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

Re:Approved by administrators before publishing ?

[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.

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: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.

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: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".