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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.
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...
Mr. Universe: "They can't stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal."
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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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)
Meta will eat itself
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.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
"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?
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.
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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
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
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".
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.
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.
Clear, Dark Skies
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.
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.
Ok, I give up, why you?
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.
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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.
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.
Clear, Dark Skies
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:
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.
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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.
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".
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