crap -good riddance ,its not slashdot or digg.

The biggest threat?

[blueZ3]

Actually, IMO the biggest threat to Wikipedia's "quality" claim is that, contrary to the disclaimer at the bottom of pages on en.wikipedia.org, "This Wikipedia isn't English." Vandalism has nothing to do with the problem -- un-vandalized articles are just as bad as the vandalized ones.

Until someone comes up with a way to sort out the crap writing, Wikipedia is still going to have the appearance of something that's poor quality. Some of the articles read like they were written by a random spam generator.

Some examples:

From the article on the the Kuomintang party in Taiwan (ROC)

Current party leader Ma Ying-jeou advocates signing a 30-50 year peace treaty with China and forming a common market as well as Chinese culture.

Nice. How do you parse that? The ROC wants a treaty to form Chinese culture?

From the Wiki article on Ratco Mladic

Although he is not in custody, his arrest is proving to be a major factor in Serbia and Montenegro's integrations towards the EU.

Yikes! "...integrations towards the EU"?

Or how about: The city was bombarded with shells, snipers randomly shooting.

Yeah, right. Could you tell me how hard it is to bombard a town with snipers randomly shooting? How difficult is it to get the snipers into the cannons? And how do they manage to shoot during their ballistic flight toward the city? If the barrels of the artillery are rifled, I guess any sniper fire would be pretty random.

Here's another one from the article on the V2 Rocket:

It was the progenitor of the rocket race that developed during the Cold War, and ultimately put men on the moon and probes that have left our solar system.

Parse that sentence and you wind up wondering how the V2 helped put men on the probes that have left our solar system. And if any of those men knew that they were on a one-way journey...

Whatever else you may get from Wikipedia (I read it for the laughs), the articles (both writing and factual content) don't say "quality." More like "any idiet cun edit hour artikles, and we du!"

Just click the "Random article" link. Within two or three clicks, you're bound to land on an article that contains spelling, grammar, logical, or factual errors. Not only are some of these articles the worst form of "committee-write," they're chock full of errata, as well as contradictory and even downright wrong information.

Of course, the Wiki-boosters mantra "anyone can fix it" is ridiculous, as there's no value proposition in correcting sloppily written articles when you know that some "administrator" with a fifth-grade reading level is going to revert the article as soon as you've cleaned it up. Of course, this is the same group (Wiki-boosters) who sincerely believe that giving every child in Africa a laptop with the Wikipedia on it is the sure cure of all that continent's ills.

Until Jimbo's Big Bag of Trivia gets some real editorial staff, "quality" will continue to be job 237,345,861.

Re:The biggest threat?

[KillerDeathRobot]

I'm kind of wondering if this was meant as a troll or what. Yes, plenty of articles have grammatical flubs and/or factual errors, but it's simply not true that any fixes you make to these will be immediately reverted. It's not even kind of true. I think what I would call it is "completely false."

Re:The biggest threat?

[Mike Peel]

This would be a perfect place for a {{Sofixit}}.

Thank you for your suggestion! When you feel an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the Edit this page link at the top. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to). The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes -- they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page , or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome.

In reply to "there's no value proposition in correcting sloppily written articles when you know that some "administrator" with a fifth-grade reading level is going to revert the article as soon as you've cleaned it up", can you back that up with diffs from when this has happened to you? Or are you just quoting hearsay?

Re:The biggest threat?

[sowth]

Whatever else you may get from Wikipedia (I read it for the laughs), the articles (both writing and factual content) don't say "quality." More like "any idiet cun edit hour artikles, and we du!"

Just click the "Random article" link. Within two or three clicks, you're bound to land on an article that contains spelling, grammar, logical, or factual errors. Not only are some of these articles the worst form of "committee-write," they're chock full of errata, as well as contradictory and even downright wrong information.

You're kidding, right? I've seen plenty of print books which have those problems, and not just crap fiction either. Textbooks and manuals. I remember one programming manual for the Atari ST had examples in both C and Assembly Language. All the Assembly examples were fucked up in some way--I don't think they even tested them, and I didn't know C or have a C compiler! I paid for that book and another from a different company, which had similar problems. It was total crap.

I've been in classes where nobody read the textbook and just looked at the equations and figures because it was so poorly written as to be useless. Also, almost every textbook where the answers to problems were in the back, quite a few were wrong. The instructor would have to tell everyone which ones were right. Sometimes even professionals aren't up to basic standards. Why should you expect a volunteer site written for free to be any better?

And the minor grammar problems? Who cares. Most people read Wikipedia for information, not to look for grammar problems. As long as you can understand what is being said, it is good enough. As for the major problems making the article unreadable, well it happens. For all you know, the person writing is an expert in the field, and had a stroke or came down with some sort of neurological disease and has problems with grammar. (or maybe they just never learned proper grammar.) The articles are more or less intended to give a person a general idea about the subject.

If you want something which is 100% accurate with perfect grammar, then you'll have to pay a lot of money to buy expensive books or hire a bunch of people to write them. You probably still won't get your perfect material anyway...

Re:The biggest threat?

[DragonWriter]

Of course, the Wiki-boosters mantra "anyone can fix it" is ridiculous, as there's no value proposition in correcting sloppily written articles when you know that some "administrator" with a fifth-grade reading level is going to revert the article as soon as you've cleaned it up.

I've seen plenty of cleanups and corrections made (including the one I've made myself) that weren't reverted, either immediately or later, by an illiterate administrator or anyone else. If you have a particular problem with all of your "corrections" being reverted, it might be something about your "corrections".

Of course, this is the same group (Wiki-boosters) who sincerely believe that giving every child in Africa a laptop with the Wikipedia on it is the sure cure of all that continent's ills.

I've never seen anyone suggest anything like that. You seem to confusing the overlapping sets of wikiboosters and OLPC boosters, and then ridiculously exaggerating what either believes about the thing they support before combining them to create a giant distortion that's irrelevant to the actual quality or utility of Wikipedia to attempt to discredit Wikipedia by creating a false image of its supporters.

Re:The biggest threat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha. I can't believe my own eyes. I went to three random articles and found at least one spelling error in two of them. The third contained an instance in which material was copied from a source without following the copyright restrictions of the source.

Jeez.

Re:The biggest threat?

[Eivind]

Of course, the Wiki-boosters mantra "anyone can fix it" is ridiculous, as there's no value proposition in correcting sloppily written articles when you know that some "administrator" with a fifth-grade reading level is going to revert the article as soon as you've cleaned it up.

Do you have any experience that this happens ?

I've *never* experienced having an improvement in language reverted. Have you ? Or are you just trolling. Post a few links to examples of such reverts, if you want to continue claiming they're a real problem as opposed to one you just invented.

It's the demographics that need changin

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at some of the most popular articles. With results like that, itg is obvious people are using Wikipedia for low culture and therefore vandalism. Wikipedia needs to encourage more visits to the more encyclopedic topics in order to succeed. Unfortunatley its not even fun to vandalize Wikipedia anymore. If google didn't treat Wikipedia so well In its search results Wikipedia would have to focus on quality in order to attract vistors. Unfortunatley users like Zocky are to interested in advertising how much Naruto fancruft Wikipedia has (see the main page history and discussion) rather than aiming for Quality.

This is the last time I talk about Wikipedia. I have tried Wikipedia for several years but keep getting screwed by idiots. Even Jimbo Wales likes playing games on various forums about his critics. Even Myspace, AOL and Walmart have more culture than Wikipedia these days. Wikipedia has gone down the drain.

Any self respecting culture geek such as Trekkies and Otakus would avoid it and go for quality fan guides than the fancruft tripe on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia, it's own name is an insult to itself. Might as well say Welcome to CelingcatPenispedia on wheels!

Vague pondering.

[Tychon]

If the Wikipedia is going to require administrative approval of edits, why not offer something to help the admins out? Say the user ability to "vote" on accuracy, giving that article a higher rating in the queue. Giving the user a sort of score would allow the power of their vote to fluctuate -- raising with each article that they voted on that is approved, and dropping for each that is rejected, et cetra. Certainly not perfect, but it would help the more popular/useful articles get through quickly, rather than all articles being weighed equally.

Re:Wikipedia needs a way to recognize professional

[faedle]

Yes, because we all know that amateurs never develop anything important and all are a bunch of ignorant schmucks.

Except for the actress who developed spread-spectrum radio technology. Or the numerous backyard astronomers who have found new celestial objects. Or the college student from Finland who created an entire operating system.

Wasn't this rejected?

[IIH]

This to me, looks like a description of the proposal (marked as rejected) of Wikipedia:Stable versions now.

In some ways, that proposal would make it very like the linux kernel. The public face which most people see would be the stable branch, with the "unstable branch" still open to edits, and once stabilised, becomes the new stable version.

Re:Wasn't this rejected?

[David Gerard]

Bill Thompson got it completely wrong, even given the correction. The internal FAQ on the matter gives a better picture.

I think you should fork Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree your approach is a more solid one than theirs.
I hope you fork the project; since I'm pretty sure this is the best way to go. I'd contribute.

The BBC got the story wrong.

[lee]

From the original BBC article, "Under the new approach, page edits will no longer be immediately applied to pages but will instead have to be approved by an administrator before they become visible." This is flatly false. I have been involved in discussion about the German experiment and what English wikipedia will do, and the above statement is exactly what will not happen and what no one wants, not the foundation, not administrators, not the writers. It strikes me as FUD at its worst.

Notice this correction was made, "There's no decision yet as to who will be able to "approve" a page, and of course the English-language Wikipedia is simply watching what happens in Germany and seeing how it works, so there will be no change for those of us who use the English version." Now this is accurate. English is watching the German wikipedia to see what works for them with full knowledge that what works for German is not what works for English.

Re:The BBC got the story wrong.

[billthom]

Well the BBC - or rather me, a columnist who writes on the BBC website - took what information was available from the German site, an interview with Jimmy Wales on news.com and general reading and wrote a column speculating about the implications of a more controlled Wikipedia for the site. That's not getting it wrong, except that decisions had apparently been made which were not known to me, as an outsider, at the time I wrote. No FUD, just a rapidly changing situation.

The difference between edits being 'applied' and 'visible' is of course one that can be debated endlessly and no doubt will be. The reality - that many users will not see the most recently edited version of a page - is most interesting to me. Whether this makes Wikipedia more or less wiki-like may be left as an exercise for the reader - I know where I stand.

Re:The BBC got the story wrong.

[owlnation]

Well the BBC - or rather me, a columnist who writes on the BBC website - took what information was available from the German site, an interview with Jimmy Wales on news.com and general reading and wrote a column speculating about the implications of a more controlled Wikipedia for the site.

You scare. You scare me very very deeply. You seriously mean to say that a globaly trusted source of news (and as an expat Brit, my personal primary source of news) is essentially, or occasionally, cobbled together out of some second and third hand reports? You didn't think to, oh, you know, maybe email or call someone first hand? Kudos for being brave enough to write here but, again, you scare me. Deeply. Do you feel you did good work with this article?

I am media savvy enough to know that this is an (internally) accepted method of news gathering in many media outlets - News Corp for example, since Outfoxed shows just this very practice. However, my expectation is that the BBC, as a directly funded organ of the British Nation, would be more careful and have more journalistic integrity. I guess this begins in part to explain why those of us who remember the integrity and quality of the BBC in the 70s view it now as being "dumbed down".

Perhaps there should be some kind of moderation system applied to the BBC too, seeing that perhaps we can't entirely trust their quality. At least you didn't use Wikipedia as a source, though just a guess, if you are typical of BBC standards then I bet you one of your colleagues has done just that at some point. In this case you do have verifiable sources - just goes to show what use they were for you...

Re:The BBC got the story wrong.

[billthom]

Don't be scared - understand the difference between a column and a news story. I wasn't writing a news story, I was writing a bylined, clearly flagged as such, opinion piece based on my understanding of what was going on, talking about the implications as I saw them and explaining the background. I work as a reporter too, and operate in a different way, but I think it's reasonable to say 'this is what we hear is going on, these are the reports from other places, what does it imply?' I do think the article was a good one, because it aimed to explore what I saw as a potentially bad proposal, and in so doing I've learned that Jimmy Wales' point of view and mine are pretty different on this matter.

Childish stupidity.

[rice_burners_suck]

Yeah, especially the Wikipedia moderators. I don't envy them one bit the huge job they have to do all the time. Look at this page, for example. Why does it say:

"Because of recent vandalism, editing of this article by anonymous or newly registered users is disabled. Such users may discuss changes, request unprotection, or create an account."

No, I don't mean that it says that because one of the Wikipedia moderators put it there. I mean, it says that because people are stupid and can't be objective about anything, and they'll ruin it for the rest of us. Here's an encyclopedia that anybody can improve, but instead, people are putting trash on many its articles, because they disagree with something. That particular article is about the State of Israel. People are blinded by hate speech.

Here's another example of a page with such protection activated: George W. Bush. Again, even if someone doesn't agree with his policies, why vandalize the page? That's childish and stupid.

I blame Colbert!

[Anonymous Coward]

Stephen Colbert is to blame. I'm almost sure of it, and as soon as you all agree with me it will become the truth. W0RD!

spam never sleeps

[uioreanu]

as far I see it, wikipedia might be "too young" on the web spere, and has many things to learn from ./ and the like.

On the other side, wikipedia is the website that might be the closest thing to a collective human conscious that we have, and spam and vandalism is part of our nature, therefore will never go away for good.

Democracy Anarchy

[Manhigh]

Why not formulate some voting/moderation system to keep malicious content at bay?

Anyone is allowed to add anything. If the section they add is modded down enough, they wont be able to mod as much for the next month.

Changing/removing existing sections should be more difficult. The more modded-up a section, the harder it is to change.

"Approved" versions on Wikipedia FAQ

[David Gerard]

From Wikimedia Meta-Wiki:

What is changing?

We want to open up editing without damaging the reader's experience.

We want to be more wiki and let editors edit freely, which is where all the good things come from. At present a small percentage of articles (a few hundred out of 1.5 million on the English language Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/) are locked or partially locked from editing. We want to open these up. But Wikipedia is a top 20 website (Alexa ratings, no. 17 on 3 month average; no. 15 on 30 August 2006 -- http://www.alexa.com/), so we must keep it good for the readers.

The new feature will mean that edits from new or anonymous editors will be delayed before being shown to readers - they will see a 'flagged OK' version by default, with a link to the live version. The idea is to enhance the reading experience, and free us to enhance the editing experience. If vandalism can't be seen by the general public, there will be less motivation to vandalise.

Anonymous or new-editor edits will need to be approved by a logged-in editor. Of the thousands of editors on the large Wikipedias, many concentrate on checking revisions and dealing with odd changes and vandalism -- this will assist their work and we do not expect new delays.

We are also considering a related feature to flag particular versions of articles as being of high quality. This is to a different end: a high-quality finished product. This will likely be tested first on the German language Wikipedia (http://de.wikipedia.org/), which has already had three stable editions released on CD and DVD, which have sold quite well. If the feature works there, it may be used on other language Wikipedias.

These features are not finished, so we don't have a lot of fine detail as to how it will all work as yet. But we hope this change will allow us to do things such as open up the George W. Bush article or even the front page itself to full unrestricted editing.

When was this proposed?

Jimmy Wales asked for a time-delay feature for casual readers in late 2004; after very fast editing on the Indian Ocean tsunami produced a very high-quality article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_ea rthquake) very quickly, but with some highly visible vandalism; we've hotly discussed how to achieve stable high-quality editions of Wikipedia since almost the start of the project, in 2001.

Re:"Approved" versions on Wikipedia FAQ

[owlnation]

My question is, why start with Germany? Jokes about Grammar Nazis aside, this country has real scary violent Nazis.

I live in Berlin, I am not German. This afternoon I was walking past the Monument to the murdered Jews of Europe to find 5 Neo-Nazis being arrested for performing a Hitler salute and urinating on the stones. In the past two months that's the third incident I've personally seen in broad daylight and in tourist or fashionable areas. There are just under 2 million card carrying and voting Neo-Nazis in Germany as of the last election. It's not all in the past. The problem is here and now, and is growing. It is simply not being reported or being dealt with as much as it should and could be.

I am not saying that any of the German editors are currently Nazis - likely much of the vandalism they see is Nazi related. There is however, absolutely nothing to stop that situation changing; Wikipedia becoming WikiBebelplatz.

It's just, you know, why didn't you start with Holland or Sweden? Germany isn't perhaps the best place to start investigating use of extra authoritarianism?

--------
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Re:"Approved" versions on Wikipedia FAQ

[Maru Dubshinki]

Funny post.

All joking aside, it's just that the de Wikipedia just has more of a reputation and culture of being less free-wheeling and comprehensive and easy-going, I guess, than en Wikipedia; so this sort of thing seems more natural a progression to them.

For more on this general difference, see an informative little essay here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Elian/comparison

Bors, go cut it's head off.

[uberjoe]

You mean to say that Beavers don't REALLY explosively attack people with their menacing teeth? Damn..

No, only cute fluffy rabbits do that.

Re:4 months...

[DragonWriter]

Maybe -- and this is a stretch, stay with me on this one -- he just wants to consult an encyclopedia and get some geo-political information without the risk that it has somehow been altered by a twelve year-old on a dare made in the back of a school bus?

Then he should use, say, Encyclopedia Britannica. I mean, no one is forcing anyone to use Wikipedia. Of course, Britannica—while there is no risk of it being altered as you describe—when examined turns out not to be much more accurate than Wikipedia where they both cover the same topics, and Britannica has far less coverage in a lot of areas, but if your concern is only that you don't want to look at an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, then Wikipedia isn't the online encyclopedia for you.

It's the Tragedy of the Commons

[TheWoozle]

This problem isn't new. Human nature is a bitch.

I think that a democracy with appropriate checks and balances is the best solution. Because we can't trust each other, it works best when everyone is watching everyone else.

Oh, and the people who think that the solution is for "professionals" or licensed practitioners (doctors, lawyers, etc.), or university professors or whatever "qualified" people to be the gatekeepers - I suggest that this would basically be setting up a "priesthood" that controls/directs the views represented in Wikipedia. A Bad Thing IMHO.

Just because someone is paid money for or holds a license (basically just passing a test) for a particular field doesn't guarantee that they have any better understanding of a topic than anyone else. Einstein wasn't the chair of a physics department at a major university when he came up with his theory of relativity, and Philo T. Farnsworth wasn't a licensed Electrical Engineer.

Mod parent up.

[Animats]

That's right. There's a "Wikipedia stable versions" proposal, in fact there are several, but none of them are likely to be accepted soon.

The trial "stable versions" proposal is mostly manual and generates a big administrative load. It's just a scheme where the main page for an article is locked, and regular editors can only edit a working copy. Every once in a while, some authorized "approver" copies the working copy to the main page. This requires a huge group of "approvers". This scheme has the advantage of being possible with the current Wikimedia implementation, but isn't really workable for all of Wikipedia. It's too labor-intensive.

Better, more automated schemes have been discussed, but they need a substantial programming effort, and Wikipedia is weak in that area.

"Semi-protection" is a useful addition, but under current policies, isn't used much. Most requests for semi-protection are turned down. Unless a page is being vandalized many times per day, semi-protection is seldom used.

So less is happening in this area than the article suggests.

Actually, the most striking feature of Wikipedia today is that it's done. Very few new articles are on substantative subjects. All the important subjects already have articles. Most new articles are spam, self-promotion, or fancruft. The fancruft is now for items so obscure (a character appearing once in one Star Wars comic book is typical) that it's total junk. Articles come in daily for non-notable buildings, atlas info ("State Route 93"), bands nobody ever heard of, and for every album of any band that ever managed to sell a CD. Most of that info is unsuited for a wiki; IMDB, Gracenote, and Google Maps do a better job in those categories, because they need proper databases.

This is what Wikipedia looks like at maturity.

Not trolling. This reflects my actual experience

[blueZ3]

Let me suggest that before you write me off as a troll, you try it for yourself: Pick an article with an egregious grammar error, correct the mistake, and then come back in a week or ten days. Unless the article is completely obscure (i.e. no one ever sees your changes) chances are that the article will be back in the same sad shape within that time.

When I first discovered the Wikipedia, I thought that it was cool that I could help to "fix" broken articles (I'm a writer in my day job). So I spent a little free time correcting the grammar errors (and generally sloppy writing) in a number of articles, probably around 10. Within a week, all but one of them had either been reverted so that the original mistakes returned, or re-edited introducing the same or similar mistakes. When I saw that, it became clear to me that what Wiki-boosters claim as the main strength of Wikipedia is also a weakness. It also significantly cooled my interest in editing the poorly written articles I come across.

Basically, writing done by committee is always going to be inferior. Since that's the method that the Wikipedia currently uses, it's hard to see any significant improvement in the quality of the articles coming along. Further, I think that there's no real solution to this problem as long as every article is open to editing by anyone at any time. Someone suggested that there should be a static "live" article and then people would work on a dynamic "backend" article that would become the live article once it was edited and checked for accuracy. But I'm not sure even that would work, since it requires someone to take ownership of the article.

Perhaps there's a solution out there, but none of the proposals I've seen suggested looks like it would work.

The first rule of Wiki...

[moracity]

Don't believe anything on Wiki.

Well here's the problem

[Sycraft-fu]

When you are talking development, that work, though it can cause problems by confusing users. It works since there's not a "right" way to make Linux. Make it however you want. It's a tool, nothing more. That doesn't work with facts. There are right and wrong facts. If I make a page that talks about the history of the US and puts independence in the 1500s I'm WRONG. There's just no two ways about it. The point of an encyclopedia, or other kind of reference material, isn't to be presented with different accounts that any nutjob could have created. It is to be presented with something that is generally factually accurate. Errors can always happen, of course, but in general the objective is to have the truth on there.

So letting people put their own, wrong versions up wouldn't accomplish anything.

Open Edit vs. Professional

[rinkjustice]

Wikipedia is still, by-in-large, a respectable and reliable source of information when compared to professionally produced encyclopedias. For example, in a study where experts evaluated 42 entries between Wikipedia and Britannica's online version, the experts found an equal amount of *serious* errors (four each) along with 123 factual errors in the Britannica and 162 in Wikipedia. So, that means the professionally-produced encyclopedia had three errors for every four in an amateur and openly edited one. Not too shabby for free.

Re:Open Edit vs. Professional

[DiamondGeezer]

Not true. Nature cooked the books. Wikipedia is much, much worse quality than any professional encyclopedia.

I've lost count of the number of times this canard has been repeated on Slashdot.

Re:Open Edit vs. Professional

[DragonWriter]

Not true. Nature cooked the books [theregister.co.uk].

An opinion piece repeating uncritically the claims in Britannica's response and ignoring Nature's counter to Britannica's response. Proves...someone at the Register has an opinion, and not much else.

I've lost count of the number of times this canard has been repeated on Slashdot.

Soon, I'll lose track of the times this false rebuttal has been posted in this thread on Slashdot.

Nope

[Sycraft-fu]

You don't cite encyclopedias, because you don't use them as sources in scholarly works. Encyclopedias are starting points. You use them to get an overview of the information you want, and references to more primary sources. You then go to those sources read and use them. This is even true in sources themselves. If you are reading a paper by Dr. A, and he talks about the results of Dr. B's experiment, you don't quote him on that, you go get Dr. B's paper and quote that instead.

So even when you are talking about Britanica, it's improper form to cite a reference book. When you are talking Wikipedia, it's downright stupid. Especially since it's changeable. I mean the student can always change it to say what they want. It'll get revered, of course, but they can just claim "That's what it said when I looked at the page, so I figured it was right."

You always want to go to the most primary source available. Don't read a paper about a paper about an experiment, read the paper about the experiment by the experimenters themselves. Don't read a newspaper article about a speech, read the transcript of the actual speech. While all the sources that are more levels removed can be useful starting points, and have useful commentary and analysis for you to think about, they aren't what you should cite. Don't believe their version of things, get the original and check for yourself.

Re:Nope

[Tweekster]

Well that flies in the face of what has been hammered into every students brain for the last decade.
which is: CITE EVERYTHING YOU USED.

Re:Nope

[Sycraft-fu]

No, the rule is "Cite the source of all your information." Basically anything that's not your orignal thought, you need to cite. If you quote something, directly or indirectly, it needs to be cited. If you reference something, it needs to be cited. However what you should be citing is the most primary source available. So let's say I'm doing an article on cognition. I look up some info in an encyclopedia, it is relevant to what I want. I do not cite that, I check their source. Turns out to be a paper by Dr. Robert Harnish. So I get his paper. In reading it, I find out that the relevant section isn't actually his work, but actually work done by Dr. Kent Bach. Again, I don't cite Harnish's paper, I get Bach's. I then read that, and it is the original paper on what I want. THAT'S what I cite.

Does it take more time? Of course, but it makes sure I'm getting the accurate original story. The encyclopedia version is what Britannica thinks about what HArnish thinks about what Bach wrote about. I want to remove the abstraction and get down to what Bach thought. I might also cite Harnish's paper if I am referencing his comments or criticisms of Bach, but I won't cite Harnish's paper when I am taking a section that is talking about Bach's paper.

Re:Nope

[JohnG307]

The problem here is that it's often hard or even impossible to get primary sources.

I've written countless scientific papers where, in the search of a primary article, I wasn't able to get it because:
(a) it was in a database that my institution does not have a subscription to
(b) it was in a journal that my library doesn't carry (or doesn't have a complete archive)
(c) it seemed to disappear from the face of the Earth after having been cited

Secondary sources, tertiary sources, and beyond, especially on obscure/older research subjects, can oftentimes be all there is to go by.

Re:Nope

[Sycraft-fu]

Not saying that isn't the case, and in large research projects you will have sources many levels removed, espically if you are dealing with something historical. However the orignal complaint was that students were useing Wikipedia on research papers. We are in all likelihood not talking about dissertations here, but just normal class research papers. Here, unless the professor is a moron, the topic will be assigned as something that you CAN get more primary sources on.

Either way, an encyclopedia is a particularly bad source as any good professor will tell you. An encyclopedia that anyone can edit? Well that's probably just about the worst of all.

So while I'd admonish a professor that insists on "only primary sources in all cases", I can completely understand one that says "No encyclopedias and yes that includes Wikipedia." Part of writing a research paper is learning to do proper research, and that means getting good sources. If you can't get good sources, maybe you shouldn't be doing a paper on that particular topic since you aren't going to be well informed.

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't read a paper about a paper about an experiment, read the paper about the experiment by the experimenters themselves.

Or, even better, do the experiment yourself.

(Of course, there's a point at which convenience outweighs the desire for accuracy - and if it comes to replicating a lengthy experiment, you've probably passed that point.)

Yes, but

[eepok]

Mo' money, Mo' problems.

You add money to the picture and you will get lawsuits claiming defamation etc.

Keep it free. No one worth their salt does real "research" at Wiki anyway. We go their to find +5 Informative or +5 insightful -- Not +5 Guaranteed Fact.

See my reply to the sib

[blueZ3]

Yes, this has happened to me. Regularly. Enough times that I have lost interest in making further corrections.

And no, I didn't keep careful records of edits. Change tracking and content revision is something I do in my day job, so I'm not really interested in expending that kind of effort on the Wikipedia in the evenings.

Back when I was making edits, I was interested enough in the project that I bothered to keep a list and return to articles I'd changed with the idea of "keeping them up" if anyone had added new info. "Maintenance" of knowledge base articles is something I'm very familiar with as a writer who has done a good bit of editing and I was expecting that Wikipedia articles would require something similar. Imagine my surprise when I returned to articles I'd edited to find that while no new information had been added, the articles were either reverted or re-edited by someone with apprently no grasp of English. It doesn't take many instances of that to show the futility of editing Wikipedia articles and to kill off all enthusiasm for the task.

That's my personal experience. Other writers I know (and I know quite a few technical writers here in the Bay Area) have expressed similar frustration.

Again, there's the possiblity that someone could come up with a solution for this, but I haven't seen it yet.

I agree with their decision

[awss82]

I think they have done a wise thing by doing that, since people make mistakes I think the larger the wiki gets the more complicated it will get to maintain its info.

Wikipedia Complete?

[DragonWriter]

Actually, the most striking feature of Wikipedia today is that it's done. Very few new articles are on substantative subjects.

The former is not really an indicator of the latter (I disagree that it is accurate either; while the proportion of new articles addressing what I would consider substantive topics is low, the absolute number is not.) Most new (particulary on substantive topics) articles are stubs or not much more than stubs; development is not limited to new articles, but improvement of existing articles.

And substantive new knowledge is being developed all the time, so if there weren't new substantive articles on Wikipedia, it wouldn't be evidence that Wikipedia was done, but that it was getting progressively less done.

Re:Wikipedia needs a way to recognize professional

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yes, because we all know that amateurs never develop anything important and all are a bunch of ignorant schmucks."

The problem are not the knowlegdeable amaterus, it is with the idiot amateurs and those with agendas and the inability of the public and article editors to distinguish between these categories of people.

Amateurs are also not an authoratative source.

"Except for the actress who developed spread-spectrum radio technology. Or the numerous backyard astronomers who have found new celestial objects. Or the college student from Finland who created an entire operating system."

Everything you cite here is realistically vetted by professionals through confirmation or usage.
Wikipedia has none of this; the vetting is arbitrary.

POV

[Archangel Michael]

Why not have subsection/articles related to the NPOV parts that are difinitively bias POV, for perspective sake. Let's look at how this relates to your stalking example.

Give generally accepted and nominal usage of what cyberstalking is, give related pages to "cyberstalking - cases" which gives backgrounds and such on cases, examples of, etc. and then have a "cyberstalking - false accusation" which gives examples such as you have pointed out.

Better usage would be for highly charged political topics like GWB, the main article can give generally accepted facts (date of birth, schools, service records etc) and two pages, GWB - pro (I heart bush), and GWB - con (evil dictator) facts can be presented.

Quite frankly, the truth lies (no pun or oxymoron intended) probably somewhere in between, and some of us grownups realize that bush isn't 100% good or 100% evil as the political poles would like to paint.

You kid, but I think /. has the key to the future

[snowwrestler]

I've been participating in, thinking about, and studying online communities for well over 10 years now, and in my opinion the greatest challenge is the question of trust. Nothing is faster than online communities for disseminating knowledge...the problem is qualifying it. How do I know that what I'm reading is not bullshit?

In a relatively small online community like http://www.boatertalk.com/ or one of the thousands of niche news groups, the solution usually is to lurk for a while at first until you learn the "regulars" and how you feel about them. Small communities can also institute some basic accountability like requiring registration to post, so site admins can ban if needed.

But on a free-wheeling site, it's a huge problem to develop an institution for quantifying trust in a way that even a newbie can use. On Boatertalk the site owner has designated some volunteer admins based on his personal experience with them, to police the site. That won't work on a huge site like Slashdot, Digg, or Wikipedia--it doesn't scale well enough. And it's desperately needed...witness the rampant problems on Digg with systematic and arbitrary article and comment down-mods.

The absolute best solution I've seen so far is the Slashdot moderation system. It's the only automatic* system I know of that actually successfully shapes the community such that the highest-quality discussions are raised for the greatest public exposure, and the lowest-quality posts are dropped out of sight. To me that is why Slashdot continues to be so relevant and useful, even in the face of more user-content-friendly sites like Digg.

In real life there are multiple ways that we qualify sources and identify "good" sources of communication. They include things like academic pedigree, education, training, or work experience, or commercial or critical or scientific success. There are vetting systems in place to get published in a newspaper, magazine, research journal, encyclopedia, or to get on TV. The problem is that there is no way to leverage those online in a free wheeling, stand-alone forum, without running into massive privacy or ease-of-use issues. (You can't require a full CV to be submitted to Slashdot in order to create an account, an even if you could, how would you check it other than manually?)

Trust has to be built and managed from scratch. But it doesn't just come from nowhere...it has to come from other people, that is how trust is created. So it's really about creating a social framework with technology. And unfortunately humans seem to be really bad at creating social frameworks that overcome our personal weaknesses...just look at the sordid history of governments through the ages.

Google took a stab at this with their Gmail beta. The fact that you had to get an invite from another user set up a "Web of trust" that ensured that each new member was to some extent personally vetted by an existing member. It neatly put the kibosh on automated sign-ups in a way that no captcha could hope to. Unfortunately I guess they decided that did not scale well enough for their growth goals and they chose greater numbers over higher quality...now anyone can sign up without having to connect to the Web of trust.

Slashdot's karma system is better, in that it is based on actions, so it scales well. Anyone can create an account, and their karma is then set in motion to go up or down. The downside is that there is a delay from their first post to when their "trust level" has been established (as opposed to Gmail beta, where trust was part of the signup). But the advantage is that a) anyone can sign up, so it scales well, and b) after the initial delay, it works fairly accurately.

*by automatic I mean that the site owners are not involved in the moderation on a user-by-user or post-by-post basis to make it work.

Spelling in Slashdot comments

[hisstory student]

Even if Slashdot had a spelling check, it wouldn't help a lot of these folks. It seems that even after using the Preview button (assuming they used it) they still can't see their errors.
A grammar checker would simply be overwhelmed here.
Sometimes the pain induced by reading some of these comments is just too painful and distracting, yet, like Wikipedia, the good outweighs the bad so I keep coming back.

Re:Spelling in Slashdot comments

[Millenniumman]

I have a solution. If someone's post has excessive spelling/grammar errors, they are automatically replied to by a post that points them out and always has the same moderation. That way, moderators will be less likely to mod up posts with poor spelling and grammar.

I can't wait for a reply that corrects my grammar.

Weasel words

[PCM2]

One could actually well argue that the last claim I mention, what Norway is "generally perceived as" doesn't really belong in an encyclopedia, it's very subjective anyway, certainly it's not an undisputable fact.

The Wikipedia term for this kind of construction is "weasel words."

The first half of the sentence says that Norwegians "enjoy a high standard of living." What does that mean? Relative to what? The whole sentence is arbitrary and should probably be stricken.

Re:Weasel words

[Achromatic1978]

What does it mean? Quality of life. Or rather: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_life. So it's a well established scale and not entirely arbitrary.

Particularly not when you look at http://www.economist.com/media/pdf/QUALITY_OF_LIFE .pdf (PDF), and see that Norway is ranked 3 of all the countries on earth. I think that qualifies for "a high standard of living" on objective grounds.

Re:Weasel words

[Eivind]

I don't know *precisely* what it means either. I do however have a vague idea.

Furthermore, I am quite convinced that whatever reasonable definition you come up with for "high standard of living", Norway would likely qualify.

Much harder would be to give objective evidence for the claim that Norway is "generally regarded" as enjoying such.

By the way, statements such as these are perfectly common in all encyclopedias. Not just Wikipedia. I don't think it's possible, or even desirable, to completely eliminate them.

Re:Weasel words

[Eivind]

It's not clear that a high "quality of life" is the same as a "high standard of living". (for example, the latter sounds to me, more a materialistic measure than the first)

Nor is it clear that the "Quality of life" measurement you refer to are the obviously correct ones. Different people will put different weigth on different factors. Some factors can even be backwards.

Women in Iraq divorce their men significantly more seldom than women in Norway. In this ranking, having lots of divorces are ranked as negative. And it is, offcourse, if the reason for the difference is that the Norwegian females (or males) are unhappier with their partner than the Iraqi ones.

All evidence though, points in a different direction; Iraqi women seldom divorce their partners, not because the couples are so much happier, but because divorce is simply not an option in all but the most severe cases. In other words, the low divorce-rates are a result of fanatical religion, societaly norms and actual laws which prevent divorce.

That was just a single example. Similar arguments can be applied to any and all of the remaining indicators.

Re:Weasel words

[PCM2]

Actually, you might have pointed to the Wikipedia article on "Standard of living," rather than "quality of life."

But the point remains that the statement is vague. So Norwegians have a high standard of living. Relative to what, or to whom?

You reference an Economist study on quality of life. That's great! Better that the Wikipedia article itself referenced that, than just made a vague and unsubstantiated statement: "According to a study by The Economist, Norway ranked third..."

Citing Wikipedia correctly

[nczempin]

So even when you are talking about Britanica, it's improper form to cite a reference book. When you are talking Wikipedia, it's downright stupid. Especially since it's changeable. I mean the student can always change it to say what they want. It'll get reverted, of course, but they can just claim "That's what it said when I looked at the page, so I figured it was right."

Apparently you haven't read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wiki pedia yet. It explicitly states "The citation should normally include the full date and time of the article revision you are using, because the page may well change drastically between when you view it and when somebody else following your reference views it."

It also gives several other pieces of advice that coincide with your other opinions (regarding citing an encyclopedia).

But the paragraph you've written is incorrect; if Wikipedia is cited properly (with precise date and time), there is no way that "the student can always change it to say what they want".

Re:Citing Wikipedia correctly

[Sycraft-fu]

Ok, multiple things:

1) You dont cite reference books (pretty sure I said that) or websites, only their sources.
2) Wikipeida's policy isn't the policy of the APA or MLA or whoever's standard you are writing the paper to.
3) Even if you do a specific date/time citation, the student can still alter it beforehand. No way to prove who did the alteration.
4) You don't cite reference books/sites (again since you are hainvg trouble with this one).

I don't care how much you like Wikipedia, it's not proper to cite it in a scholarly work. When you are doing your own thing, you do as you please. Cite Wikipedia to friends all you like. However when you do a scholarly paper there are standards. In fact there are a lot of standards, the APA standards manual is like 400 pages. One of those standards, for every paper I've ever written, is that you don't cite encyclopedias. They aren't a source, they help you find sources.

Re:Citing Wikipedia correctly

[nczempin]

4) You don't cite reference books/sites (again since you are hainvg trouble with this one).

What makes you think I'm "having trouble with this one"? You seem to be looking for a disagreement where there is none.

I said It also gives several other pieces of advice that coincide with your other opinions (regarding citing an encyclopedia).

I'll rephrase, since you are "having trouble with this one" :-) : The Wikipedia entry on citing Wikpedia gives several pieces of advice that agree with and are totally on your side of all the other stuff you talked about, including citing encyclopedias, both in general and Wikipedia in particular. In addition, they are completely on your side and think you're right.

Clear enough now? Perhaps the word "coincide" is a bit too big for you? :-) :-) :-)

I'll put one on top, by citing even more from Wikipedia:As with any source, especially those of unknown authorship, you should be wary and independently verify the accuracy of Wikipedia information if possible; see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academic_us e and our General Disclaimer page.

In fact, on the Academic use page, it says citation of Wikipedia in research papers has been known to result in a grade of F. I can't see any more agreement to what you've said than that.

I don't care how much you like Wikipedia,
I don't think I made any comment about how much or how little I like Wikipedia.

For someone who seems to value academic principles so highly, you come across as very quick to jump to conclusions:

• You haven't read my response, instead you assumed I was attacking you, when I was supporting you, except on one small issue.
• You haven't followed the link, to see what the Wikipedia recommendations are for citing (which happen to agree mostly with your opinions). Instead, you assumed they would be disagreeing with you, which they don't.
• You make uncalled-for assumptions about my motivations, instead of just staying on-topic.

Here's my view on the subject. I've tried to phrase it as clearly as possible. You may find that we are in agreement, except perhaps for little things:

1. Citing an encyclopedia is usually not a good idea. As was said above, an encyclopedia should be used as a starting point, not the only source. It may be acceptable for topics that are marginal to the paper's main content. For example, a paper on computer go could very well include a reference to an overview entry on computer chess from the Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence.
2. Citing Wikipedia is an even more controversial subject, so great care has to be taken. In general, I would consider citing from Wikipedia inappropriate for a college term paper (and "above"), perhaps adequate for high school. There are areas where Wikipedia really is among the best sources, for example on the various Internet phenomena. I wouldn't dismiss it offhand, however.
3. Part of the care that needs to be taken when citing from Wikipedia is to make sure that the version that is cited is clearly marked by time and date, if only to make sure that the reader of the paper has a chance to verify exactly what was cited.
4. The idea that students might write a paper, and edit Wikipedia just so that the particular WP entry agrees with their paper is very creative, but a bit far-fetched IMHO. Usually such changes would be quickly reverted, and the history will show exactly that. Spinning your idea further, if the student were to do exactly that, and would claim what you've said he would/could, the professor would have an easy case in that not enough care was taken that the information taken from the WP article was sufficiently stable.
Were you really thinking of this situation when you wrote I mean the student can always change it to

Re:Citing Wikipedia correctly

[Achromatic1978]

It is interesting that you should mention APA, because WP:Citing Wikipedia page actually has a whole section on the subject. Since you seem to have a problem with actually reading that page, here's that section reproduced:

Citation in APA style, as recommended by the American Psychological Association:

Apparently the APA are not as harsh as you are on the subject of citing references.

Nothing in what you quoted was an endorsement by the APA of the SOURCE of and use of references, but, as per the second blockquote, a STYLE GUIDE on how to cite as per their style.

Re:Citing Wikipedia correctly

[nczempin]

Nothing in what you quoted was an endorsement by the APA of the SOURCE of and use of references, but, as per the second blockquote, a STYLE GUIDE on how to cite as per their style.

I didn't say there was an endorsement, I just said that contrary to what Sycraft-fu said, APA does not outlaw quoting reference books. Otherwise they would say so instead of giving guidelines of how to quote them:

* For reference books, which includes encyclopedias, dictionaries, and glossaries, the book title is preceded by the word In. It is not italicized, but the book title following it is.

Thank you, voice of reason!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the BBC article was balanced. It's not such a terrible place to use as a starting point to learn about something. It's a place to find hard-copy reference material if, by some chance in hell, the author(s) cites any.

But the idea of Wikipedia for any purpose that remotely approaches the academic is ludicrous. If you want to explain why the sky is blue to your three-year-old, then go to Wikipedia. For anything beyond that, anyone who thinks Wikipedia is a credible source is smoking some strong stuff. Right now, a print encyclopedia will always, on the whole, be much more credible than a Wiki article because you can be reasonably assured that the person who wrote the particular article you're reading is an expert in his field. And if you disagree with that person, you can see who the author is and make a conscious decision not to read anything by that author. With Wikipedia, you have no such choice. You have no idea if the person who wrote a Wiki article is a 19-year-old college dropout who hasn't yet figured out that he doesn't know everything or a person with a PhD on the topic.

The idea of a community-written article is a fallacy; contributors still feel proprietary about their entries, and they do indeed revert changes back to their original, crappy, and incorrect version. I'm not a professional writer, so I can tolerate bad grammar if the facts are there. But the fact is that the facts *aren't*. Wiki's current incarnation has no mechanism for fact checking, other than the vigilance of other users, and that vigilance is too often misused.

This isn't an open source encyclopedia. It's not even close. Every contributor to the Linux kernel is attributed, and I'm all for a user ID system in Wikipedia so people can be held accountable for their biased comments and so abusers can be weeded out.

As for bad writing, good luck fighting that battle. The Internet has had a negative influence on peoples' grammatical skills, at least in the english language, and I'm not sure it's a battle you can win, even with excessive Wiki-editing. My argument is that without accountability, the entire body of Wikipedia is useless. Without accountability, the entire thing, in theory, could be false or mostly false. Yes, I'm aware of the articles about how Wikipedia is more accurate than Britannica, but I bet you're not aware that those articles have been refuted. And it doesn't matter, anyway. If there are errors in Britannica, there's a clearly defined way to correct them in the next edition, with people's names all over the process. If a biased comment is inserted, you can find out who did it and get rid of that person. Accountability, accountability, accountability...Wikipedia just doesn't have any.

What user name? What article?

[dpbsmith]

Is there some reason you don't mention what name you chose... or provide a link to the article in question? Just wondering.

At least the Wiki participants aren't being paid.

[spysmily1]

This article http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/fun.games/08/30/g ameboy.ap/index.html/ was done by someone who is paid to report facts on their subject. If you read the whole article it states that the Game Boy is still having games developed for it. The games at the bottom of the report that they claim are original games are Advance games. Another mistake is that the DS Lite might be the only system after 17 years to replace it. Wrong, the Advance replaced the GB Color which replaced the original. Let's not forget the part that says the GB Micro is a slimmed down version that replaces the original. It along with the DS will not play original or GB color games.

Btw, I got my information from articles on Wikipedia that had the facts straight. What is to become of Wikipedia if no participation from anonymous is involved? I'm sure that no staff could maintain the Wiki unless it was large. Also, what happens to the material that they already have from users? Do they claim it as their own, which is morally wrong? There's no way they can start from scratch so the conclusion is that they will have to retain all that has been input thus far.

I for one have no problem with the Wikipedia as it is and applaud those who contribute.

Re:Not trolling. This reflects my actual experienc

[christurkel]

My experience with Wikipedia is that it tries too hard to be fair; if you read an article you'll get things like "This operating system has no 3D driver support, which while true of most small operating systems, can be a hinderance to adoption, but also 3D acceleration isn't important to a new OS but can be a factor later on..." Drives me nuts. This isn't Please Everyone-O-Rama, it's an encyclopedia!

Of course also have Admins with pet editors (or the reverse) and if you touch their article they get all holy infuriated and threaten to ban you or if you comment on their talk page they'll delete it with snide little comments like "Your contribution is neither asked for or wanted."

Ummm...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Besides, anarchy can be fun! :)

So that's why one of the most popular articles there is "I have a big penis" ... ? :)

Baby and the bath water.

[Gray]

So you're arguing that Web 2.0 style content as no value? The content of the Wikipedia has no value? It's not what people want, or the closet thing to it available? We're going to revert to the old ways now that some tiny cracks have developed? Buy Britannica stock now.

The mechanisms for aggregating user contributions haven't been completely mastered yet, but man, we're not even a couple years into it. The Wikipedia clearly contains useful content available nowhere else, there is something to this jazz.

Re:Baby and the bath water.

[beaverfever]

At what point did I indicate an all or nothing choice?

Of course Wikipedia content has value. However, having some oversight and organisation would help it immensely. However, in the 2.0 world, Wikipedia is a much different animal than a digg or myspace. Wikipedia has its own content, while a site like digg is only a source for finding other sources' content.

In comparing digg to /. or fark, those in favour of digg believe that having users control contributions and having every submission go live, rather than editors "arbitrarily" deciding which stories make the front page is supposed to be superior. However, design-by-committee is well known for being inefficient. How is having a committee of everyone decide which stories are most interesting better than having someone educated and possessing insight and experience in a particular area make that choice? I would rather choose a source whose editors I am comfortable with and trust and have them filter out all the crap, rather than having to wade though the hundreds of stories which go up on digg each day.

There are thousands of blogs, thousands of youtube videos and thousands of myspace pages, but how do I know which ones would be interesting to me? All that information is overloading me! It would take ages for me to wade through all the flotsam and jetsam out there - how about a site where people with similar interests as mine can suggest sites or stories, and an editor with similar interests as mine, but with training and experience, picks and chooses the most interesting ones? (btw, I'm describing /. and all the slash-sites already out there)

Re:Not trolling. This reflects my actual experienc

[MaelstromX]

Hang on -- are you out of your fucking mind? People are THANKED when they make grammatical corrections. What in the world would anybody revert a grammatical correction for? I DARE you to show me your accounts where you've done that and had it reverted soon after. Chances are if that happened you weren't just fixing grammar, you were inserting other garbage that didn't deserve to be there.

The nice thing about Wikis is that they keep track of each individual change. No vague or mysterious claims permitted; every edit is well documented. I hereby call you on your bullshit and ask you to produce the "diffs".

ObPenny Arcade

[unsigned integer]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2004/20040319h. jpg

They do that, but they should more

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia already does this to some extent. They have articles called for example: Critiques of Scientology, and in those articles they get to quote everyone who says their an evil brainwashing cult.

But I agree with you that it should be more deliberate. There are other wikipedia clones that try this approach, but none of them approach the popularity of wikipedia.

I thought about it

[porkchop_d_clown]

but I wondered if by saying "page X gets vandalized a lot" I might attract attention from people saying "Ha! I'll show you *real* vandalism!"

If you were determined enough it wouldn't be hard to figure out what pages I watch there.

Oh, as for the user name;

[porkchop_d_clown]

Let's just say I have a preference for humorous names - the particular name doesn't matter; the annoyance came from the fact that they don't stop you from registering, they let you register and then ban you after the fact.

Re:Oh, as for the user name;

[ral315]

That's a technical issue more than anything. We'd have to ban usernames with most swear words/derogatory terms in every single language that we have Wikipedias in. Not to mention things like "vandal", "troll", "George W. Bush", etc.

Re:Not trolling. This reflects my actual experienc

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.wikitruth.info/index.php?title=FCYTravi s
http://www.wikitruth.info/index.php?title=Kelly_Ma rtin
http://www.wikitruth.info/index.php?title=WooHooKi tty

Re:4 months...

[DiamondGeezer]

Of course, Britannica--while there is no risk of it being altered as you describe--when examined turns out not to be much more accurate than Wikipedia where they both cover the same topics

Not true

Maybe I should start a count of how many times this falsehood gets repeated on /.

Re:4 months...

[DragonWriter]

An opinion piece which basically just repeats the claims in Britannica's self-interested attack on the study (but ignores Nature's response to those attacks) doesn't show that anything is a "falsehood".

Re:Wikipedia needs a way to recognize professional

[faedle]

"Experts" are just as prone to making mistakes as everybody else.

Many of the people who are pro-ID (intelligent design) have degrees, and a few of them even have some peer respect in their fields. That doesn't make them good choices as arbitrary editors of Wikipedia just because they have a piece of paper from a University. In many ways, a hypothetical Wikipedia article on ID in such an environment would be just as much full of errors, inaccuracies, and just plain B.S. as any current article on Wikipedia.

Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that Wikipedia isn't the same thing as a peer-reviewed encyclopedia. Should it be? Maybe that's ultimately a question society needs to answer. As has been pointed out, even reasonably well done conventional encyclopedias make content mistakes. Encyclopedias are in general poor sources for exclusive knowledge on any subject. They are designed to be popular references and repositories of generalized human knowledge. I wouldn't expect the Wikipedia (or the Encyclopedia Britannica for that matter) article on nuclear power to teach me enough to build or operate a nuclear reactor. I would expect it to give a good general overview of the subject, and perhaps provide a starting point for further study if desired. Any errors in the material on Wikipedia would be apparent after any such deeper search. On the other hand, if all I want to do is read a quick capsule of knowledge so I can satisfy some shallow intellectual curiosity on the subject, even the worst article on Wikipedia on a topic should suffice.

If society is using Wikipedia to teach nuclear scientists how a reactor works, we're in much bigger trouble than we realize.

Not only grammar, facts are reverted too

[g3rr!t]

I've had the same experience, and it was factual information about the language and place where I live, being reverted/"corrected" by someone who obviously didn't know much about Belgium. (To be specific it was that in the north of Belgium, Dutch is the official spoken language).

It happened to me several times, though I must say the reverting stopped once I got in touch with the person doing the editing and explained what I was doing and why - the simple "change log" entry was not enough to achieve that goal.

Seems like an awful lot of effort to do, for very little gain and all this in my free time. Needless to say, I've edited much less since.

I think the problem is that some misconceptions are simply very popular - that and that there are some very misguided wiki-editors with a lot of time on their hands out there.

Re:Not trolling. This reflects my actual experienc

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps there's a solution out there, but none of the proposals I've seen suggested looks like it would work.

I take it that ensuring noun-verb agreement for number isn't important in your grammatical perfection agenda?

Re:Wikipedia needs a way to recognize professional

[TheNoxx]

Those are exceptions to what happens 99.99999% of time. To build a policy on it is stupidity.

Re:Not trolling. This reflects my actual experienc

[Neon Crossing]

None=not one. Not one of the proposals... looks... etc.

His grammar was fine, unless you were referring to something else.

Truth, in the limit [Re:The biggest threat?]

[j.leidner]

If there are more good people than vandals, all articles will eventually converge towards better quality, perhaps even towards truth by consensus (Peirce).

Here's an idea how

[BlackMagi]

Okay, every registered user gets 1 vote on each wikipedia page version. If they like a particular version, they 'vote' for it. If they like an update, they move their vote to the new version (if they care).

That way, when a page is defaced, new users just don't update their vote, and the new page isn't seen.

Only people who care will ever vote, so the page versions will be voted for by people who love and care for the topic. Unpopular edits will simply never be seen.

-BM

Re:Not trolling. This reflects my actual experienc

[swillden]

So I spent a little free time correcting the grammar errors (and generally sloppy writing) in a number of articles, probably around 10. Within a week, all but one of them had either been reverted so that the original mistakes returned, or re-edited introducing the same or similar mistakes.

Grammar corrections reverted? I very, very strongly doubt that. Luckily, it's very easy to find out what really happened -- just give us your WP username.

Re:Not trolling. This reflects my actual experienc

[Vadim Makarov]

This is contrary to my experience. I fix grammatical mistakes whenever I see them, and do other small changes in articles. None of them have been reverted.

Are you logged in when editing articles? Have you been putting a note in the edit summary when you do more than fixing a misspelling? Marking the "minor edit" checkbox for edits that do not alter the contents and formatting?

Re:Not trolling. This reflects my actual experienc

[Crazy Eight]

The articles that aren't poorly written have a surprisingly consistent style.

Casual fraud vs. hardcore fraud

[tepples]

First, there's no way to prove that the work really belongs to the author of the site.

If you write a song, I know of no way to prove even to yourself that you did not copy the song from something you heard a decade ago on the radio (see Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music and Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton. However, there is some strong albeit not conclusive evidence: Web pages copyright Damian Yerrick, source code copyright Damian Yerrick, and WHOIS shows that the domain is registered to Damian Yerrick. Would you suggest a U.S. registration of copyright as well?

Second, there's no way to prove you, the slashdot poster, have anything do to with the site or its contents.

I could put "site owner's Slashdot username is 'tepples'" somewhere in the comments. These measures would demonstrate that I'm not interested in casual fraud, although hardcore fraud might be difficult to discern and possibly beyond the scope of Wikipedia.

Heh.

[porkchop_d_clown]

Well, if you're really curious, read the talk page about user names - I've left a couple of comments there. Personally, I still feel like the admins have gone insane in their attempts at ensuring inoffensiveness; banning a user because his ID consists solely of numbers, because his ID is his email address (something that is required on other sites), banning a user name that reflects an organization, banning a user because "troll" has negative connotations in internet slang, banning a user not for anything they've *done* but because their name implies, to you, that they are planning on doing something is blatant paranoia, unjust and ridiculous.

My favorite is banning people who call themselves after their organization. Yeah, that's right - you wouldn't want the PR flacks to be honest about who they are, would you?

Re:Not trolling. This reflects my actual experienc

[strikethree]

My login name at wikipedia is, amazingly, strikethree. I stopped editing a year or two ago for the exact same reason as the previous poster mentioned. I do not have any diffs as I do not care enough to fight that particular system. To help you focus your disbelieving mind, I fixed grammatical and spelling areas mostly in the astronomy section.

My guess is that the author/s had scripts running to check for changes and to revert the changes to prevent vandalism. *shrug* I really do not care why my fixes were erased. I tried to help and was rebuffed. I guess the vandals have won.

strike

Re:Not trolling. This reflects my actual experienc

[Anonymous Coward]

You sir are full of shit. Congrats on getting your trolls modded up though, apparently over multiple Slashdot user accounts(??).

Re:Not trolling. This reflects my actual experienc

[strikethree]

*shrug* If I were lying, why would I provide my real login name for verification? It is not my fault nor my concern that Wikipedia has failed to keep track of my changes. Mayhaps the record of changes is not kept forever?

strike

Re:Not trolling. This reflects my actual experienc

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had ever done anything under that username it would appear in that list. In the future please recuse yourself from discussions about which you are unfamiliar with the subject at hand. HTH HAND