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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.
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.
My work here is dung.
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.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
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.
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.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
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.
www.eFax.com are spammers
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.
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.
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.
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
Wikia
Good: coming around back on topic. This is infintely more helpful than any help on the actuall Digg site.
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.
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
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.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
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.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You sir are full of shit. Congrats on getting your trolls modded up though, apparently over multiple Slashdot user accounts(??).