Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
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?
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 (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.
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.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
audioLibre - freedom of music