More Wiki Than Ever

Earlier today Slashdot took a look at a change being implemented on the German version of Wikipedia which raised quite a few eyebrows. Many of the implications, however, led the readers to believe things that just are not necessarily true. Wikipedia founder Jimmy 'Jimbo' Wales took a minute to help set the record straight. Jimbo writes: "Recent media reports have been quite confused about the new feature we will be testing in the German Wikipedia. Some explanation is in order. Wikipedia is undergoing change. The fundamental nature of that change, the fundamental trend of that change, is to open up more than before, and to become more of a wiki than ever before. If you have read otherwise in the mainstream media, well, digital culture is hard to understand, and it is no wonder that errors are made so often."

From the early days of Wikipedia, we were forced to do something that we did not like to do: protect (lock) pages. For a long time, whenever there was a major editing dispute requiring a cool-down time, or a sudden spate of vandalism to an article, the community administrators of Wikipedia were forced to put pages into a state where no one could edit them. (Admins could technically edit them, but by social custom did not, in order to preserve the level playing field between admins and ordinary users.)

Protection was a good way to prevent further vandalism, but it did unfortunately still allow the general public to see the vandalism.

After many years of this, we recognized that protection was too un-wiki for us, and so the community devised a new software feature: semi-protection. An article which is semi-protected is more open than an article which is protected, because it is open for editing for all but anonymous editors and the very newest of accounts. This innovation has been very popular in Wikipedia precisely because it allowed us to be more wiki, more open, than when we were forced to lock articles.

Encouraged by this development, and after carefully watching the use of the feature and finding it to be a net improvement, members of the German community in particular thought creatively about how we might do an even better job of openness and therefore quality. Could we simultaneously open editing still further, while also dealing better than ever with the problem that protection and semi-protection were designed to solve?

After much discussion, a clever and elegant innovation was found. This innovation holds forth the promise of Wikipedia being able to open the front page for editing for the first time in 5 years! And at the same time, it provides a finer tool for preventing much of the vandalism that had unfortunately slipped through to the general public, while eliminating the need for semi-protection!

The new feature will allow the community, using the same sorts of procedures and norms that we have used for years to determine semi-protection and protection status, to flag certain versions of articles as "non-vandalized", and these versions are what will be shown to users who are not logged in. The feature will be tested in the normal manner of all new features at Wikipedia, with a simple quiet introduction and a period of testing and evaluation within the community.

We expect the following benefits from this innovation:

• Wikipedia will be more wiki than ever, in the sense that for the first time in years, we expect that nearly ALL pages will be open to editing by ANYONE, even non-logged-in users. This means the almost complete elimination of the editing restrictions we have been forced to have for years.

• We have good reason to believe that the primary incentive for most vandalism, as the primary incentive for most graffiti in the real world, is that the vandalism can be seen by the general public. Vandals seek to shock people. The new feature will deprive them of that benefit, and we expect to see a corresponding drop in the total amount of vandalism that the community has to deal with. This is an excellent example of our philosophy of trusting the general public to do the right thing when given the right incentives, and an illustration of why openness and transparency is better than control.

• Although not all pages will have the 'non-vandalized versions' feature enabled, we expect that it will be enabled quickly by the community on all the pages that are currently semi-protected due to being popular vandalism targets. Thus, we will achieve our aim of preventing the general public from seeing vandalized versions (as we do now on these articles), but at the same time allowing open editing of these articles.

A quick summary to make this even more clear:

• PROTECTION - NO ONE can edit, NO ONE can affect the public version

• SEMI-PROTECTION - all except new users and anons can edit, all except new users and anons can affect the public versions

• VERSION FLAGGING - ANYONE can edit, all except new users and anons can affect the public versions

As you can see, each step of this chain allows MORE people to do MORE things, rather than less. Each step of this chain is becoming MORE wiki, not LESS wiki.

The news media has an unfortunate temptation to follow a story arc that goes something like this. "Open editing is impossible. It worked for a little while at Wikipedia, but now even Wikipedia is admitting that it does not work, so they are closing off public editing step by step. This proves that our traditional model is best in the end."

The fact that this story arc has no relationship to the reality of changes in Wikipedia has not stopped them. I am hopeful that this post will catch enough attention that journalists will start to grasp the real revolution that is taking place here.

Comments

Article updated

[daveschroeder]

The original BBC article on this has been updated:

There's been quite a lot of discussion about this article over on the Wikipedia mailing lists, and as a result the details of what the German group are proposing to do are a lot clearer.

Rather than hold any pending edits until they are approved, edits will still be allowed to any unlocked page on the site.

Unregistered users will not automatically see these pages when they visit, so that the chances that someone will inadvertently come across a vandalised page should be reduced, but the pages will still be available if someone wants to see them.

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.

This clarifies a number of the points I raised in the article. I was wrong to say that "Under the new approach, page edits will no longer be immediately applied to pages", since the changes will be there, and someone who wants to see the latest edits will be able to do so.

However for most users, the page they see will not be the latest edit but the latest approved page, so my wider point that this would mark a significant shift in the "wikiness" of the site if it was universally adopted still holds.

In the end, the success of Wikipedia depends on the willingness of large numbers of us to write, edit, fix and expand articles all over the site.

Whether the technology which makes this possible is a wiki or a more conventional editorial process is less important than the project itself, which has provided millions of people with a (mostly reliable) source of information that can transform their lives - or just help with their school projects.

Wales didn't "set the record straight".

If anything this is not becoming more "open" or "wiki" than ever before. It is, however slightly, less wiki than it was. Now, make no mistake, this plan may ultimately be a very good thing, but to say that restricting and approving edits, and having the default page visible to normal people browsing only be the latest "approved" page, is becoming "more of a wiki" is a little bit disingenuous. It would be more accurate to say that it might be a better model, and we're exploring it.

The most open state for a wiki, fundamentally, is to allow, and immediately publish, all edits. If Wikipedia is backing away from that, that's not becoming "more of a wiki".

The most useful state for a wiki like Wikipedia, however, may be some reasonable ratcheting back that makes it the most accurate, functional, and stable source of information for all users.

It seems like they're stuck unnecessarily on trying to defend this decision, when some type of balance like this may ultimately be the best.

Even if it makes it "less of a wiki".

Re:Article updated

[noidentity]

Sounds like the standard thing that happens to any concept or idea. Over time, it becomes associated with "good", and its absence associated with "bad". The term then has its meaning diluted by more and more things being shoved into its definition, to avoid them seeming bad. I'd guess that something like that is going on here. "If it's Wiki, it's good; if it's not Wiki, it's bad (for Wikipedia). Since our new changes are good, they must make it more Wiki."

For a perfect example of this process, examine the concept of theft and the rampant misuse of it (theft = bad, here's something that's bad, therefore it must be theft).

Re:Article updated

[Anonymous Coward]

The vast majority of articles will not be marked for "approved version" viewing. If the shift is only to go from "Protected" to "Approval Required" and "Semi-Protected" to "Approval Required", then this is less restrictions.

The real question here is how will pages that are currently editable without default display approval become marked as approval required? If the same mechanism is used to change a page from completely open to approval required then this is less restrictions as well.

I'm concerned about the obvious missing questions. Who will be able to mark a page as "Approval Required"? and More importantly who will be able to mark a page as approved?

Re:Article updated

[Darkforge]

If you think this is "less wiki", then you've missed the point of Wales' response. Here's a ranking from least wiki to most wiki:

1) Every page is locked: only modifiable by the admins (this is almost every page on the web right now!)
2) Every page is semi-protected: only modifiable by logged in non-new users
3) Every page is version-flagged: where anyone can make a modification, but only non-new users can "bless" the page to make it public.
4) Most pages are a wiki-like free-for-all, but some pages are Locked
5) Most pages are a wiki-like free-for-all, but some pages are Locked and some are Semi-protected (today's status quo)
6) Most pages are a wiki-like free-for-all, but some pages are Semi-protected (and none are locked)
7) Most pages are a wiki-like free-for-all, but some pages are Version-Flagged (and none are locked or semi-protected)
8) All pages are a wiki-like free-for all

Clearly, moving from 5 to 3 would make Wikipedia substantially less wiki, but that's not what they're proposing. But that's not what's happening; they're going to 7. Moving from 5 to 7 makes Wikipedia substantially more wiki.

Thanks!

Re:Article updated

[daveschroeder]

I actually spoke to this in a couple of my other responses.

I believe that version-flagging will be seen as less "drastic" than protection, and, over time, will be applied more than protection would have been.

So when you say "some pages", what if "some" is "x" for 5, and "10x" for 7?

I'd agree that if version-flagging was never used more, or more quickly, than protection/semi-protection would have been, which is a future that I guess can't necessarily be predicted until we see what happens with the German team's proposal, that you could argue it to be "more wiki". But if far more pages are version-flagged than ever would have been protected, which is what I believe will happen, and significantly so, it's not "more wiki".

Re:Article updated

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice. I agree with you completely. It was sad that this concept wasn't hit directly in the article. That is why the media doesn't get it IMO.

Re:Article updated

[AuMatar]

WHat you have to remember is- Wales never wanted to create Wikipedia. He wanted to create Nupedia- a free resource that was created and edited by experts. Wikipedia was a side project that eventually eclipsed it. This is yet another step to bringing back Nupedia- have anyone edit, and then let the experts pick the displayed version. Since he's been slowly trying to turn it back into Nupedia for a while, I would expect the entire site to quickly get version flagged.

Re:Article updated

[Ibag]

The most open state for a wiki, fundamentally, is to allow, and immediately publish, all edits. If Wikipedia is backing away from that, that's not becoming "more of a wiki".

Yes, the most open state for a wiki is when anybody can do anything, and so the more things people can do, the more "wiki" the site is (that has to be the stupidest sounding adjective I have ever heard, but I digress). Changing protected or semi-protected pages over to the new system means that more people can now do more things, and while the changes people make might not immediately show up to those who are not logged in, they are still there for anybody to see. One might argue that this is less open than semi-protected, but it is certainly more open than protected.

Of course, the question is, will they use the new flag in place of protected/semi-protected, or will they use it everywhere? In the former case, wikipedia seems more open. In the latter, it does not. My understanding is that we will be in the former case. Wikipedia might work better if the tag is applied everywhere, but I do not believe that is the plan. In any event, since this is only a small scale test, if it does not work out the way people imagine, we won't have to worry about it.

Re:Article updated

[QuietLagoon]

In the end, the success of Wikipedia depends on the willingness of large numbers of us to write, edit, fix and expand articles all over the site.

What makes us such experts? How does more people changing things make the WikiPedia a more reliable source?

Last I read, the entropy of the universe is increasing. Why is WikiPedia exempt from universal laws?

Re:Article updated

[Darkforge]

I agree, and that's a very legitimate concern. I guess we'll just have to see what happens...

Re:Article updated

[TheSpoom]

It should be noted that there's no way they're eliminating Protection and Semi-Protection. So really, they're just adding another level of approval. Whether or not this is a good thing depends (as do most things) entirely on the community.

My guess is that it will help though.

Re:Article updated

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said. I didn't see why making the general public harder at detecting vandalism and the control exerted therein could be "more wiki".

Re:Article updated

[EsbenMoseHansen]

examine the concept of theft and the rampant misuse of it (theft = bad, here's something that's bad, therefore it must be theft).

I am not an native English speaker, so besides being able to tell your from you're ;), I can maybe shed some light on this :)

For many people (including me), theft is synonymous to misappropriate, to take what is not yours. Extending this slightly you arrived at accessing what is not yours, or even just copying what is not yours. Thus theft comes to include copyright infringement, data theft and such stuff where nothing was actually removed (which I understand is the bit that is missing for something to be theft in the official definition).

As this usage is so widespread, I would not be surprised if the dictionaries (though maybe not the legal system) at some future point will updated, whether people who like to do illegal-access or illegal-copying likes to be called thieves or not. That's how languages work, and there is little we can do to change it, the mores the pity.

As for wiki, let's have a look at the word. A wiki is a webpage that can be very freely edited by a wide audience. It seems logical to call something "more wiki" if it is more freely edited by a larger audience. Thus, I do not think the word is being misused here, in so far a so recently invented words can be misused.

Just my 2 early morning eurocents :)

Re:Article updated

[noidentity]

Thanks for your insight. I guess I was just in the mood for a rant about bending words. You're probably right about the word "theft" too. I wonder what word we'll use in the future for the removal of someone's physical property. There's still something to bending words to obscure the truth that gets under my skin.

Re:Article updated

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't we see the updates made to articles at news sites such as the BBC? That would be a great wiki feature for the mainsream media to have, especially when the changes suggest a bias.

Re:Article updated

[painlord2k]

Because the vandals and the errors are corrected with less hassle.
The termodinamics of Wikipedia is in favor of good articles, not bad articles.
This because you keep all the changes to an article, so you are able to return to any previous state with a click.
Without the history feature this would not be possible.

Re:Article updated

[David Gerard]

Possibly, but I don't think the present behaviour reflects such a tendency. English Wikipedia presently has about 800 locked pages and about 200 semi-protected. If a tendency to overapply softer protection did exist, I'd expect that second number to be higher.

Further, there are many admins on en: who are fiercely opposed to any locking down whatsoever, want it kept as absolutely open as possible and regularly patrol locked or semi-locked pages to get them unlocked. I'd expect them to do the same with this option.

Re:Article updated

[David Gerard]

"It should be noted that there's no way they're eliminating Protection and Semi-Protection."

Actually, Jimbo is hoping this will eventually allow us to unlock even the Main Page.

Protection won't be "eliminated", but we're hoping this will let us apply it way less.

Re:Article updated

[EsbenMoseHansen]

There's still something to bending words to obscure the truth that gets under my skin.

You are not alone there :/ Like in Danish, we have the world's easiest rule for nouns: All nouns are one word. Still, the English + American influence makes more and more people put nouns in several words (like house cat) which should be in one ( in Danish that is!). Still, it is pretty hopeless fighting it.

We have an institution here that monitors and documents the Danish language. (Wonderful waste of money except for the humoristic content). They once said "Most (danish) people believe that their language was at the best around their twenties, and then has been in a steady decline ever since." Right, I think so too! ;)

Re:Article updated

[QuietLagoon]

This because you keep all the changes to an article, so you are able to return to any previous state with a click.

You can return to any bad state with a click as well. :)

You still have not substantiated why the dynamics are in favor of good articles, you merely asserted it.

Re:Article updated

[painlord2k]

It is not really in favor of good articles "per se".
But good articles are a resource that the people is available to protect and restore (the "single click"). It is in their interest to do so.
Bad articles are not a resource for the people, so they have no interest in protect or restore them. No even the people that write them.
This is because articles like "Quartz", "Iron", "Mars", tend to grow in usefulness and contributors collaborate with ease.

The real problem is with articles about controversial topics like "G.W.Bush", "Cindy Sheenan", "Islam", etc.
Where people is not able to agree to a common definition of a "good article", because what is good for a part is bad for another.

Re:Article updated

[QuietLagoon]

But good articles are a resource that the people is available to protect and restore (the "single click"). It is in their interest to do so. Bad articles are not a resource for the people, so they have no interest in protect or restore them. No[t] even the people that write them.

It is not "good articles" vs. "bad articles" per se. It is more that any topic where there is an intent to present an opinion, will have that opinion maintained - regardless of whether it is a correct or incorrect opinion.

So then it becomes an issue of what articles are being maintained by those whose opinions reflect the correctness of the topic. A determined person with an incorrect opinion will win out over a less-determined person with the correct opinion.

Article updated further

[Anonymous Coward]

The original BBC article on this has been updated again:

There's been quite a lot of discussion about this article over on the Wikipedia mailing lists, and as a result the details of what the German group are proposing to do are a lot clearer.

CHUCK NORRIS RULEZ!!! CHUCK NORRIS RULEZ!!! CHUCK NORRIS RULEZ!!! CHUCK NORRIS RULEZ!!!

Damn those Wiki Vandals.

Update

[daveschroeder]

I should also note that I understand the argument that the new move is "more open", and thus "more wiki", than protection and semi-protection.

That's debatable.

Protection and semi-protection only applied to a very small proportion of pages. This new mechanism of "approving" the page that is default-visible will now likely be applied to many more pages than protection or semi-protection ever did, precisely because it's so tempting to use. Yes, I realize that there are ways to see the most recent edits. That's irrelevant to most people. They'll be seeing the latest "approved" page, and that's it.

Now, I still say that this may be a good thing.

But it's at most misleading, and at least subjective, to say this makes it "more wiki".

Re:Update

[NNKK]

What you're missing in your rush to find something wrong with the plan is that the version flagging is NOT being applied site-wide -- it is being used as a less-restrictive alternative to full- and semi-protection currently applied to SOME pages, the result being that users previously unable to edit those pages AT ALL will be able to edit them, but the changes won't be displayed by default to random non-logged-in ("anonymous") users until their edits have been flagged as not-vandalism (though they'll still available to everyone).

Re:Update

[daveschroeder]

What you're missing in your rush to defend it, and to disagree with me (even though I think the plan is a good idea), is that most wikipedia users ARE "random" not-logged-in anonymous users. They're not registering accounts. They're not editing pages. They're using wikipedia as a resource. Those people will never see anything but the most recent "approved" page on version-flagged pages, and that takes away a certain amount of the "wiki" nature, at least from those pages.

And also, I didn't say it was being applied site-wide. In fact, I spoke to that fact specifcially, and noted that precisely because version-flagging will be viewed as less drastic than protection or semi-protection, my personal feeling is that it WILL be applied to more pages. The more pages that don't publish edits immediately, the less of a "wiki" it is.

Now, that may not be a bad thing. But it's still incorrect to say it's "more of a wiki", and that's my only point. And if you want to nitpick, what's better: protected pages, or version-flagged pages? If they're the same amount, I guess I'd agree and say version-flagged. But what if there are double the amount of version-flagged pages as there were protected pages. Ten times? Fifty times?

Re:Update

[Breakfast Pants]

If it was sitewide it would be a huge mess, as anyone who has dealt with merging changes in a version control system knows. Two people see an outdated page, because they newest version isn't flagged safe yet. They both make changes. You now have a diverging tree. This can happen today with Wikipedia but it is rare enough not to discourage people from contributing. If this policy was sitewide (it isn't) this would, as I said, be a huge mess.

Re:Update

[Bastian]

What you're both missing is that this doesn't categorically make Wikipedia more or less of a wiki. It makes Wikipedia less of a wiki for some users, and more of one for others. I think this is a Good Thing.

The biggest problem Wikipedia ever had is that too many people can't tell the difference between "wiki" and "encyclo." The genius of this plan is that it makes Wikipedia behave more like an encyclopedia for the people who expect it to behave like one, or don't realize that it's fundamentally different from Britannica. There's at least some guarantee (or at least good faith effort) that all the pages will be reasonably accurate, and it's going to be a lot harder for people to vandalize it and confuse users in the process.

However, it gives a big opt-out for people who want it to be more open than that - all they have to do is get an account and log in. For these people, Wikipedia will now be a whole lot more wiki-like simply because, if everything goes as planned, every single one of Wikipedia's pages can now be open for editing. And the whole reason why they are now free to do things that way is because the people who don't "get" wikis can now be insulated from the site's inherently volatile nature, leaving everyone else to enjoy their wiki-ness without disturbing passers-by.

Re:Update

[Red Alastor]

I'd like a color code on Wikipedia where recent changes are highlighted (let say during 48 hours) so I can easily spot recent changes and mentally assign them a lower priority (possible vandalism). It would be even wikier than flagged versions.

Re:Update

[dubl-u]

This new mechanism of "approving" the page that is default-visible will now likely be applied to many more pages than protection or semi-protection ever did, precisely because it's so tempting to use.

That's a fine assertion, but I don't see any real evidence for it. The Wikipedia editing community is generally widely opposed to any sort of editing restriction. And even if the number of restricted pages ends up going up, it's not clear to me that a moderately larger number of less restricted pages will mean a net increase in restrictiveness. If a lot of the current protected and semi-protected pages use this new system, then it will, as Wales asserts, be a net increase in openness.

Personally, that's my bet. Looking at the list of protected pages, I'd bet the ones related to edit wars will stay protected; those are temporary anyhow. But most of the rest, including almost all of the semi-protected ones, could move to this new status.

Re:Update

[David Gerard]

One idea was to make approval of anonymous and new-editor edits automatic after some length of time (a few days). So if no-one gets around to flagging a good edit or fixing a bad one, it doesn't sit in limbo forever.

Please note, again, that almost all details of these new functions are undecided as yet. The story is hardly news ... it's just that the Bill Thompson piece, despite being unfortunately silly [*], has been spreading like wildfire. Yay.

[*] and you should have seen the prima-donna email I got from him for calling his silly article silly.

Re:Update

[kthejoker]

If any project ever screamed out for a fork, it's Wikipedia, for exactly the reasons you state.

It is a wiki, it is an encyclopedia. Weren't we promised a "stable" version of Wikipedia? Where has that agenda gone?

Prominently link back and forth between the two - stable to wiki, wiki to stable. Make changes to the stable be part of a rolling process, constantly updated by approved personnel. The equivalent of the peer-reviewed thing.

This decision is stupid, because it simply removes the most important aspect of a wiki - INSTANT gratification. It solves one underlying problem, but creates another. A fork could solve both.

C'mon, people, it's just bits and bytes. We can do this.

Re:Update

[astralbat]

What you're both missing is that this doesn't categorically make Wikipedia more or less of a wiki. It makes Wikipedia less of a wiki for some users, and more of one for others. I think this is a Good Thing.

I think it's more of a wiki for EVERYONE.

The reason is that wiki means you can edit it. With the new rules applied to all protected and semi-protected pages, the encyclopedia would allow everyone to edit every page. As long as anonymous users can edit and view their own edits, the encyclopedia should see MORE growth. The only disadvantage is that not all users will be able to see the latest edits by default.

Now everyone can edit. This hasn't been the case for at least 5 years. So this means MORE wiki :-)

Re:Update

[mdwh2]

What you're missing in your rush to defend it, and to disagree with me (even though I think the plan is a good idea), is that most wikipedia users ARE "random" not-logged-in anonymous users. They're not registering accounts. They're not editing pages. They're using wikipedia as a resource. Those people will never see anything but the most recent "approved" page on version-flagged pages, and that takes away a certain amount of the "wiki" nature, at least from those pages.

Compared with currently protected pages, where they will never see those unapproved edits at all, because the unapproved edits could never be made!

I take your point though that it would be bad if more pages were put under this new system. I'd oppose that, and hope it only gets used in cases where protection would currently be needed.

Re:Update

[Bastian]

This decision is stupid, because it simply removes the most important aspect of a wiki - INSTANT gratification. It solves one underlying problem, but creates another. A fork could solve both.

I fail to see two things:

1. How does it remove instant gratification, except as much as is necessary to satisfy users who expect Wikipedia to be more like an encyclopedia. Users who want their instant gratification will just need to log in. I don't see what's so hard about that.

2. How would forking the project increase the instant gratification? It seems to me that turning Wikipedia into two things rather than one thing with two interfaces would just increase the overhead involved in keeping things synced and get rid of some of the things that make Wikipedia great as an encyclopedia - the way that articles get updated to reflect new developments almost immediately comes to mind.

Re:Update

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would wikipedia have to fork? Any decent version control system supports branching and tagging. Wikipedia just got around to tagging, maybe they can reinvent branching next.

My goodness, Wiki is one of the most uninspired technologies ever, if it's just now discovering these things.

Re:Update

[David Gerard]

The agenda is still there. Note that the German Wikipedia has done three stable releases so far, and the English Wikipedia is trying various methods. The German stable releases were pushed by an outside company (whose stroke of genius was that what they needed for the release was stuff that would improve the encyclopedia anyway, so volunteers did the heavy lifting), I fear we'll need one to get a stable release from the English edition.

Judgments of Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

What is it that makes people always want to jump to conclusions about Wikipedia? A site that has the noblest goals at heart, seems to always have a torch bearing mob knocking on its door.

Re:Judgments of Wikipedia

[thelost]

because it's a summation of a massive amount of information that we are all sharing, and until recently this kind of information has been bartered and edited by a privileged few, the thought of the basic building blocks of wisdom being communally kept and edited by not few but many is a powerful and intimidating idea.

Re:Judgments of Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

When you seek medical advice, do you ask a doctor's opinion, or do you listen to someone who wishes he were a doctor? On wikipedia, these two people are given equal authority. The democratization of reference information -- without strict oversight for correctness and motives of authorship -- is a terrible idea.

Everyone who stops to think about it will agree that Wikipedia can never replace traditional reference material. But the danger lies in that not everyone will stop to think about it, and that many people ARE using it to replace traditional references. This wealth of unreliable information has the potential to cause even more societal damage than the previous difficulty of finding reliable information.

Re:Judgments of Wikipedia

[TheLink]

Because it's a site where stuff like "we are at war with oceania" can be continuously redefined and changed.

You can claim there's a history of changes etc but I say that's not true because stuff can be deleted and does get deleted. And it seems pretty arbitrary what ends up being deleted and what doesn't.

If more people start depending on it then that sort of thing becomes important.

Re:Judgments of Wikipedia

[thelost]

Yeah I've heard that one before and to be honest it doesn't hold water. If people do start using wikipedia to self diagnose themselves then that is *their* problem, not wikipedias and nor is wikipedia being misleading and suggesting itself a medical authority.

Ignore Wikipedia for a moment, lets look at medical texts. Anyone can go and in the appropriate place purchase a medical text that tells them a-z what illness they have, self-diagnosis is just an index-search away. Do people do it? No, unless perhaps they are a hypochondriac. So are people likely to use Wikipedia as a medical reference rather than going to a Doctor? No.

Are you saying it would be reasonable to use wikipedia as a medical reference for self diagnosis if it was 100% accurate? We place our trust in certain professions to help us in certain situations.

Next time there is a fire in my house, I will look up Fire Fighting on wikipedia, I'm sure it will help me, afterall who *really* needs a fire service when you have a wiki at your disposal.

Re:Judgments of Wikipedia

[popejeremy]

You don't have to jump to any conclusions to see that it's a failure. It's upsetting to many because there are millions of people who now view Wikipedia as a reliable source for facts, when it's quite the opposite. A free society depends on correct and useful information, and Wikipedia offers the opposite. When we live in a society with the misinformed and ignorant, we all suffer, and Wikipedia is pushing us as a whole towards being more ignorant and misinformed.

Re:Judgments of Wikipedia

[pilkul]

Even if Wikipedia didn't exist, reference information is still becoming democratised. For the people who don't "stop to think about it" and get carefully checked sources, the de facto reference on a topic is whatever website Google turned up as its first result. And it's pretty clear that Wikipedia usually has less errors than Joe Random Webpage. (Or, for that matter, Joe Random Reporter for almost any middlebrow news source.)

The problem with all of Wikipedia's critics is that they view it as potentially replacing traditional reference material, when really it mainly just replaces a bunch of even less reliable material. As an additional benefit, its open model even leads most people to be more careful and skeptical of what they read there, which they might not be with other sources. Wikipedia is a net win for propagation of accurate information.

Re:Judgments of Wikipedia

[imlepid]

This kinda reminds me of an argument I made one day in defense of Wikipedia. It goes like this, I was looking up some fact on Wikipeida to discredit something someone said, they said "You can't trust Wikipeida, any one can edit it." to which I responded "And any one can create a web page you can get to using Google. The difference is since Wikipedia is a central point for the colleciton of knowledge it is more likely that an 'expert' reviewed it and, if someone found an error, they can correct it, unlike some random web page."

Wikipedia's biggest strengths are these: 1) It is a large (popular), central point for information 2) Because it is large and popular people try and make it accurate ( 3) The number of people who wish to do good out number those who with to do bad on Wikiepeida )

Re:Judgments of Wikipedia

[SamSim]

It's always cool to hate things which are massively popular.

Re:Judgments of Wikipedia

[moonbender]

The problem with all of Wikipedia's critics is that they view it as potentially replacing traditional reference material, when really it mainly just replaces a bunch of even less reliable material. As an additional benefit, its open model even leads most people to be more careful and skeptical of what they read there, which they might not be with other sources. Wikipedia is a net win for propagation of accurate information.

Repeated for merit. You rock!

Re:Judgments of Wikipedia

[Gnostic Ronin]

But the problem is that in some cases, it does replace "traditional" encyclopedias, news articles, and research in general. People are tending to go to wikipedia and ONLY wikipedia when looking up new information. And most people are reading Wpedia as gospel truth, thus any inaccuracy in Wpedia is going to likely become accepted as truth, whether or not it *is* truth.

It's bad enough, imo when people use a single source, esp. a secondary or teriary source as their only source in a serious report. Worse still is when they trust the accuracy of people who don't leave their names or list credentials, which means that there is no chance of determining whether or not the person behind the page (or in the case of Wpedia) has any actual knowledge of the subject, has an agenda, or is a 12-year old having fun by reversing terms in that math equation.

Wpedia may be OK if you're using it to find related terms so that you can look up articles and technical material in professional journals or even news articles to confirm what Wpedia says. Or if you're looking up something that just doesn't matter much (say Jedi fighting styles for an internet Star Wars debate). But if you're doing something like writing a report (for school or business) or researching because you want to understand an issue, Wpedia isn't a good enough source to be the main source. Most webpages aren't and those that are, in general are the online versions of offline magazines and journals or newspapers.

Re:Judgments of Wikipedia

[mdwh2]

When you seek medical advice, do you ask a doctor's opinion, or do you listen to someone who wishes he were a doctor?

Except no one is suggesting you go to Wikipedia rather than a doctor. If you know of an expert, then sure, talk to him.

And secondly, Wikipedia is not "someone who wishes he were a doctor" - instead it's a collection of statements sourced from doctors and other sources.

What Wikipedia is compared to are other reference sources - not "experts" - but anyone who writes a book, the media, and even websites. People are not replacing doctors with Wikipedia, instead they are replacing books, media, and Google searches, many of which have far more potential for bias and inaccuracy.

And yes, if I want to know about some potential controversial medical treatment, you're damn right I'd check out what Wikipedia has to say, to see if there are controversies, what they are, and where I can find out further information on the subject (yes, from experts).

Not everything is black and white in medicine - you have issues such as risks of certain treatments, side-effects to medication, and controversies over mental illness diagnoses. Any sensible person would try to find out more about these topics from a variety of people (both "experts", and people who were patients) and sources rather than accepting what their doctor says as 100% truth.

What worries me is not that people use Wikipedia, but that people live in this dream world where every non-Wikipedia material is taken as 100% truth.

Re:Judgments of Wikipedia

[mdwh2]

But the problem is that in some cases, it does replace "traditional" encyclopedias, news articles, and research in general. People are tending to go to wikipedia and ONLY wikipedia when looking up new information. And most people are reading Wpedia as gospel truth, thus any inaccuracy in Wpedia is going to likely become accepted as truth, whether or not it *is* truth.

But before these sorts of people weren't checking Britannica, they were checking #1 Google hit, and accepting it as truth. And Wikipedia easily outstrips news articles in terms of accuracy and neutral point of view.

It's bad enough, imo when people use a single source, esp. a secondary or teriary source as their only source in a serious report.

It's no better to be citing any encyclopedia in a serious report.

Worse still is when they trust the accuracy of people who don't leave their names or list credentials, which means that there is no chance of determining whether or not the person behind the page (or in the case of Wpedia) has any actual knowledge of the subject, has an agenda, or is a 12-year old having fun by reversing terms in that math equation.

The sorts of stupid people you describe are hardly going to be the people to dig out names and addresses and past histories of the particular person who wrote the news or encyclopedia article they just read.

Re:Judgments of Wikipedia

[DragonWriter]

But the problem is that in some cases, it does replace "traditional" encyclopedias, news articles, and research in general.

Why is that a problem, where it is a problem at all, with Wikipedia? People that lack the understanding to select a proper source for the use they are using will tend to select improper sources no matter what the array of sources available is. This is not a problem with the source they choose to use, its a problem with the people choosing to use the wrong source (and, in many cases, the educational system that failed to teach them properly.)

It's bad enough, imo when people use a single source, esp. a secondary or teriary source as their only source in a serious report.

Yes, it is. But it is not the single sources fault.

Worse still is when they trust the accuracy of people who don't leave their names or list credentials,

No, I really don't think this is "worse still". Putting a name and claiming credentials does not itself justify trust.

which means that there is no chance of determining whether or not the person behind the page (or in the case of Wpedia) has any actual knowledge of the subject, has an agenda, or is a 12-year old having fun by reversing terms in that math equation.

If they aren't going to verify the identity and credentials, then the mere fact that they are asserted provides no benefit in terms of that. And I don't think many people lazy or ill-trained in research enough to cite a single source, and an encyclopedia at that, in a "serious report" are also doing research about the bias of the authors of the source, even when they are identified and claim credentials.

Wpedia may be OK if you're using it to find related terms so that you can look up articles and technical material in professional journals or even news articles to confirm what Wpedia says. Or if you're looking up something that just doesn't matter much (say Jedi fighting styles for an internet Star Wars debate). But if you're doing something like writing a report (for school or business) or researching because you want to understand an issue, Wpedia isn't a good enough source to be the main source. Most webpages aren't and those that are, in general are the online versions of offline magazines and journals or newspapers.

Wikipedia is useful for a lot more than that; I find its particularly useful as a refresher for material I'm basically familiar with but don't have the details at hand (like, say, a lot of basic algorithms). In fact, I find its generally useful (unsurprisingly) for the exact kind of things an encyclopedia should be used for, and its limitations basically come in areas where you shouldn't be relying on an encyclopedia in the first place.

(OTOH, most technical journals online—but not free—versions are perfectly good sources: they tend to contain the same content as the dead-tree versions, at least IME.)

Most "magazines and newspapers", especially used as a single source, are generally fairly unreliable sources, though for current-events coverage they may be all that is available. The online versions, even there, are often not much, if any, worse than the dead-tree versions (they sometimes include fewer articles, but usually the articles are fairly complete), and its a lot more practical to get wide coverage from different news sources online than in dead tree form.

Re:Judgments of Wikipedia

[kabocox]

The problem with all of Wikipedia's critics is that they view it as potentially replacing traditional reference material, when really it mainly just replaces a bunch of even less reliable material. As an additional benefit, its open model even leads most people to be more careful and skeptical of what they read there, which they might not be with other sources. Wikipedia is a net win for propagation of accurate information.

Now, if we could just have Wikipedia have a science peer-review section so that the whole process of submitting an acdemic article and having it reviewed could go through a wiki process, then we'd be set.

Re:Judgments of Wikipedia

[Julian Morrison]

It's a matter of holding-to-account.

People police their saints unkindly, because they want to guard the power of moral suasion linked to their goodness. A lying sinner is normal, but a lying saint is dangerous.

Re:Judgments of Wikipedia

[jmacleod9975]

try http://xxx.lanl.gov/

Re:Judgments of Wikipedia

[David Gerard]

Ultimately, there's only so much Wikipedia' can do for readers who refuse to think. Have you read the disclaimer linked from every page? I suppose we could put it at the top ...

Why the Germans?

[Quaoar]

I don't know, but I bet it has something to do with Schteffen Colbheimer...

Re:Why the Germans?

[Kamineko]

Don't mention the war! I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it. [/fawlty]

Dear Lord.

[Funkcikle]

The irony! Argh, it burns!

"digital culture is hard to understand, and it is no wonder that errors are made so often."

Re:Dear Lord.

[mrbooze]

He's right, digital culture *is* hard to understand. He should make a wiki to explain it.

Oh well

[Elektroschock]

Wikipedia is just fine as it is. Press complains about single cases but non-perfection is essential for getting people involved. 'Peak Britannica' is just a matter of time.

The complaints of conservative outsiders have to be used in a productive fashion. Ask them to donate staff to QA wikipedia.

Wikipedia has almost no employees. A public library gets more public funding than wikipedia. I think as Wikipedia fulfills an important or key task for society, the governments shoudl spent a few dollars on it.

So if they complain about Wikipedia next time ask for more public funds. And deny any approach which compromises the WIKI-success model.

Re:Oh well

[9x320]

Donations by governments have been rejected as a risk to its impartiality, or perceived impartiality, at least.

Re:Oh well

[jhuntnz]

I would argue that as it currently is, Wikipedia (at least in sciences) is of comparable quality to Britannica. This fits with personal experience but perhaps more importantly no less a peer-reviewed publication than Nature (which is about as un-wiki as you can get) agrees.

Nature (Dec 2005) Internet Encylopedias Go Head to Head. Vol 438, p. 900.

This is a pretty big "tick" for Wikipedia - I don't know why the press continue to act as though it's a failure when I think it is (with a few issues) succeeding incredibly well.

Re:Oh well

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

A public library gets more public funding than wikipedia.

And, in the US, a public library gets twisted by the government and its agendas far more than wikipedia ever has. Look at all the censorship laws directed at library internet access and justified, or excused by the apologists, because of their public funding.

Government(s) already have too much power to censor the net, we don't need to give them any more.

Re:Oh well

[kaligraphic]

Actually, that study was faked.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/23/britannica _wikipedia_nature_study/

Re:Oh well

[Elektroschock]

I mean persons employed for working on wikipedia QA not by wikipedia.

Re:Oh well

[Elektroschock]

Does not really matter. Wikipedia is younger than a usual EB review cycles. EB set quality standards. But regardless where wikipedia is today. A new release of EB takes ages while Wikipedia documents uptodate issues as well. There is no other encyclopedic source for many topics. where wikipedia is today at 40% it will be 97% in two years. EB nor any other medium can surpass Wikipedia given its continuous growth and improvement.

Re:Oh well

[Elektroschock]

The cyberlibertarian approach leads to a situation where public authorities spent millions on their commercial counterparts and useful projects run with almost no fuel. I don't say decision. I say funding for what is succesful.

Re:Oh well

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The cyberlibertarian approach leads to a situation where public authorities spent millions on their commercial counterparts and useful projects run with almost no fuel.

Huh? How do you go from "don't spend public money on non-goverment projects like wikipedia" to "leads to ... public authorities spend[ing] millions on [non-government projects]?"

I don't say decision. I say funding for what is succesful.

You can say what you want. But the only example we have to indicate what will happen indicates bad will happen. Freedom is not free.

Re:Oh well

[Elektroschock]

It is an efficiency argument.


* public authorities spent millions on their commercial counterparts

* useful non-profit substitutes run with almost no fuel.

Public procurement, e.g. say who buys EB? Public libraries!! Wikipedia is more open, more accesible,better, cheaper etc. Why not transfer 10% of what governments pay for EB to the Wikipedia foundation, so it can become even better.

Other
a)
* you get a National Spam Council with a large conference series and spam awareness raising programs, high level. After 2 years of research and numerous networking conferences they will present a report which includes what we know before they even started. Total costs 30 million$
* you don't get a government to donate 200 000 $ for software developments like spamassasin which are useful

b)
* Governments around the world pay billions for software licenses and support
* You don't get even 100 million for a national Open Source Fund

Now in the case of b) let's consider c)
* A local Goverment evaluates an exisiting proprietary and a open source product
* The research report which costs the taxpayer 200 000$ will present
advantages and disadvantages of open source and the proprietary solution.
* The government choses the proprietary solution although its more expensive.
* The development of the "missing features" would cost less then 20 000$ but no
public money is spent on this.

Think of key projects of our internet infrastructure which are seriously underfunded and the efficiency losses involved. We both don't want Governmental regulation and control but this is not what I talk of. We can imagine a lot of say Google SoC style action, which is all peanuts.

The cyberlibertarian approach is strange because it says: We don't want money at all.
A purity strategy.

The rationale behind governmental spending here is to avoid 'strategic dependencies' which cost a whole lot of money on a longterm and the importance of internet infrastructure. It is like geostrategy. What these electronic systems like wikipedia, like wikis, like key open source tools cost is peanuts, but from a social effect perspective it is crucial to support them to get public benefit.

donations by success means: Governments should support the tools which are succesful and play a crucial strategic role for society and not waste their money by starting their own projects.

Re:Oh well

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The cyberlibertarian approach is strange because it says: We don't want money at all.

No. This "cyberlibertarian" approach says: "We don't want regulation and control at all."

You make the key error of assuming that small amounts of money mean little or no attempt to regulate and control. Again, the best example we have - public libraries, which receive tiny amounts of government funding - indicates that to be false.

As long as you believe that you can take money without strings - especially small amounts of money without regulation in lieu of large amounts with regulation - you are doomed to failure. The people who use government to impose their views via regulation and control don't particularly care about the amount of the money, they care about the regulation and control.

From your grammar and syntax, I suspect English is not your first language. Perhaps you have more experience with european style government which is not (yet) quite so mercenary as much of american government.

Re:Oh well

[Elektroschock]

Your are right. From a European perspective we know that US bureaucracies are very inefficient which makes their citizens think government involvement was bad in general. Intrestingly even US-politicians with libertarian propaganda waste so much public money in certain projects. Think e.g. of Reagan, the strongest Keynesianist ever, though with Libertarian agenda.

I call your approach an idealistic purity approach. The reason is that whenever say Novell, Microsoft start a dependency in X the government of X will pay public money. Government procurement accounts for a whole lot of their annual income. The governments have to reduce their very own strategic dependencies and investment in open source pays off from a procurement perspective. Think of the government of Denmark. It does not matter if they really switched to odf or OpenOffice but the mere announcement to do so ensures better conditions on the procurement front. AOL funded Mozilla and got about 1 billion from MS to continue to use the IE-Engine.

"You make the key error of assuming that small amounts of money mean little or no attempt to regulate and control."

No. Control reduction is all what it is about. I follow an ordoliberal approach which key aim is to reduce control and foster competition. Open Source software plays a key role in the reduction of control and level competition in the software market. The task of ordoliberal policy is to provide a framework which combats 'control'. There are many different means of control: govermental orders, technological , lock-ins, strategic dependencies...

I would like to see a public foundation run by trusted people with a budget around 100-200 million which funds key software infrastructure projects for strategic reasons.

And these strategic reasons are tied to the aims of ordoliberal policy: reduction of power concentration.

US-Libertarians often combat state action in an anarchocapitalist manner. Ordoliberals aim to install Ordo, i.e. a free market. In the software industry the forces of laissez-faire lead to market monopolies (winner-takes-all markets) which bear a welfare burden, power concentration etc.. Open Source software and principles lead to a more efficient ordo. Therefore the task is to fertilize open source in order to get a more efficient state of economy. These activities are tied to infrastructure related projects.

Capacity building for some key projects.

You know there are different policies of government. E.g. activities of a competition authority cannot be regarded as a 'regulation'. Usually those companies affected by competition law enforcement try some 'red tape' media strategies but no one take that serious. An 'industry policy' unit on the contrary is probably a real regulatory body and often the very same companies here plea for aid and regulation which shuts off competition.

Obl. Simpsons

[Anonymous Coward]

Because no one who speaks German could be an evil man.

wtf?

[User 956]

The fundamental nature of that change, the fundamental trend of that change, is to open up more than before, and to become more of a wiki than ever before. If you have read otherwise in the mainstream media, well, digital culture is hard to understand,

How can a wiki becomre "more of a wiki"? When you use the defined term in your definition of that term, i can see how it might be hard to understand.

Re:wtf?

[Elemenope]

It's like a Wiki, but SQUARED!!!

Re:wtf?

[The MAZZTer]

It's closer to Jimbo's concept of what a Wiki SHOULD be.

Re:wtf?

[pimpimpim]

almost correct! You only have to change the definition of 'wiki' that is defined in a wiki (of course). This will however start a recursive process, the results of which are still unknown, but will be written down in the wiki the moment more information is available.

Grandparent is apparently still thinking in 'old' technology terms, not in 'new technology' (the difference can be found in a wiki somewhere).

approaching respectability

[theglassishalf]

I always thought it would be a great idea if some group (a major university, perhaps) were to fork Wikipedia and make "confirmed correct" pages that could then be used for real research. This is an interesting spin on that: not "confirmed correct" but at least "not patently wrong", and it (may) approach this goal without needing to fork. Good luck guys.

Re:approaching respectability

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be cool.

If I change the article (even slightly) would the experts have to reconfirm it's correctness?

I wouldn't want to have that job...

Re:approaching respectability

[Kamineko]

There's nothing to stop your university from linking to mid-edit pages like this (the first edit I did to Blinx) that it finds particularly groovy.

Re:approaching respectability

[David Gerard]

There are various ideas along these lines. The important thing is not to foul up the normal Wikipedia creation and editing process. See Category:Wikipedia release version work for some ideas on the English language Wikipedia. Like this proposal, most of the workable ones tend toward flagging or listing particular articles or article versions on the existing wiki, rather than bothering with a fork.

Setting 'Not Vandalized' can be done by ANYONE.

[Derivin]

I think you are missing the point of this change and how it is making things MORE Wiki.
Previously only Administrators could make a page me protected, or semi-protected (which wont change).
That mechanism meant it was the Adimistrators which determined what the anonymous or new users would see and be able to edit.

This new system will be controlled by the internet community at large.
The permissions are in a sence becomming Wiki'd.
(granted the protection editing is semi-protected ;-)
Welcome to meta-recursion.

Let me say..

[hclyff]

Guessing from the summary, I don't think the changes are very good idea. When you put difference between "the latest" and "public" revision of a page, you basically loose the elegance of plain linear revision system.

Casual users won't see changes made by anons, so why exactly will their changes be there? Why bother? Editors will still see them, fine, but people like me are usual users but casual editors, they won't have the basic motivation for improving an article - their work won't be available for the public immediately.

You may say the changes are primarily intended to demoralize vandals. This might work fine with unrefined vandalizing, like replacing a page with a picture of man giving himself a blowjob, because such pages will be quickly noticed by subsequent edits. Other types of vandalizing, like adding few PR sentences here and there might not be so easilly spoted. Non-anon editor won't bother to proofread the entire article before commiting his changes and making the vandalized page revision public.

Re:Let me say..

[Jetson]

Casual users won't see changes made by anons, so why exactly will their changes be there? Why bother? Editors will still see them, fine, but people like me are usual users but casual editors, they won't have the basic motivation for improving an article - their work won't be available for the public immediately.

Two things come to mind:

1. If you know enough about a subject and feel strongly enough about accuracy to be making updates to Wiki then you have an incentive to login so your changes are seen. If you don't feel strongly enough about the information to take a moment and login then your change probably isn't worth making. This discourages "drive-by graffiti" artists who rely on their anonymous and ever-changing IP addresses to let them get away with it.
2. If the public needs to know something but you can't have your name associated with it then you still have the option of making the "Deep Throat" changes and trust the rest of the Wiki community to eventually see and propagate your changes.

Re:Let me say..

[Anonymous Coward]

I've made anonymous typo edits. No, I didn't feel strongly enough about the information to take a moment and login but change was worth making. IMO. I hope that anonymous edits are easy for logged in people to promote... it would be worth logging in to check on 100 anonymous typo edits.

No, I didn't feel strongly enough to login to slashdot :P

--AC

Re:Let me say..

[Anonymous Coward]

I've made literally thousands of minor edits and hundreds of major edits while not logged into Wikipedia because I think logging in itself is a little bit contrary to the spirit of a true wiki. Only ONE, exactly ONE was reverted within the roughly four hours I watch my anonymous edits.

I have a login account, but I prefer not to use it because I've seen how it makes so many people petty defenders of their exact wording and their exact bias. It makes many people strive for greater influence and power in the community, which is contrary to the goal of simply building a better encyclopedia.

If Wikipedia changes it so that the first thing seen by anonymous users is NOT the latest version that I just finished correcting, I think they will have completely ruined the wiki, and I'll use some other site.

If they feel they MUST have "approved" versions, I think they need to present the raw face of the wiki, (which also shows it's innate power,) while linking to the latest "approved" version.

Re:Let me say..

[LordLucless]

Casual users won't see changes made by anons, so why exactly will their changes be there? Why bother? Editors will still see them, fine, but people like me are usual users but casual editors, they won't have the basic motivation for improving an article - their work won't be available for the public immediately.

Sure they will. When an anon makes a change, the entry will be flagged as recently changed, and editors with the appropriate permission can mark it off and send it on to the public face of the site. This is really just a change in workflow. It used to be Anyone -> Everyone, now it's Anyone -> Registered Users -> Everyone. You still have the Anyone -> Everyone relationship, which I consider to be the most important aspect of Wikipedia. It's just you have an intermediate entity approving the changes.

Re:Let me say..

[David Gerard]

It is a tricky one - regular editors will have a much easier time of things, but casual editing will be two clicks instead of one, and many may not bother. And our anonymous edits are mostly good. So any effect on casual edits will be one of the things people will be watching for, and is a reason not to have flagging on all pages.

Why did this take so long??

[madhatter256]

Q: Why did this take so long?

A: Because people in general can be idiots and can mess around with information posted on wikipedia for a few giggles before someone has to go in and moderate it back to the article's original state. For example, remember the fiasco with Stephen Colbert? That page on elephants had to restricted because people kept on going in and changing it. Before that, there was restrictions on congressmen from editing pages on their opponents (search slashdot) because they were putting in false information about them as well as false accusations.

Although I like the idea of having information free and able to update it instantaneously, however, the vast majority of people are not ready to truly treat wikipedia the way it should be treated.

Before, information was only allowed to a select few but as technology evolved, so did the ability to acquire information as well. And now it really is becoming highly accessible for everyone, however, there are no checks and balances to see if the information that is posted/edited is correct and factual, even if a majority thinks one entry is true but in reality it isn't, this can and will happen and the rest of the world isn't ready for a true wikipedia.

I do have to say though that this venture in Germany will kick off well because Germany has less chance of people, anonymous people, go in and just start messing around.

Re:Why did this take so long??

[mapkinase]

I could not help paraphrasing Tom Lehrer: "... and Germans did not bother us much since 1914".

Re:Why did this take so long??

[Raenex]

Although I like the idea of having information free and able to update it instantaneously, however, the vast majority of people are not ready to truly treat wikipedia the way it should be treated.

I'd say it's the opposite. The vast majority do respect the site. If that weren't true, then the site would have been deluged by vandalism and made unusable a long time ago. Really, the number of people that vandalize is just a tiny percentage of the number of people that visit the site.

This breaks how I help Wikipedia

[CDarklock]

I go to Wikipedia to look things up. Usually, I'll click through to a few related links. If I happen to see that something is vandalised or blatantly wrong, I will log in and either fix it or stick one of the dispute bugs on the page and open a talk issue about it.

The important thing here is that I am NORMALLY not logged in. If the most-vandalised pages are version flagged, I will never see the vandalism, and thus I will never fix it.

I don't know how many people browse this way, but if there are enough of them, it will have an impact on how the whole wiki concept works.

Re:This breaks how I help Wikipedia

[myspys]

i guess the key thing here is that this flagging only relates to some pages

Re:This breaks how I help Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure if this is relevant, as I'm not sure exactly how the flagging for vandalism works, but I think your point is moot. For a page to be flagged as vandalized, if my guess is correct, *someone* must have seen the offending change(s). So it doesn't really matter if you see it, right? I suspect the page will be visibly flagged to normal users, so if you weren't logged in, you could see the box of text that told you about the vandalism, then you could log in and fix it if you so desired.

Re:This breaks how I help Wikipedia

[BoldAndBusted]

Wait, I think I have a solution for your problem:

Log in.

I do. It's fun!(tm)

Re:This breaks how I help Wikipedia

[David Gerard]

Yes, this is a problem some have mentioned in the discussions about the plan - that it makes regular editing of Wikipedia easier, but casual editing (anon typo fixing) two clicks instead of one, and that will be enough for people not to bother. Since most of our anonymous edits are in fact perfectly good edits, this is an effect that the experimental period will be watching for.

Vouching

[Harmonious Botch]

I always thought it would be a great idea if some group (a major university, perhaps) were to fork Wikipedia and make "confirmed correct" pages

Good idea, but there is no need to fork Wikipedia, just have a protected field for organizations or people who are considered athorities in their area. A cosmology article, for example, might have a note at the bottom that says "Roger Penrose has looked at this and vouches for it's accuracy". If somebody edits it, the field then reads "Prior to the most recent edit, this page was vouched for by Roger Penrose."
A person would think twice about changing something when the record would show that he thereby made it inferior.

Re:Vouching

[amRadioHed]

A person would think twice about changing something when the record would show that he thereby made it inferior.

If that was the case, that would be rather unfortunate. Just because Penrose has verified that a certain page is accurate as best as he knows, doesn't mean that it doesn't have room for improvement. Especially in a field such as Cosmology where changes are so frequent and substantial. It would not be good for any sort of marking that would hinder future development of the page.

Re:Vouching

[NumbThumb]

Something like this is in fact part of the proposal currently under discussion: a seconds flag ("validated" or something) in addition to "not vandalized". The ability to set this flag would be reserved to a special group of experts. For core articles about science, etc, I think this can work. I'm not sure though how much of Wikipedia can be covered this way.

Re:Vouching

[mean pun]

The best approach would probably be that anyone can add such a tag, but by default only a few authoritive tags are visible. If you're interested in the tag 'The US governement approves of this version' that's up to you.

The only drawback I see is that I, random outsider, may be able to improve on an authoritive version, simply by fixing a spelling error. Are these authority figures going to approve all such changes? That may grow old very fast.

Re:Vouching

[puzmaster]

I think the problem with 'confirmed correct' is that 'correct' is often a matter of opinion.

'Not vandalized' is a neat semantic way of sidestepping that issue.

Re:Vouching

[Harmonious Botch]

It would not be good for any sort of marking that would hinder future development of the page.

Hmmm...true...perhaps the wiki should be divided into two sections: a 'vouched for' and an 'addendum' section; or a 'above the voucher' and 'below the voucher'. The expert of Wikipedia's choosing could vouch for the part that he considers correct, and anybody else could add newer stuff below.
Every now and then the expert would scan the newer parts, and if he liked what he saw, he could move his voucher down to include them. People could then boast "I write ATV." Or a criticism of a wiki contibutor: "He is a permanent BTV writer."

Re:Vouching

[xfurious]

Admin tags don't have to disappear for minor edits. Spelling error edits are easy to detect for computers. Grammar errors aren't that much harder either. If they really wanted to have fun, they could have a 'Edit type' box that explains what you are fixing (spelling, grammar, factuality, expansion, new information), and statistical AI could continually improve it's definition of certain kinds of changes. Furthermore, that box wouldn't necessarily mean that edit would be considered as such. The edits which were deemed to be misclassified could be moderated by non-new/admin users. I think Wikipedia could use some slashcode actually... instead of needing a privileged user to find that page, a non-privileged user could be allotted an extremely small amount of power in the spirit of helping the system.

A Security Inversion

[brundlefly]

This is a security model inversion which is better suited to Wikis than traditional security, and it's Good.

Traditional security (i.e. non-communal) says "only privileged users can make changes", and "the more privileged you are, the more you can change".

This security inverts that concept and focuses not on who can change what, but rather on how pervasive their changes are once they have made them. If the old model is a Privilege-Heirarchy model, then this is a Popularity-Broadcasting model. It says "anyone can change anything", and "only if you matter will your changes be seen by anyone else who matters".

It removes the temptation to vandalize anonymously, because anonymous folks have no rep and therefore no power. It idealizes having a good reputation, because therein lies the path to the biggest podium.

Re:A Security Inversion

[bherman]

You must be a college student.

You just took the article and reworded it perfectly to say the same thing without having to cite your source.

good job A+ for you!

Re:A Security Inversion

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not a security inversion, it is using a confidentiality protection mechanism rather than an integrity protection mechanism.

If we regard published content as being "unclassified" in a MLS like security model (readable by everyone) then the changes made by unverified users can be regarded as "secret" such that only users with "secret" clearance (or higher) can read them. Normally in confidentiality protection mechanisms (such as Bell la Padula) you can write to files at levels above your effective clearance and read files that are below your clearance. Special privilege is required to relabel data to a lower level (administrators and long-term authenticated users would have such privileges in the case of Wikipedia.

This was all invented decades ago, but applying it to wiki is a new thing. Check wikipedia for MLS (Multi Level Security) for more details.

Russell Coker

Re:A Security Inversion

[MichaelSmith]

This is a security model inversion which is better suited to Wikis than traditional security, and it's Good.

I wonder if it would work for code? Say I forked NetBSD and let absolutely anyone commit changes. One of these days I will just have to try that, its better than not knowing.

predictable consequences

[mapkinase]

1. There are two wikipedia's - public and "underground". There are two classes of people for those two wikipedia's. Instead of one most recent version with equal access, now we will have two. Depending on the level of care for the underground Universe - it will becomes "street"opedia as in wise and street-wise.

2. Wrappers around "underground" wikipedia will appear exposing it to the public.

Re:predictable consequences

[amRadioHed]

1. There are two wikipedia's - public and "underground". There are two classes of people for those two wikipedia's. Instead of one most recent version with equal access, now we will have two. Depending on the level of care for the underground Universe - it will becomes "street"opedia as in wise and street-wise.

That's just silly. For that to be the case it would require a conspiracy of all registered wikipedia users to prevent the best, most up to date pages from being seen by the unwashed masses. Obviously that's not going to happen.

2. Wrappers around "underground" wikipedia will appear exposing it to the public.

More power to them.

Re:predictable consequences

[Jetson]

You forgot:

3. ???

4. Profit!

Re:predictable consequences

[mapkinase]

Nobody says which versions will be the best. May be you should start reading what IN lines,not BETWEEN the lines.

Other fixes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any chance of actually fixing the dependence of article titles on their url and the sloppy case handling associated with this?

Such as pH and iPod not only being found at PH and IPod, but having PH and IPod appear at the top with a duct-taped message saying "The correct title of this article is **. The initial letter is capitalized because of technical restrictions"? Or still maintaining case-sensitivity when the case handling is stuffed from the start?

Semi-protection should have presented itself as an obvious measure from the start, but for a bug like this to still exist five years later when all it takes is a method of describing the title in the code is a little baffling.

Re:Other fixes?

[David Gerard]

Mediawiki needs coders! Get YOUR code into running a Top 20 website! http://www.mediawiki.org/

Re:Other fixes?

[ral315]

One comment on grandparent's post...the reason that capitalization is that way is that otherwise, to [[link]] to a page like [[this]] would lead to a lowercase title, when the article might be located at an uppercase title. The decision was made to force capitalization for this reason. However, MediaWiki allows this default to be changed- Wiktionary uses mostly lowercase titles.

Tell The WIKItruth

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you charge /. for this article Jimbo?

Wiki + CVS/SVN?

[corychristison]

So basically it is introducing features similar to CVS/SVN?

Wasted Text... that's all I needed to know. :-P

Re:Wiki + CVS/SVN?

[David Gerard]

It's always had simple version control (click an article's History tab). It doesn't have branches and this change won't implement branches either.

Re:Wiki + CVS/SVN?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you familiar with svnwiki?

There. :-)

It's easy. Just stay logged in.

[jchenx]

I don't see how this breaks it at all. All it requires is one change on your part: stay logged into Wikipedia. Now, I don't know how hard or feasible this is to you, but it seems to make sense for me.

I, as well as most other folks, just use Wikipedia as "read-only", to look things up. I don't really envision myself being the helpful type, as you are. So there's really no reason for us to be logged in.

But for those like you who want to help Wikipedia, just stay logged in! I don't know if they have a "keep me logged in" feature, but I imagine they do ... or should now. Otherwise, you're right ... it'd be a pain in the butt for helpers to have to log in every time they visit the site.

Re:It's easy. Just stay logged in.

[9x320]

I, as well as most other folks, just use Wikipedia as "read-only", to look things up. I don't really envision myself being the helpful type, as you are. So there's really no reason for us to be logged in.

There is a reason for non-editors to have a username. Logged in users can change how the layout of Wikipedia appears to them through this page. Here are previews of different layouts, for non-logged in users:

Nostalgia
Chick
MySkin
Cologne Blue
Classic
The default you probably have on right now is called MonoBook.

Logged in users can also change how math equations are displayed, how large images should be displayed in pages, change the date and time edits are made in article histories from UTC to your local time, and also manipulate Wikipedia's search engine for the number of hits per page and lines per hit. You can also change whether it should underline internal links to other pages and whether Wikipedia pages should display a "table of contents."

In short, you have to sign up for Wikipedia's appearance to become very customizable.

Re:It's easy. Just stay logged in.

[Anonymous Coward]

OMFG! I'M MISSING OUT ON EYE CANDY! OMFG, LET ME CHANGE THE WAY I USE THE INTERNETS!

Who cares? I'm not there to see pretty layout art, I'm there for INFORMATION.

Logging in isn't worth the bother to have the page laid out differently. Why shouldn't I browse the information in the default manner, the way the default editors laid it out in the first place? The fact that Wikipedia even offers different layouts for logged in editors is a distraction at best.

And I don't stay logged in ANYWHERE, so why should I make such a huge and notable exception for Wikipedia instead of going elsewhere?

(Yes, I do have a Wikipedia account.)

Some reasons it's a bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

(a) There are already three degrees of protection (free/semi-protected/protected), four degrees is too many. (b) Clandestine behaviour (showing different pages to different people, "accepting" edits without showing them) should never ever be implemented. (c) Flagging will lag behind as it requires too much from too few people, eventually further editing to some pages will be ignored altogether.

All users can edit semi-protected pages!

[raehl]

It irks me everytime someone says some users can't edit semi-protected pages. That's not true. All users can edit; some of them just have to wait 4 days.

There is a big difference between 'can't edit' and 'can't edit now', just like there is a big difference between 'can't make changes' and 'can't make immediately viewable changes'.

There's nothing un-wiki about changes not being immediately viewable.

Re:All users can edit semi-protected pages!

[TeknoHog]

There's nothing un-wiki about changes not being immediately viewable.

Except that 'wiki' literally stands for 'quick' :-/

Not so clear...

[Nahor]

Clearly, moving from 5 to 3 would make Wikipedia substantially less wiki

Clearly? Sorry, but I actually think it's better and "more wiki". I think that your 3) is actually more wiki than any of your point 4) to 6).

With the new scheme, *anybody* can edit *any* page. Isn't that better than have *some* pages not editable at all? With 3), anybody get a chances to see their changes on a public page. It may require approval, true, but at least you can be heard. That is not the case with 4)-6)

Re:Not so clear...

[Darkforge]

It sounds like you agree that 4-6 (various degrees of Locking/Semi-Protection) are all "less wiki" than 7 (mostly free-for-all, some version-flagging). I think you also agree that 3 (everything version-flagged) is less wiki than 7 (only a few things version-flagged).

Since the proposed move is to 7, IMO, it doesn't matter which of the other options is more/less wiki... 7 is wikier than them all. :-)

With that said, you raise an interesting point re: whether 3 is actually more wiki than 4-6. Do we measure it by the most restricted pages? If so, then any Locking, even just a few pages, is less wiki than when everything is version-flagged. But I think it makes more sense to measure it by how much of the wiki is free-for-all, (which is the real "wiki" way,) and then comparing the restrictions on what's left. *shrug*

Not really a good sign

[TheLink]

"version-flagged: where anyone can make a modification, but only non-new users can "bless" the page to make it public."

Whether it really is more wiki in practice depends on:

1) how many pages end up version flagged
2) who are regarded as non-new users

Given the way they've tried to spin it as "definitely more wiki", I think soon we'll have "all are equal but some are more equal than others".

If Wikipedia was a humour/satire site then that's probably fine, but it seems it is supposed to be a site about truths.

And if the people at the top don't think the truth is that important or don't even have a good sense of what is true, then it's just a matter of how rapid the decay ends up being.

So the political/PR style talk isn't encouraging at all.

It's about time.

[DeadboltX]

Programmers have been using this method for years. It's called Beta testing.

A page gets edited, new page is tagged 'beta', registered users check the page to make sure its clean and tag it 'stable' where it is then released to the rest of the world.

The fact that anyone can become a registered user makes this open-source, so the slashdot community should be behind it 100%!!

Re:It's about time.

[DiamondGeezer]

The fact that anyone can become a registered user makes this open-source, so the slashdot community should be behind it 100%!!

But open source software is not written like this. Instead the code is watched over by extremely knowledgeable people, and changes are made after full testing has been done to confirm functionality.

Open source software engineering does not involve anybody just registering and altering the live code (even with versioning)

It doesn't matter, Wikipedia is not opensource even in the sense that "DeadboltX" means it, because if you make too many changes, even if they are correct, you'll get banned as a "troll", a "vandal" or a "sockpuppet" of some other banned editor.

Possible issues

[Dan East]

I'm curious what the ratio of signed in / anonymous article views is. Obviously the number of anonymous views must be many times larger for them to feel this will help.

I see a few issues with this.

Since user contributions (for protected articles) will have to be specifically flagged as valid, there will be a delay before the contribution is seen by all. For obscure articles this delay could be measured in days. It also lessens one of the strengths of Wikipedia over other encyclopedias, which is immediacy, especially concerning breaking news events (most recent that comes to mind is the John Mark Karr article).

More reversion of vandalism will fall on signed in users, since anonymous users cannot see the vandalism and thus cannot revert it themselves. I know that currently signed in users take care of most vandalism, however I see plenty of reversions by anonymous users too.

Since regular contributors will know that vandalism cannot be seen by the general public, it may lead to apathy, leaving the vandalism in the article for longer. I usually visit Wikipedia in one of two modes - to contribute because I have spare time, or to find information while I'm working on something else. In the latter case I would be less likely to revert vandalism if I knew that the general public could not see it, so as to not distract me from whatever it is I'm actually working on.

Blatant vandalism is merely annoying. Subtle modification of article facts is what is really dangerous (like changing a birthdate by a few days, etc). This new addition really only addresses the former, because most wikipedians will use the same criteria they currently use when deciding if a contribution should be reverted - that being if the contribution has the mere appearance of being legitimate.

Finally, this may require more effort. Currently Wikipedia works by checking specific contributions to see if they are vandalism. It is simply assumed that the article, in whatever state it was in already, was fine. This is particularly true for those patrolling Recent Changes. The new addition will put more burden on people to look over the entire article to spot errors (or at least multiple contributions since it was last approved), since there will be less patrolling of individual contributions.

Dan East

Re:Possible issues

[pilkul]

Subtle modification of article facts is what is really dangerous (like changing a birthdate by a few days, etc).

I've done some vandalism patrol, and actually changes like what you describe from anonymous or new users immediately raise a red flag. Think about it: what are the chances that the original author(s) somehow got this simple, easily-looked-up fact wrong? It actually takes a huge amount of effort and intelligence to come up with plausible-sounding false statements: most people can't do it. And if a single one of someone's contributions is flagged as vandalism, their entire edit history comes under close scrutiny. For this reason, I don't believe "sneaky vandalism" poses much more of a problem for Wikipedia than blatant vandalism.

The real problem, of course, is good-faith edits from people who are ignorant or biased.

Re:Possible issues

[David Gerard]

Nah. We have a lot of people whose main contribution to the project is manning the floodgates and checking the recent changes feed. They're there already, and this will make their jobs a lot easier.

Hmmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

This has provoked a lot of thought for me regarding the opening of so many pages. I just don't know what to do.

Should I put "Wangs" or "Dongs" on the homepage?

Less vandalism Abraham Lincolns luxurious beard!

What about the Colbert effect?

[Asmor]

It sounds like a good idea in practice, but it's susceptible to a large-scale conspiracy. And don't go waving that off as some silly paranoid delusion, not only can it happen, it HAS happened.

I submit the Colbert Report. He's got a huge legion of geeks ready to do whatever he says, albeit all in good-natured jest. He overwhelmed an online vote in some European country to name a bridge after him (he got something like 2 million votes, which was significantly more than the population of said country). He's even gone after Wikipedia, suggesting that people edit the page on African elephants to suggest that their population has tripled in the past few years.

Now, imagine if this system were in place. The same legion of Colbert-inspired editors would also flag the page as valid, thus making it the default page and making the harm difficult to repair.

Re:What about the Colbert effect?

[Webz]

With versioning systems, damage was never difficult to repair. Consider this: if you approve an article that isn't really kosher, your name shows up in the history as the one who approved it. If you have a history of approving unfit articles, maybe your privilages should be taken away. Your reputation with the Wikipedia community is at stake, just because you want to support Colbert?

Re:What about the Colbert effect?

[The Cisco Kid]

Yes, but then once the vandalism was detecting, the sme legion of persons would have their accounts flagged as unreliable. Vandals generally avoid signing their name to their vandalism.

Re:What about the Colbert effect?

[dubl-u]

Now, imagine if this system were in place. The same legion of Colbert-inspired editors would also flag the page as valid, thus making it the default page and making the harm difficult to repair.

And a bunch of other Colbert-watching editors would put it back. Or, at worst, the page would get protected for a couple of days until the pranksters found a shiny new video on YouTube.

With version control and one-click reversion, it is easier to clean up messes than to make them. That fundamentally shifts the balance of power.

Re:What about the Colbert effect?

[soliptic]

He overwhelmed an online vote in some European country to name a bridge after him (he got something like 2 million votes, which was significantly more than the population of said country)

I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess you're American? I mean, wtf, "some European country"? It was Hungary, which has a population of about 10 million, and last time I checked 2 million wasn't significantly more than 10 million.

Re:What about the Colbert effect?

[woztheproblem]

In the GPs defense, Colbert actually had 17 million votes before people running the vote changed the rules. Colbert mentioned that this was more than Hungary's population.

Re:What about the Colbert effect?

[Asmor]

I have a memory like a sieve and couldn't remember which country it was. Wasn't too sure about the vote count, either. Could well have been 20 million for all I know. All I remembered was that Colbert said it was more than the population of the country.

Re:What about the Colbert effect?

[soliptic]

Fair play mate, I see now from another post that actually you were right, he did get more votes than Hungary's population, you were right on that, you just remembered the wrong number.

As it happens I looked up the population of Hungary with wikipedia *chuckle*

Taking bets

[NRISecretAgent]

Currently taking bets on how long it will take after this update goes in until the front page is vandalized... Question though, how does something get marked as non-vandalized? If it only takes one user to do it then that doesn't work very well because someone could vandalize it and than mark it. Perhaps so many users would need to mark it? Don't know if we have that many experts out there on some of the more obscure articles...

Re:Taking bets

[Aris Katsaris]

Most vandals are immature brats whose idea of contributing to wikipedia is posting things like "FUggOTS sYCk!" in the article concerning Homosexuality. It's not as if we need experts to determine whether *those* edits are vandalism or not.

Future Versions Proposal

[Baricom]

I've been considering the proposal, and I think the extension could be fairly simple, and address most of your points. Here's how I'd do it:

1. Unless an article has been protected, editing works as it does today - somebody clicks Edit, makes the change, hits Save Page, and the edit immediately shows up.
2. If an article is either protected or semi-protected, the appropriate class of users cannot immediately alter the article. In this case, when they click Edit, they'll receive a warning message, something like this:
   

   This article has been protected or semi-protected. Any changes you make will be saved for possible inclusion in a future version of the article.

3. If the article already has a "future version", rather than the typical edit screen, MediaWiki will take the editor to the Show Changes screen, which will show a diff between the latest version of the article and the protected version (the one displayed by default). When they save, the saved version becomes the protected version, assuming they have sufficient access. Something on the page should also change (perhaps the edit tab's name?) to alert users that future revisions exist.
4. Future versions can be accessed by anybody (even logged-out users) from the history. As far as the software is concerned, these versions are no different than previous revisions. This is on par with the status of most previous revisions now - if you choose to, you can go see the vandalism. The only difference is now you can also see vandalism that hasn't happened yet.

Here's responses to some of your points:

Obviously the number of anonymous views must be many times larger for them to feel this will help.

I suspect that the vast majority of hits to Wikipedia are users with no account who are there purely for research purposes. Wikipedia comes up first in many Google and Yahoo! searches.

Since user contributions (for protected articles) will have to be specifically flagged as valid, there will be a delay before the contribution is seen by all.

My proposal addresses this by making the edit available, just hidden by default. It also eliminates the separate flagging process by letting anybody who could make an instant edit in the current system make an instant edit to a protected article.

More reversion of vandalism will fall on signed in users, since anonymous users cannot see the vandalism and thus cannot revert it themselves.

In this system, anonymous users can see vandalism - they just have to go looking for it. A logged-in user or admin can trivially "bless" the revert by a null edit, which are sometimes used now for other reasons.

Since regular contributors will know that vandalism cannot be seen by the general public, it may lead to apathy, leaving the vandalism in the article for longer.

It may, but since the next valid editor has to take care of it before saving their edit, I don't think it'd be too much of a problem.

I don't think it's perfect, but I think this proposal could work given sufficient buy-in by editors. It's fairly easy to understand, uses concepts editors are already familiar with, and steers users into the desired behavior (less vandalism, and more attention to articles before they're changed).

Jimbo Jimmy Jimsky

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess this small potatoes compared with free speech rights and the future of the internet, but how is his name "Jimmy 'Jimbo' Wales"? Isn't "Jimmy" a nickname to begin with? Shouldn't that be "James 'Jimmy' {Jimbo} Wales"? Or does his birth certificate actually say "Jimmy"?

Either way, my man is double-dipping in the nickname department.

Wake me when....

[Anonymous Coward]

...they go to 11.

Work for wikipedia is still work.

[jozmala]

Arbeit Macht Frei.

Re:Work for wikipedia is still work.

[The DSL guy]

Completely tasteless. Attempted humor using nazi death camp references is sick. Please grow up.

Re:Work for wikipedia is still work.

[jozmala]

Firstly, the phrases original meaning fits this very well.
Its not my problem that nazis misused a good phrase, and even less that some people are too ignorant to only know only one usage.

Re:Work for wikipedia is still work.

[The DSL guy]

You use a phrase that 99% (of people who know what it means) immediately associate with Auschwitz, and I'm the one who's ignornant? Ironically "work makes you free" does fit the meaning, but just like the phrases "Operation Just Crusade" in the Gulf War, or use of the phrase "Final Solution" -- civilized people avoid such phrases because of the cultural connotations assoicated with them. Get over yourself, it's clear from your OP that you intended to be clever. I am not claiming you are a racist, Nazi, or are ignorant. You just missed the mark. It's just like donning a swastika and claiming that it's an ancient religious symbol; or in the US claiming the Confederate flag is a sign of Southern pride rather than a symbol of hate.

Thats all? that will not be enought

[Anonymous Coward]

The company were i work, some years ago started the internal knowlege base like a wiki (its a consulting, support and staff company) and monetary incentives were put in place to reward those whom contribute to persist the not printed, archived or formalized "know how" (there is alot of that in there... and some times a big part of a team is new or exiting the job)

The problems arised because there are areas were there is no clearly right answer and the teams allways expect the criteria of their particular client to prevail

1st) We ended building a versioning wiki like system depending of the user group (teams by client)

2dt) But the project managers got mad because didnt wanted or had time to policy the contributions... so we added accept/reject community voting (and only unrejected posts were payed)

3rt) Voting wars exploded inside user groups... so poster names where removed and the versioning system was reworked around belief groups (user votes ranked unshowed contributors and the users are grouped depending of who they belief)

4rt) The users feeled the system worked half the time; because the default version showed to the user reflected the group thinking, but only for information contributed by someone higly ranked in his/her trust list. For posts not related historicaly to the user (and therefore contributed by someone not in the trust list) the overall most trusted version usually didnt reflected the expected point of view... so we added networks of trust, the trust lists of the gurus of the user are recursively linked until select the version to show for historicaly not viewed information

5th) For a belief group the most showed version sometimes ended wasnt the "better"... so now the new versions are notified to the poster of the edited version, and his/her accept votes put the edited version in merge mode of the "syntax colored" diff of the two versions (the most trusted and the new accepted one) and to the browsing by group was added browsing by level of trust inside a group (to view the rejected posts... posts rejected several times and not accesed are deleted)

Unexpected results were:
- The most trusted versions tend to merge (the most trusted version of one belief group its edited by the poster of the most trusted version of other belief group and is accepted)but the belief groups not
- To be a guru or trusted regular contributor pays well, but to be a regular merger pays more
- The gurus cluster (some dont stand each other in real life but put accept votes to each other)
- Some gurus are only virtual (in real life dont show)
- The gurus have wider belief groups (have trust lists with gurus of different belief groups)
- The gurus can change frecuently of belief group... almost with the same trust list (mostly changes the ranking)

The weirdest thing its that now accounting, sales, etc knows what "diff" and "merge" is

Will it actually work.

[Anonymous Coward]

The real problem isn't petty vandalism, but writing something that will trick people.

If I'd write that the president of Belgium is OJ Simpson someone will quickly notice it and hardly anyone who sees it will belive.
On the other hand if I'd write that the president of Azerbaijan is Khuj Ebany, then it's likely it will stay unnoticed for a long time, and someone who doesn't know much about the country will have no problem beliving it, as it's a plausible, turkish sounding name.

Others Take Note

[Kamiza Ikioi]

Here is a truly inventive way of solving a difficult problem. They've basically flipped everything on its head. Instead of voting to exclude, they vote to include, without distorting the current system or balance (not everything must be tagged include).

I think many others should take note of this system if it works. It's not exactly like Digg, but the idea of inclusion moderation could work in many other areas. To me, this is like switching from blacklisting to whitelisting to stop spam, and I think it will have the same dramatic effect, with some quirky new problems (nothing is perfect).

But, take note all you web service designers. Maybe you should think about changing some of your functions from exclude to verified include if this works out. I think this could really have an impact on news related sites, like Slashdot to quickly vet story facts. Just look at this forum, it's already using such a system to verify the most competent responses, and weeding out the junk. Approval vs. Disapproval models could really expand when this is fully adopted far beyond sites like news and Wiki.

I like it...

[daecabhir]

I hadn't thought about it before, but that does make alot of sense. Have you suggested it to the folks at Wikipedia?

Re:I like it...

[Red Alastor]

Where is the best place to suggest it ?

Re:I like it...

[David Gerard]

On the mailing lists - mediawiki-l is the list for the software, wikitech-l is the Wikimedia technical issues list - or on irc.freenode.net #mediawiki or #wikimedia-tech, where the developers hang out.

Re:Wikipedia is broken

[nukechiroptera]

> You just redefined reality. No, you spread misinformation. > It was easy, too. I've done it many times. Why? What do you gain? I can understand doing it a few times out of curiosity, but why waste your time like this?

Recovery vs. Prevention

[Khelder]

It's not an inversion, it's a focus on a different part of the security process, one that isn't talked about so much: Recovery.

People talk a lot about Detection and Prevention, which is good since a lot of times Recovery isn't feasible (for example, if a virus wipes someone's home PC, it's likely not recoverable since they probably didn't have a backup).

However, sometimes it's better to allow a potentially bad thing to happen and recover from it later if it turns out to actually be bad, than to prevent it in the first place. It seems like Wikipedia may have found one of those times.

It's a start, but you can do better.

[EvilNight]

Not bad - I'm surpised it took them this long to adopt the obvious solution, but the implementation details are much better than expected, so good on them for taking the time to get the implementation right. Now, all they need to do is build the logic of how pages are 'protected' into the system directly, so that when certain edit patterns or questionable new content is detected (presence of dirty words, etc), the pages go into protected mode automatically and flag an administrator to investigate. If it's legit, approval is no problem. If it isn't, dumping the changes and the user is also no problem.

I see two trending targets - edit behaviour of all users on a single page, and single user behaviour across all pages. If appropriate heuristics can be developed and applied (perhaps a form of bayesian matching) it should be possible to automatically recognize and flag almost all kinds of vandalism for administrative review without the need to involve people in the process. That would make it a hell of a lot harder for the subtle, quiet vandalizations to continue unnoticed.

Stick some interfaces into the wiki for tweaking what kinds of behaviours set off the auto-protection, and over time you'll be able to fine tune things very well.

Re:It's a start, but you can do better.

[David Gerard]

And some say this already happens ;-) There's a remarkable array of anti-vandalism bots watching the recent changes feed and flagging stuff for human review.

The job is to watch a firehose for bad drops of water ... but I'm amazed it works so well.

Re:Wikipedia is broken

[DragonWriter]

Wikipedia is broken. Funamentally broken. You see, Wikipedia is incapable of arriving at the truth. It is only able to arrive at content that appears true.

Inasmuch as this is true (and it would be better phrased as "disinformation is possible via Wikipedia"), this is a problem of "humanity" not "wikipedia". The same effect you describe has been done through traditional, professionally edited, information sources throughout the entire history of information.

Seven fucking paragraphs!

[glwtta]

Seven paragraphs of gibberish before it actually tells you what the stupid deal is!

No, it is not

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not fine the way it is. Accountability is important, and Wikipedia has none. It's better the Joe Average Webpage, but that's not really saying much. Britannica may have errors and some cultural bias, but you can SEE who the incorrect, biased author is and make a conscious choice not read anything else by that person or even have the person weeded out of the organization. With Wikipedia, it's too easy for cowards, zealots, and general idiots to hide behind the veil of anonymity.

How about user moderation/karma/feedback levels?

[dthree]

So if what they are describing is limiting the visibility of pages that are edited by anonymous and new users, whats to prevent the chronic vandalizer? A feedback system like ebay, or even like the karma system her here, where editors' reputations are visible to everyone would allow more insight into the veracity of every edit. A poster upstream suggested "believable" pranks would be hard to spot, but they might be easier to spot if the user had a low reputation value. Reputation points could be either randomly awarded in small batches like here, or in bulk to heavy-contributing users and those with high reputations.