Could a Reputation System Improve Wikipedia?

Acidus writes, "There is an excellent article in this month's First Monday about using reputation systems to limit the effects of vandalism on public wikis like Wikipedia. It discusses the benefits and weaknesses of various algorithms to judge how 'reliable' a given piece of text or an edit is. From the article: 'I propose that it would be better to provide Wikipedia users with a visual cue that enables them to see what assertions in an article have, in fact, survived the scrutiny of a large number of people, and what assertions are relatively fresh, and may not be as reliable. This would enable Wikipedia users to take more advantage of the power of the collaborative editing process taking place without forcing that process to change.'"

Comments

Easier said than done?

[gasmonso]

I agree that they need to do something, but that is a fantastic challenge. Look at your major encyclopedias, they have a team of several thousand to do fact checking on a paid basis. I'm not saying people wouldn't fact check, but its a great challenge. How would you know that people aren't just saying its legit or not just for fun?

http://religiousfreaks.com/

Re:Easier said than done?

[truthsearch]

With the method recommended in the article the system automatically assumes that a section of text which has not been modified over a series of edits to be more likely to be accurate. It's not that someone denotes a section as fact checked. But if a page has been edited many times, yet one section of it has not been modified, it assumes that unmodified section is more likely correct and colors it appropriately.

Re:Easier said than done?

[beheaderaswp]

Well the biggest problem they are dealing with is standards. In academia there's a criteria for what constitutes a "fact" and a formal process for fact checking. On the "internets", well anyone can submit edits, and claim a factual basis for it.

So a reputation system is pretty useless because special interest groups can mobilize to skew reputation.

Want to have Intelligent Design show more favorably? Ok, get a bunch of like minded people to raise your reputation.

Heck, we even see it on Slashdot when a conservative or liberal viewpoint gets buried in moderation because people of a certain political belief gang up on the opposition.

A lot of what Wikipedia is dealing with is a direct result of the deep divisions on our society. And the fact that unlike World Book Encyclopedia, apparently *everyone* is allowed into the research offices. In a virtual sense of course...

Re:Easier said than done?

[Tweekster]

Do they have teams of several thousand?

seriously, do they

Re:Easier said than done?

[miyako]

There are two big problems I see with this:
The first is that there are a lot of articles and sections of articles in wikipedia that are heavily edited without the facts changing much. This is mostly a good thing, cleaning up grammar, etc. But the if that is used as a basis for how reliable the information is, it could be misleading because the software won't know if the facts have changed, or just their wording
The other problem that I see with this is that it makes it easy for people who "disagree" with facts to make edits to the sections to reduce their rating without just deleting them. It just makes me thing of those people who say "yeah, but evolution is only a theory" to undermine it, I can see them making minor changes to wordings of things to make the facts seem less debatable.
Of course, if someone was doing that, it would be impossible to say if they were doing it because they wanted to supress facts by making them look less reliable, or if there were simply trying to contribute to the quality of an article.

Re:Easier said than done?

[Anonymous Coward]

For instance, something has been wrong with an article from the very begnining http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gato_cla ss_submarine&diff=2048162&oldid=2048151 Like the Horsepower on the submarine being four times its actual size. Then it gets repeated on every single entry for the class http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Tinosa_(SS-283) and then gets repeated as fact on thousands of wiki-replicas http://www.google.com/search?q=four+6500-hp+Diesel +engines to the point where you can only find the truth on a few sites obscured sites if you search for the HP of a Gato class submarine. http://www.bergall.org/mechinfo.html It doenst matter how long it has stood, and especialy not that other sites share the same misinformation, all that matters is if someone knows what they are talking about, or if someone's "source" got their information from wikipedia to begin with.

Re:Easier said than done?

[hpavc]

They should put in a rep+web of trust system right now, but the system shouldn't limit someone until the rep system as a time for it to saturate a large number of its users. They really need to be able to express the data on users and their change management relationships.

If you have a change to my document. We need to have a way of saying 'i agree' and 'i defer to your judgment', etc.

Re:Easier said than done?

[Plutonite]

Sections may remain modified because they are overlooked and/or not touching on controversial topics that driving the editing. Editing for non-paid citizens of the internets is more likely an opinionated matter than for paid professionals, and this scheme could allow malicious groups of people to render undisputable sections quite controversial.

Re:Easier said than done?

[laxcat]

...there are a lot of articles and sections of articles in wikipedia that are heavily edited without the facts changing much. This is mostly a good thing, cleaning up grammar, etc. But the if that is used as a basis for how reliable the information is, it could be misleading because the software won't know if the facts have changed, or just their wording.

It's a good point, but I think the edit frequency would be pretty substantialy different in those cases. I'm not really basing this off anything more than guessing, but I would imaging that cleaning up gramar or structure in a particular section might take what? 2 or 3 big edits? Maybe a dozen or so little ones? And in most cases all of these would take place pretty much all at once. If the grammer is bad, someone who cares goes in and fixes it, and then it's pretty much done with. I think the type of edits that happen in the these fact wars would result in far more edits than your typical cleanup. And the edits would continue for a longer period of time. Algorithms that could adjust for those threshholds aren't too far out of the question.

Again, though, just kinda guessing. I've never gotten into any heavy editing.

Re:Easier said than done?

[dthree]

Actually, the author of TFA is NOT promoting a reputation system as the writeup mistakenly suggests.

Re:Easier said than done?

[gbsallery]

This could actually work to its advantage, as long as any "frequently edited" text provides an easy way to get to the history. That way, contentious (and thus frequently edited) assertions would be obvious, allowing the user to review the list of edits and for an opinion about the changes which had been made - presumably revealing an interesting set of changes for and against creationism in the example cited above.

Re:Easier said than done?

[Maru Dubshinki]

Your first problem is not really a problem. What you're complaining about are false negatives (good sections not being approved), but if one were to ramp up the "sensitivity" of the section rating system to be less stringent and more generous, then one would start seeing far more false positives, where it tries to assess as positive stuff which should not have been so approved.

It's better to default to saying this section is not-reliable/you-have-to-assess-the-reliability-yo urself-like-you-always-did than to say it is reliable without being rather sure. Better safe than sorry?

Problem number two is similar: if a section isn't stable and is the subject of dispute (I'm excluding ye olde vandalism from consideration here), don't you want to know that it may not be trustworthy, that you've stumbled onto it while it might in one of several POV'd or uninformative states? I know I would.

I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[RLiegh]

That answer is "no". We've seen numerous ratings and karma systems set up on a variety of boards and time and time again they've been defeated by people willing to take the time to game them for whatever reason.

It's typical nerd hubris to believe that you can solve social problems through technological means.
It's been proven time and time again that you can't.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

A rating system is a social solution to a social problem.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[NewWorldDan]

Firstly, the word was "improve", not "solve". I think Wikipedia would improve substantially if it added an editorial supervision system. For example, changes were not posted until approved by a randomly assigned editor. The random part is important. Sure, it's still possible to trash the system, but that takes a lot more effort. And then you need a rating system for editors, and so on and so forth. But the Wikipedia is run on a volunteer basis. There are limits to what it can accomplish without resorting to professional oversight, which would change the very nature of the beast. Ultimately, I think we just have to accept that it is what it is.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[Somatic]

I was tempted to mod that down cause it would have been funny. But no one but me would have got it.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[cavintage]

There are successful reputation systems out there. For instance, Credence can avoid Gnutella spam. They have a cool algo for detecting when a group of fake users all rate the same bogus files up. Wish this sort of thing was more widely deployed. Bitzi is the dumb version of the same idea, but never worked for me.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[catbutt]

Good the Wright brothers didn't say that because lots of attempts were made at flying that failed.

Slashdot's karma system is far from perfect, but at the end of the day it works. Can you game it? I don't really think so, at least not without a LOT of effort, which generally means contributing a lot of good content/ratings so that you can sneak in a very small amount of biased content or ratings.

Whether "ungameable" is possible or not I don't know, but I am quite sure that wikipedia's system could be improved upon massively.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[AndyG314]

I think that almost any reputation system woulth threaten the impartial nature of wikipedia.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[Yokaze]

> It's typical nerd hubris to believe that you can solve social problems through technological means.

That is not what nerds are trying, it is what society is doing: Trying to solve social problems through software for wetware (laws).

In the case of computer based communities, that laws are codified in programming languages, whereas in RL it is codified in legalese.

> It's been proven time and time again that you can't.

Yes... like flying.

I admit, my first statement seem to be more an argument against the possability of creating a good working online community, as we cannot really claim to have solved our social problems in real life.

However, one has to remember, that an on-line community only has to solve a small subset of the problems, which one has to solve in real life.

IRC, some time ago (one or two years ago) there was a post on Slashdot about a sociology study on the matter on reward and penalty system in communities, which claimed to have isolated some simple rules for a thriving one. I cannot remember having seen it implemented in software.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

A smaller but much less gameable step would just be annotation of recent edits. Yes, you can look them up in the history if you want to now. No, this won't help with people who post believable BS. But it'd be nice if when skimming an article I could see the information that's been there forever and is likely not in dispute vs the information that got posted 3 hours ago by some anonymous jackass.

Of course, while you couldn't game this to make information look more factual (a recent edit would always show up as such) you could discredit information if you wanted by editing it slightly. Also it might lead to people not wanting to correct style/grammar/etc errors for fear of ruining the article's reputation.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot's karma system works fine for Slashdot, but wouldn't work at all for Wikipedia. Slashdot, despite how much you may like it, is pretty far from neutral. It does the same thing this reputation thing would, represent the opinions of those most active in using it. Wikipedia would be ruined.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[speculatrix]

We've seen numerous ratings and karma systems set up on a variety of boards and time and time again they've been defeated by people willing to take the time to game them for whatever reason

surely these people who can beat the system are smart enough to make a useful contribution?
if they put all the effort into getting a good reputation, then won't they want to keep it?
rep based systems can work quite well - ebay for instance (although I can tell that a significant number of ebaybuyers don't really think about it too hard).. and here on slashpedia,er,wikidot,er,slashdot - especially if people can tag friends & enemies.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[catbutt]

How does wikipedia, in its current form, *not* represent the opinions of those who use it (including the opinion that it shoudl be as neutral as possible)?

If people using it today value neutrality, how is that going to change when a karma system is put in place?

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[Jerf]

But he's not talking about assigning reputation to people, he's talking about assigning reputation to content.

There is a world of difference.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[geekoid]

Wow, worst analogy on slashdot ever.

The wright brothers weren't trying to overcome social issues, they were overcoming a technical issue.

You can not solve social issues with technology. Social issue aren't always rational.

I have gamed slashdot karma many times.
In days of yor, I could intentional get a 50 karma in a week, and a -49 karma the next.
I can do it today.

Don't believe me? mod me up. ;)

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[catbutt]

I'll make an analogy about how badly you understand analogies.

I say "puppies are to dogs as kittens are to cats".

You say "flawed analogy! Kittens are not canines!"

And I'm not convinced you really "gamed" slashdot in any significant way. Try to get a crappy (as seen by the community) comment prominently displayed for a long time, in order to push some agenda. Without balancing it out by posting a large amount of good (as seen by the community) content.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[mdwh2]

Slashdot's karma system is far from perfect, but at the end of the day it works.

I disagree. I set my preferences so anons don't have a -1, and people with karma bonuses aren't shown with +1.

If you have something good to say, it should stand on its own merit - and that applies to Wikipedia. We should accept information there because it is verifiable, and not because we trust the random person who wrote it.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[gatzke]

Every dupe someone reposts stale comments.

Almost ever story someone whores and posts the article.

It takes a little effort, but you can boost your karma.

Recently, I found out that they may ban you from AC posts if you get enough down mods on past AC posts. I was posting asinine stuff AC, but it still hurt my account and I did not know that was an option...

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[catbutt]

I disagree. I set my preferences so anons don't have a -1, and people with karma bonuses aren't shown with +1.

You are forgettting an important point. Because other people don't do that, others have less incentive to post crap. I think you have no idea how much spam there would be if no karma system.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[mdwh2]

How does karma stop spam? Not moderation (which Wikipedia already has on a far more powerful level than Slashdot, in that edits can be reverted rather than simply moderated down), but the karma bonus system? I see no way to distinguish the trolls from the majority of Slashdotters who are not trolls, but simply do not have a karma bonus.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[catbutt]

First of all its not just the "karma bonus system", but that counts for a fair amount.

It's really the whole ratings system, of which karma is one aspect. Note also that people with good karma get to moderate more often (at least that is my understanding), so a spammer can't easily just create a bunch of accounts solely for the purpose of rating his own posts up. And meta moderation is also important.

The point is, a spammer would have his post viewed by very few people if he doesn't have any karma, and even then, his post would quickly get modded away. Again....imperfect, but it certainly discourages spammers from bothering.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[jZnat]

Then it isn't a wiki anymore. I'm sure a lot of edits these days are clarifications, typo fixes, and other minor modifications. Having to approve them all would be tedious and would grind Wikipedia to a halt.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[apol]

A good wikipedia article is typically written by an expert, a person that knows a certain domain very well, that writes about it but that won't write about many other things. Good professionals typically don't have much time, they could find some time to explain their domain of activity but certainly won't take wikipedia editing as a hobby.

A rating system for editors would raise the power of non-experts, people that like to write about anything.

apol

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[mgblst]

You can not solve social issues with technology. Social issue aren't always rational.
 
Well, I think this needs a correction: You can not solve all social issues with technology. Social issue aren't always rational. Obviously many can be solved, but not all.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[kthejoker]

Basically you want the difference between +1000 / - 999, + 45/ -44, and + 1 / - 0. That's pretty easy, just figure out (VotesUp + 1) * (VotesDown + 1), determine the percentile a particular Vu * Vd falls under in the whole system, and come up with a 10 point "intensity" scale to cover for it.

So 1001 * 1000 = 1,001,000. So that's like a "10" on the intensometer.

46 * 45 = 2070. Maybe a "4" on the intensometer.

2 * 1 = 2. That's a "0" on the intensometer.

Now you know which is the more intensely debated karma. Tweak as necessary.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[gurps_npc]

While I generally agree with your idea that a karma system will not work for wikipedia, your add on comments are blatantly wrong. You CAN solve social problems through technological means. That has been proven time and time again, despite your bald faced assertion to the negative.

The internet itself is a prime example of that. Before it, many more people were socially isolated. The ability to communicate with others like you, despite physical limitations of distance and mobility has brought people together into a community. Any gay man will tell you that the reason sections of San Francicso and sections of NYC became popular was that 50 years ago if you were gay in a small town, there was NO ONE to talk to, let alone date. So they moved to big towns. Now adays, gay dating services will connect you up other people, either to talk or to meet. This allows gays to live in small towns if they want to, and still have a social life.

Similar benefits were given to the blind (Yes, blind people DO use the internet), and those with impaired movement.

Unfortunately, the same benefits were given to prejudiced people, creating NEW social problems.

But it is quite clear that technology can and DOES solve social problems all the time. Sometimes it creates new ones to replace the old ones, but it definitely solves the social problems.

Re:I can give you the answer without even RTFA

[RealGrouchy]

Slashdot's karma system works fine for Slashdot, but wouldn't work at all for Wikipedia.

PP was refuting GPP's implication that no moderation/karma system worked by pointing out that Slashdot's works alright. PP wasn't implying that Slashdot's system would work for Wikipedia--simply that there are some systems which do work, so we needn't abandon all hope before starting.

- RG>

The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[no_nicks_available]

this wouldn't work.

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[$RANDOMLUSER]

That's exactly right. We would just see the emergence of a "Wikipedia groupthink"; not unlike what we see on Slashdot, or University faculties.

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[joe 155]

I must disagree, the /. system is actually working pretty well. If you say something which is needlessly offensive you will be modded flaimbait, the same would go if you're trying to start a flame war with comments like "GNOME smells of cheese and suX!!11!". If you make some "GNAA!!!!!" type posts, that'll be a troll. If you say something which is completely off topic, it gets modded as such. Both of these things mean that modding becomes pretty much a true/false kind of thing, which meta modding can comfirm. It also stops being seeing it as a default and makes the best shine out...

Possitive modding is a little more shakey with "informative/interesting/insightful" all meaning pretty much the same thing in most people's mind, but that's not too much of a problem.

Group think can cause issues, but in reality there is such a wide range of modders it is often avoided (you can see some pro-MS or anti-Apple comments come through)... although the system isn't perfect I guess group think at least only makes content that most would want to see if they come here.

It is also interesting to note that most people do care about karma and do like to get modded +5, maybe the wiki system would work in a similar way - where people will care.

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[catbutt]

And what is wikipedia today if not "groupthink"? As much as they like to say their is "NPOV" and that this is purely objective, I call BS.

Wikipedia's current system is "edit till the arguing stops". Ultimately, the more people sharing an opinion, the more the articles will bias that way. A good reputation system would not change this, just make it more efficient.

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[drinkypoo]

[The Slashdot moderation system proves....] this wouldn't work.

So what you're saying is that because a bad, stupid, wrong moderation system doesn't work on slashdot, that some other moderation system wouldn't work on wikipedia?

I don't think you really completed that thought before you wrote your comment.

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[AndyG314]

If people really used it like that, then it would work, but people also mod down statements that they don't like, or disagree with. Go ahead and post a well thought out pro GWB statement and wathch it get modded to -1, or post something negetave about apple computers etc...

The moderation system does protect from crap floods, trolls and flame wars, but it also promotes groupthink and surpresses comments opposed to the majorit.

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[catbutt]

Please make your case that slashdot would be better if there was no karma system...I don't buy it. I think it is poorly designed, but still makes slashdot more useful than boards of comparable size that have no such system. (actually, I don't think boards of such size without a rep system exist....they became unusable long ago because of all the trolling and spam)

Also I think it is odd to say that "because there is a case of something doesn't work, that will never work".

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[AlphaWolf_HK]

If you say something which is needlessly offensive you will be modded flaimbait, the same would go if you're trying to start a flame war with comments like "GNOME smells of cheese and suX!!11!". If you make some "GNAA!!!!!" type posts, that'll be a troll. If you say something which is completely off topic, it gets modded as such. Both of these things mean that modding becomes pretty much a true/false kind of thing, which meta modding can comfirm. It also stops being seeing it as a default and makes the best shine out...

This is not true. I have seen posts where somebody points out a mere fact about microsoft that gives them a positive light get moderated as a troll just because somebody doesn't like microsoft. It also occurs often that somebody will post comments that have mere facts which support a particular conservative viewpoint, yet just because somebody who may be a liberal doesn't like it they downmoderate it as overrated or as flamebait.

Then the karma system basically says "don't make these kinds of comments again, or else all future comments you make will be ignored." People realize this, thus they are reluctant to speak their mind when they already know that the group (due to its demographic) is going to disagree with them. By having a karma system, you essentially introduce the "fear" element common among e.g. dictatorships. That is, fear of speaking your mind lest you offend somebody who reduces your group reputation. Another fitting way of describing group think would be "group censorship."

The meta moderation system attempts to solve this, but it falls far short for various reasons. First of all the meta moderator could agree with the moderator, even though both of them are biased. Second of all, not everybody wants to spend enough time reading each subject and then each post in order to understand the context fully, but they still want the moderator points anyways so they may just pick answers at random.

This would be terrible for an encyclopedia, since if somebody doesn't like a fact (even though it may be true) they can go along with the groupthink and censor it anyways. An encyclopedia is not, nor should it ever be, a democracy. An encyclopedia should follow the facts as they are, not the facts how people want them to be.

If you still feel that this isn't the case, then explain why it often occurs that people feel the need to post as anonymous coward when posting a view that they already know the group won't like?

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[Arivia]

Of course it was. It was perfectly formed for the best karma payoff with the least amount of effort. That's what posting to Slashdot is all about, right?

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[Crabbyass]

If you say something which is needlessly offensive you will be modded flaimbait, the same would go if you're trying to start a flame war with comments like "GNOME smells of cheese and suX!!11!".

True, but you're forgetting the fact that the exact same thing happens if you make a rational argument that says something POSITIVE about Microsoft. You get attacked immediately. THIS is the major problem with Slashdot's moderation system: the automatic bias FOR Linux/OSS/etc and AGAINST Microsoft.

The same thing will undoubtedly happen to this post, because I'm basically saying that it's VERY annoying.

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[crabpeople]

Your perfectly right. This is why I like the moderation system on sites like urbandictionary and reddit. They let multiple people upmod or downmod a comment and then list the most upmodded ones at the top. That way you get the consensus of the site, much more than the consensus of what must be the two or three people, who get mod points.

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[mdwh2]

And what is wikipedia today if not "groupthink"? As much as they like to say their is "NPOV" and that this is purely objective, I call BS.

But if what you say is true, then a karma system would only make this worse. Who would get the most karma? Those people who are spending all their time editing on Wikipedia, of course.

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[mdwh2]

You're missing the point - yes, Slashdot moderation works well for getting rid of trolls, or what would be vandalism on Wikipedia - but Wikipedia already has a system far more stronger than moderation: You can edit the post so the material is deleted altogether.

What people are talking about here is a karma system, where people who post "good" things somehow get treated better. I'm not sure how that would work with vandals/trolls - giving them negative karma won't work because they just get new accounts or edit anonymously.

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[catbutt]

No, karma would have more to do with quality of content than quantity. People who's content is rated consistantly highly by those who themselves have a good reputation (for giving quality ratings and/or posting quality content). And so on. A smart karma system is very similar to Googles PageRank thing.

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[jZnat]

Go ahead and post a well thought out pro GWB statement and wathch it get modded to -1

If someone can do that, seriously, they'd get modded +5 WTF. Is it even possible to say anything positive about him anymore?

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[jZnat]

If you post your opinion enough (e.g. like twitter does, although I agree with him), there just aren't enough mod points to go around to mod you down all the time. A lot of people's comment history seem to be a lot of +1 comments, even those with excellent karma.

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[bcrowell]

I'd say that Slashdot's moderation system sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't. It works the worst in certain situations:

• You will be modded down to oblivion if you say something negative about BSD in discussion of a BSD article, or something negative about macs in a mac article. I've been posting on slashdot for roughly 5-7 years (?), and my karma has been bobbing around 50 for almost that whole time, but I recently got banned from posting for a few weeks because I posted something negative about freenet in discussion of an article about freenet, and it attracted a massive amount of negative moderation. (If your post oscillates repeatedly between +5 and -1, this can happen.) Basically, there's a problem with fanboyism.
• Slashdot attracts linux geeks, who are not necessarily science geeks as well. The quality of comments and moderation on science topics tends to be extremely low.

I'm not sure how much of this would apply to wikipedia. The fanboy issue, in my experience, doesn't seem to apply so much, because, e.g., on an article about Israel, or astrology, you don't just have people on one side editing.

The article we're talking about here proposes a system that's basically meant to keep users from believing material that's really vandalism. In my experience, that's not really a problem on WP that needs to be solved. Bigger problems on WP are:

• Over the past few years, the experience as an editor has become one of spending all your time time checking your watchlist obsessively.
• Random, uncoordinated edits make the quality of the writing decay over time.
• One crazy, dedicated person can make life miserable for a lot of sane people.

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[earthbound kid]

If they switch a Slashdot style system, all you have to do to get mod value is to start your edit with, "Now, I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but..." then continue on to whatever it is you're trying to push. Just mentioning the damage you're doing to your karma is pretty much guaranteed to give you a 5 around here.

Of course, this post is probably going to shoot my karma to hell though.

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[kthejoker]

All of your points are okay, but also really wishy-washy. "First of all the meta moderator could agree with the moderator." - In the long run, this flattens out, and people who consistently overstep the bounds of good moderation will get dinged eventually.

Also, the Wikipedia system proposes to "karmify" content, not people. So there's no fear of personal retribution or fear of censorship, because the worst that can happen is the thing you write gets dinged, and not your person / digital identity.

And finally, the plural of anecdote is not data. Just because you've "seen" people get modded down for having a contrarian viewpoint does not mean that as a statistical whole a karma system favors groupthink, censorship, or what have you. As a general rule, the posts that *I* see marked as 4s and 5s are very insightful, or funny, or informative indeed. By themselves they usually engender the whole crux of the discussion - which makes me suspect the moderators are doing their job very well indeed.

But more to the point, this argument gets tired because I have not seen any statistical evidence that moderators or metamoderators are unconsciously engineering groupthink at Slashdot. Of course people moderate according to their biass - they are encouraged to, half of the moderating options are subjective criteria (not to mention the ubiquitous "Underrated"/"Overrated"). And all it takes is one metamoderator to disagree with you to undo not only your moderation, but your moderating rights. I expect most moderators take their position seriously enough not to take a chance at losing their privileges for being scurrilous.

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop being so gay, Mike.
Stop crying.

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[Anonymous Coward]

And finally, the plural of anecdote is not data. Just because you've "seen" people get modded down for having a contrarian viewpoint does not mean that as a statistical whole a karma system favors groupthink, censorship, or what have you. As a general rule, the posts that *I* see marked as 4s and 5s are very insightful, or funny, or informative indeed. By themselves they usually engender the whole crux of the discussion - which makes me suspect the moderators are doing their job very well indeed.

This is because you fit the slashdot demographic to the tee. You repeat the typical slashdot mantra in your posts all the time. Yes I can read your post history. But in case you haven't noticed, not everybody is like you. And this is the problem with group think. You think that since your closest friends think like you then everybody must think like you, and therefore your oppinion is the right one, and every other one is inherently wrong. Because of this you are simply unable to see what is wrong with the slashdot moderation system.

Re:The Slashdot moderation system proves....

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh lighten up, Eve. You're worse than Kerri.

rep farming

[Sebastopol]

of course it won't help. people will just grind for rep and then vandalize.

what we need are national ids and biometric logins.

i kid... i kid...

Re:rep farming

[happyemoticon]

Bah. I'm already wasting several hours a week farming Cenarion Circle rep for my new axe, and now I've gotta farm wikipedia rep?

Re:rep farming

[jelle]

"of course it won't help. people will just grind for rep and then vandalize"

It's a form of 'payment'. Need to 'do good' before can 'do bad'. How wouldn't that help if vandals need to make (e.g.) 10 useful contributions for each vandalization instead of just vandalizing like it's possible now?

With the example above, for every 10 vandals, there only needs to be one more vandal still building up his reputation to undo the vandalism of all the others...

And that's without the people who don't vandalize.

Re:rep farming

[Sebastopol]

The problem is the bandwidth and debate required to decide what is a USEFUL mod and what isn't. By inserting a person or people into the loop you do two things: 1) bottleneck wikipedia immensely, and 2) require a subjective analysis of each edit by an inherently biased 3rd (er, 2nd) party.

* Yes, there's the karma-like concept, but that could easily be spammed by the opposition, just like it is on /. with alternate login IDs. Metamoderation taught me moderation is probably only (just a guess) 50% effective because lots of valid points end up as trolls, crap gets modded as insightful, and over time people move on, leaving bad mods.

Re:rep farming

[jZnat]

I'd recommend giving troll posts a +3 bonus; that seems to be the most abused negative mod out there, and at least 75% of the time (in my experience M2'ing) are given unfairly.

Otherwise, I've found that most moderations are fine. Maybe I luck out while M2'ing?

solution in search of a problem

[capoccia]

this is a solution in search of a problem. wikipedia does not have a problem with ordinary vandalism that could result in a reasonable measure of a user's reliability. wikipedia's biggest problem is with unfounded but believable information. in this case, the measure of reliability of a user would be nearly useless because the reliability of their edits is unknown.

Re:solution in search of a problem

[owlnation]

Yes, absolutely, I couldn't agree more.

I am progressively more and more disturbed by the wikipedophile focus on finding a solution to "vandalism". Liken it if you will to an right wing politicans campaign to rid the world of "terrorism".

I would concur that mindless destruction of someone's work is annoying and should be dealt with, however, I think it is important to understand that not all acts of destruction are in fact mindless - some are legitimate protests. Much as wikipedia likes to harp on about vandalism, I don't yet see a valid definition of what constitutes vandalism.

Also, what I feel is potentially the most dangerous aspect of Wikipedia is the ability of a moderator to deliberately manipulate information to promote agendae. Wiki's editors are self-appointed and not accountable to anyone. For as long as wikipedia remains in the form it is in; by small changes, small spins and offering seemingly plausible facts you could potentially alter the course of history. The ability to alter the perception of history and facts is right there on a wikipedia page. I am astounded that people are not already doing this - I'm sure they must be. It is incredible power.

While the mindless vandalism is annoying, removing moderation and removing protection is much safer in the long run. Since, in this way, people will know not to take Wikipedia seriously as the single source of any fact, and also because it will be much harder for extremists to push agendas. We as a community can contribute to keeping the site tidy, rather than have a secret police force doing it for us.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? We actually need an answer to this question before wikipedia does anything else.

Re:solution in search of a problem

[ExFCER]

Who is guarding the guards?

"For as long as wikipedia remains in the form it is in; by small changes, small spins and offering seemingly plausible facts you could potentially alter the course of history. The ability to alter the perception of history and facts is right there on a wikipedia page. I am astounded that people are not already doing this - I'm sure they must be. It is incredible power."

owlnation

Orwel was right...

Re:solution in search of a problem

[MechaStreisand]

. . . not all acts of destruction are in fact mindless - some are legitimate protests . . .

You're obviously with the terrorists.

Re:solution in search of a problem

[WilliamSChips]

I think it is important to understand that not all acts of destruction are in fact mindless - some are legitimate protests.

Doesn't mean they're not still problems.

Re:solution in search of a problem

[khallow]

Another point to make here is that the entity that runs Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation can be suborned. There was talk the other day about how China could overrun Wikipedia with an army of editors. That is, if you have the resources that China does, then you could overpower any opposition just through sheer effort, numbers, and stubbornness. But I suspect it'd take less effort to insert or coerce people who are on the board of Wikimedia Foundation.

Re:solution in search of a problem

[RealGrouchy]

RTFA.

As many comments here have mentioned, this is not about assigning reliability to *people*, but to *content*.

When I view a wikipedia article, I am oblivious to whether there is an edit war (unless there is a "content is disputed" tag on it), or even if someone wrote that the number of elephants has tripled when in fact it hasn't. While erroneous elephantite information may be reverted in five minutes, I'm still looking at the wrong information.

Currently, the only way for a user to see if this is the case is by looking at the history. However if a paragraph was changed back and forth 50 times, it only shows up as the initial and end state for the selected edits. I'd have to manually look at each edit, see what changes have been made, and keep a mental track of them.

The proposed system, while flawed, is a step towards removing this block. As TFA states, it's about indicating the *probability* that information is correct, not about carving it in stone.

- RG>

Sullied Reputations

[Anonymous Coward]

There are sooo many sullied reputations, perhaps your credit rating would be more informative.

How about one for /.?

[ackthpt]

I mean, we could all moderate/evaluate the slashdot editors on their choice of stories and keep stats, like onna baseball card.

CmdrTaco
Dupes: 23
Veiled ads as news: 18
Old news: 17
Allowed Bad Grammar: 2,980
Allowed Bad Spelling: 9,874,376

Re:How about one for /.?

[gardyloo]

Dude, to be fair, you have to have the amount of time over which those stats were accumulated. The ones you give are valid for the period of at least a day. Maybe even a week!

Yes

[neonprimetime]

Could a Reputation System Improve Wikipedia?

YES - It works on /.

Re:Yes

[treeves]

Yeah, new improved: with Wiki-karma whores!

Re:Yes

[johnlittledotorg]

Mod the parent Funny please.

Re:Yes

[drinkypoo]

While the slashdot moderation system is complete crap, can you imagine what this place would be like without anything at all? Me neither.

Re:Yes

[MK_CSGuy]

If you think the system works on Slashdot MOD ME UP.

Re:Yes

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

My god it would be a fucking zoo.

Re:Yes

[4D6963]

YES - It works on /.

I don't fully agree, I've never voluntarily trolled as much as since I have had a maxed out karma.

Re:Yes

[mdwh2]

While the slashdot moderation system is complete crap, can you imagine what this place would be like without anything at all? Me neither.

You're confusing moderation with karma. Wikipedia already has the highest level of moderation - previous edits can actually be reverted. As for karma - well, I can imagine Slashdot without it, because I have the karma bonuses/penalties disabled in my preferences. And boy does it make things more readable.

Re:Yes

[Shimmer]

I've been around long enough to remember that Slashdot was actually fine before the moderation system was introduced (late 90s, I think). IIRC, Taco added it as an experiment rather than a necessity. I think it was only afterwards that the serious trolling began.

Re:Yes

[dangitman]

My god it would be a fucking zoo.

Is that like a petting zoo, but with personal ads?

Re:Yes

[Zaatxe]

Why do people say "a reputation system would ['indeed'|'not'] improve Wikipedia because it does [''|'not'] work in Slashdot"?
This is a little stupid in my humble opinion, because Wikipedia and Slashdot are from very different nature.

Re:Yes

[drinkypoo]

I've been around long enough to remember that Slashdot was actually fine before the moderation system was introduced (late 90s, I think). IIRC, Taco added it as an experiment rather than a necessity. I think it was only afterwards that the serious trolling began.

Just take a look at your UID and then take a look at what the UIDs are up to now (have we hit a million yet? if not we're very close) and then consider if things might have changed a bit between then and now, please. What works for a community of a few thousand people doesn't apply at all when you get up into hundreds of thousands - even though a majority of those IDs are never logged (I'm sure) there are plenty which are.

I maintain that without some way to separate the wheat from the chaff, slashdot would be utterly worthless, instead of just mostly useless.

Re:Yes

[neonprimetime]

YES - It works on /.

I don't fully agree, I've never voluntarily trolled as much as since I have had a maxed out karma.

Of course I was being sarcastic / funny. But you make a good point, the true trolls are actually the /. users that have mastered the art of karma (like me) :-P

Wiki needs a YTMND-esque rating system

[Anonymous Coward]

With a rating system, the vandals could downvote good information and upvote lines of "goatse goatse goatse goatse goatse". That would be heaven.

Rep doesn't lead to reliability

[Neophytus]

Even if somebody makes hundreds of edits in good faith, there will still be a good deal of inaccuracy in some of the edits. A rep system built on trusted edits does not mean the quality will be any better. Whatsmore, determined vandals could start trying to access accounts through phishing.

Honestly...

[urbanradar]

Honestly, this seems to me like the sort of solution that only makes things more complicated than the original problem, and yet still doesn't really address a major issue - some articles contain misinformation which is believed to be true by most people, so they'd just flag it as correct.

As for the problem of vandalism, that can be fought more effectively by having "stable" versions of Wiki articles which have been verified as unvandalised.

no No No NO NO!!!

[shoma-san]

didn't you see my sig? ...

Re:no No No NO NO!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I don't read posts below Score: 1.

somethign simular to yahoo answers

[Brigadier]

I've only edited a wiki once, and that was info on my home country. I have however been addicted to yahoo answers. thats what i doo all day ( why I dont know) one cool feature is you have to gain a certain rank before you can be allowed to either thumbs up or thumbs down and answer or question. I guess it's kind of a prove your worth sort of deal.

What about...

[MarcoAtWork]

The site is /.-ed, but this got me thinking: what about having an additional page view that uses color to highlight text age? Oldest text would be black, newest would be something else (red? blue?), intermediate 'ages' in intermediate shades. This would make it quite obvious which parts of the article haven't been modified in a long time.

Re:What about...

[goofyheadedpunk]

It's an interesting idea, to be certain, but how would this be helpful?

Re:What about...

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the same thought, except I was thinking more of a yellow to represent "hot" material.

Re:What about...

[MarcoAtWork]

It's an interesting idea, to be certain, but how would this be helpful?

when reading a controversial article, or in general any article one wants to be reasonably sure about, one could use this view and take into account mostly only the 'black/oldest' text. As much as it's easy to figure out obvious vandalism, it's not as easy, especially if one doesn't have domain knowledge, to identify subtle changes.

This would also be helpful for articles on my watchlist when I don't look at them for a while, since edits would stand out fairly easily without having to go through the diff page.

Re:What about...

[Decius6i5]

That is, actually, exactly what the article suggests. You should read it. BTW, I can load the page from here...

Re:What about...

[MarcoAtWork]

it finally worked from here, although I really don't agree with his color scheme

In my implementation I chose four colors to represent text of varying degrees of maturity. Most high-tech cultures on earth employ automobiles and have fairly consistent standards for traffic light coloring, so I employed these colors to indicate the age of text. The newest text in an article is colored red, indicating that users should employ caution in relying on it. Slightly older text is colored yellow. Text that is nearing maturity is colored green. Mature text is colored black.

this will make pages really difficult to read, because a) yellow on white and sometimes green on white are hard to see b) there are quite a few people that have trouble distinguishing red from green.

There is also another issue, which is vandalizing of wiki links, where it would be trivial to leave the original link name (highlighted by wikipedia in a different color) and change its destination to vandal-friendly sites.

I think I would like to amend my original thought with having the color change be in the =background= of the text: having only one color but different saturation levels (from, say, pure medium slate blue, to light slate blue, to white) which should be distinguishable by everybody and make the reading of the article still reasonably easy, while presenting the age information as well as without interfering with link/visited color choices.

Still, I wish I had been able to read the article before my original post, since I thought it discussed only reputation.

Re:What about...

[tonyr1988]

Better yet, we could use MySpace color schemes.

• Oldest: black with jet black background
• Little newer: Yellow on orange
• Tad bit newer: Light blue with seventeen exclamation points
• Couple days old: ALL CAPS BABY
• Posted today: Embedded into a crappy Flash movie from www.pimpandrockoutyourwikipediavids.com

Then it will be truly distinguishable.

Re:What about...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Syntax_Highlighting _Extension

There was also an extension that would show who made a change (somewhat like svn blame).

Re:What about...

[CyberPack]

I can see some good in this shading scheme, but how about we shade on a grey scale from black to white. Keeping the default background, of course :P.

Not a complete solution

[br00tus]

On Wikipedia, pages relating to quantum mechanics are sometimes vandalized, but 99% of people are on the same side in terms of keeping it accurate. So there are various ways this can be improved.

On the other hand, the pages regarding the fight between Hamas and IDF are as much a battleground as is the area around the Israeli/Lebanese border. I have been involved in Wikipedia for years and have just seen things deteriorate around these types of flame-wars. Wikipedia's leadership is not dealing with it well. Imagine Slashdot setting up a wiki where we had to determine which was better - Debian or Gentoo (or Ubuntu etc.), BSD or Linux, vi or emacs etc.

We are technical people, and there's the old thing about when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. But I don't think a technical solution will help much in regards to this. I'm not even sure you really can have a neutral view about wars in the Middle East. And even if you could, Wikipedia's "cabal" is nowhere near able to deal with it, and I doubt they ever will be. Personally, I think most of the people in high positions at Wikipedia are jerks, all the flamewars and such seem to have driven most of the nice people off.

Things like Wikipediareview.com convince me that what will ultimately happen is alternatives to Wikipedia will pop up. Wikipedia is a new phenomenom, and it makes sense everyone edits on the same wiki, but why should that be? Why should pro-Hamas and pro-Israel people edit and battle on the same wiki? It makes little sense, and I'm sure in time, just as IRC went from one network to EFnet and Anet, and then split even more, I'm sure we'll see splits with Wikipedia. In the old days, the Encyclopaedia Britannica had one view of history and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia had another, why should the future be any different?

Re:Not a complete solution

[Kesch]

On Wikipedia, pages relating to quantum mechanics are sometimes vandalized.

Actually, every article on quantum mechanics exists in a state between vandalized and not vandalized. By viewing it you colapse the waveform and change it's value. Now, there is a good probability that it will turn out unvandalized, but as you have stated it occasionaly collapses into a vandalized article. After you leave the page, Wikipedia runs complex calculations in it's improbability engine and sends the article back into a quantum state.

P.S. This is presented as per my understanding of quantum mechanics which I learned entirely from Wikipedia. It may be wrong however as my viewing might have caused it to appear in a vandalized state.

P.P.S

Imagine Slashdot setting up a wiki where we had to determine which was better - Debian or Gentoo (or Ubuntu etc.), BSD or Linux, vi or emacs

Debian, Linux, emacs. That wasn't so hard. (Anyone who disagrees is a terrorist.)

Re:Not a complete solution

[FhnuZoag]

Simple, really.

Because splitting from Wikipedia to create the Palestinapedia would be an admission of defeat.

Re:Not a complete solution

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not even sure you really can have a neutral view about wars in the Middle East. ... Why should pro-Hamas and pro-Israel people edit and battle on the same wiki?

Because the harder you try, the closer you come to success.

In contrast to most articles on the Israeli-Palestinian situation where the writer is trying to advance a particular viewpoint, I've actually found the Wikipedia articles to be quite good. You actually have a situation where people on both sides of the issue are coming together to try to figure out what the facts are. In my experience, it's the extremists committed to propagating factual inaccuracies that eventually get driven away from wikipedia because, unlike when they preach to their choirs, the audience at wikipedia actually cares whether the articles are factually accurate.

On the other hand, I have found some of the high traffic articles to be overly neutralized. For example, I was interested in the crimminal justice system in Singapore but, when I went to the main article on Singapore, all it contained was bland touristy propaganda. One of the main things Singapore is known for in the world is harsh punishment of minor crimes but there was only one sentence about it buried in an unrelated paragraph way down the page.

Re:Not a complete solution

[jelle]

What about the notion that much-contested pages/content is visible as such. It's not a secret that those pages are flame wars, it's very obvious.

It simply means that wikipedia is not absolutely objective. But as you say yourself, a printed encyclopedia is none the better, as it will simply choose a side and pretent it's the objective truth.

The absolute objective truth is not known. Mathematics is the only absolute truth we can ever know, all the rest (science, history, 'facts') is a documentation of observations, and observations are not the same from all viewpoints, can be incomplete, biased, etc.

In wikipedia, showing the amount of disagreement should be considered part of its documentation purpose. There are a lot of people who's experiences/opinions/'knowledge' differ a lot on certain subjects, so naturally, a documentation of the subject will be riddled by differences between people.

Of course, that can become a mess if, for example, uninformed opinions start to overcast more reputable sources of scientific findings and agreement. If wikipedia were to deal with this scientifically, it would be a combination of reputation and peer review. Forking is not the answer.

Re:Not a complete solution

[Bender0x7D1]

The Slashdot Wiki wouldn't be too bad. It would just say Linux and Emacs. Right? Right?!?

This is bullshit...

[GreatBunzinni]

...and I'm not even speaking about the validity and effectiveness of a karma point system. I mean, a visual queue to tell people what content to believe or not? What happened to reasoning, critical thinking and the scientific process? Do we need to think for ourselves or rely on someone's visually appealing color code to know what or what not to trust?

Re:This is bullshit...

[KillerBob]

...and I'm not even speaking about the validity and effectiveness of a karma point system. I mean, a visual queue to tell people what content to believe or not? What happened to reasoning, critical thinking and the scientific process? Do we need to think for ourselves or rely on someone's visually appealing color code to know what or what not to trust?

Sometimes it's obvious when a factual error has been made. Say, for example, somebody changes the article on Monarch butterflies to claim that they feed on the blood of human babies. Anybody with an ounce of reason can see that it's a fallacious claim. But what if it's a minor factual error that can easily slip past your notice? Or worse... an outright lie that seems more reasonable than the truth? Say, for example, somebody claims that the volume of a mol of helium is 23.6L. Outside of people with an actual background and education in chemistry, nobody's going to notice that error. Critical thought or no, that's something you just have to know in order to see as wrong. Those with a background in Chemistry know that it's actually 22.4L. Those without have no clue.

And the problem arises when people then use that number as fact, without bothering to do research outside of Wikipedia. A *lot* of research papers, particularly in High School and Undergraduate studies, skimp on research. I know people who have never been to a library to research, and do all of it online. These are the people getting burned. Arguments over the morality or wisdom in doing all of your research in that manner aside, Wiki is fast becoming the prime source of research data. And that's why the people at Wiki are trying to find a way to improve their credibility.

Re:This is bullshit...

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes more sense to have a visual cue.

Digg + Wikipedia = ?

[JediLuke]

Diggipedia!

Reputation a General Term

[BlackGriffen]

Any reputation system would need to take into account topic area somehow. Otherwise you could get someone who is extremely competent in one area making an @ss of themselves in another article.

Consider Einstein's quote, "Marriage is nothing more than an attempt to make something lasting out of an incident." Obviously Einstein was a less than stellar social psychologist.

Re:Reputation a General Term

[Pallando-zi]

Maybe have a base reputation for a user, and a topic-specific variation on that reputation?

I think adding a well thought out reputation system to wikipedia (or popular wikis in general) would help more than it would hurt, because even if such a system could be gamed with enough effort, most of the pages on the wiki will not be worth that effort.

There's a lot more thinking about this in the essay on AmiCogs

When does the bound version come out?

[antialias02]

Promoting a system of elitism turns Wikipedia into just another Encyclopedia - albeit one where the kids can scribble entries of their own in the back. In Wikipedia, you never will eliminate vandalism - you will simply raise the amount of determination required to perform the vandalism. While obvious vandalism and blatant lies may be siphoned out, I can see this new system as accepting a lot more "unnoticeable errors" that never purge in the long run - because so many people just marked it as "okay." It might work, in theory, but at the core Wikipedia is the notion that privileges can and will be abused. To remove or substantially these very privileges is to make Wikipedia less "Wiki."

Wikipedia would benefit from tagging good versions

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather than a rating system, Wikipedia would benefit most from random users being able to tag old revisions as "accurate" or "inaccurate".

That way if end users want the latest breaking news on an article they could see the latest rev at the risk that someone vandalized it -- or if they wanted a less up-to-date but true version the could look for the last "accurate" tag.

These accurate tags could play much the same role that Debian Stable does compared to Unstable.

Vanadlism is not Wikipedia's main problem

[gnetwerker]

In my opinion, vandalism is not the primary Wikipedia problem. Yes, it is embarrassing, but ultimately only a secondary symptom of the central problem: when you have an "encyclopedia that anyone can edit", anyone does edit it. The clear observtion (can't remember who said this first) is that twenty teenage idiots do not collaboratively make an expert. The perhaps more important corollary is that twenty teenage idiots plus one expert are indistinguishable from twenty-one idiots.

Larry Sanger has acutely commented on Wikipedia's anti-elitism and the way they have run experts off the system. Experts don't have the time or energy to debate fundamental points of well-understood scholarships with game-playing trolls. Further, even when they aren't teenagers, Wikipedia has become the home of everyone who wants history and scholarship to read the way they like it rather than representing some academic consensus. As a result we have politicians trying to rewrite their personal biographies (or those of their opponents), partisans on each side of the world's conflicts burnishing their allies and undermining their opponents (Israel/Palestine, Turkey/Armenia, US/everyone else), and devotees of everything from Microsoft Vista to Nintendo to PETA skillfully expunging objective truth from their deifications of the chosen object of worship.

So doling out karma to 100,000 teenage idiots is not going to solve Wikipedia's problem. In order to save Wikipedia, we need to destroy it -- it needs to be edited by more experts and fewer "normal people".

Re:Vanadlism is not Wikipedia's main problem

[nlmille1]

Reminds me of my favorite de-motivational poster on despair.com, entitled "Consensus":
"None of us is as dumb as all of us."

Re:Vanadlism is not Wikipedia's main problem

[AnyThingButWindows]

/ In my opinion, vandalism is not the primary Wikipedia problem. Yes, it is embarrassing, but ultimately only a secondary symptom of the central problem: when you have an "encyclopedia that anyone can edit", anyone does edit it. /

If everyone is allowed to edit it, then who is a vandal? How do you DEFINE vandal by this standard? If you want to call a vandal, would not the vandal be the one that created the wiki, OR anyone that edits it? From my first impression of wikipedia, nobody is allowed to edit, or make changes. Especially if those changes link to, or involve opposing views, that involve strong factual information with reputable sources... pretty much censorship was my first impression.

Re:Vanadlism is not Wikipedia's main problem

[MK_CSGuy]

If a karma system will be implemented perhaps Wikipedia (as a foundation) can give volunteered/contracted experts a very high starting karma (or even a redicously high karma so that no one but the most dedicated non-expert can reach it) so their opinion would count (possibly much) more.

Re:Vanadlism is not Wikipedia's main problem

[DoninIN]

Wikipedia isn't broken. What you're describing could be created as an add on layer, wiki is free, all content available under the GNU documentation license etc. Youre expertwiki could be added on top and be used to provide commentary and point out the articles that regularly are biased/suck because of the nature of wiki. Basically I use the wiki for EVERYTHING as a starting point, and often it's the only place I need to look, say for a recipe or to find out something utterly unimportant, if I'm looking for the real dirt on world affairs or politics or virtually anything contreversial the wiki isn't really the place to look.

Re:Vanadlism is not Wikipedia's main problem

[Anonymous Coward]

But admit it, you gotta love wikipedia.

Re:Vanadlism is not Wikipedia's main problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess what? Anyone who thinks that Wikipedia some sort of expert-system and that it is being dragged down with anti-elitism has no idea at all what WP has become.

Right now, Wikipedia strives to attribute all statements in its articles to a reliable source. This is something an idiot can do, once they are shown how.

Assuming that debates would somehow be fewer or settled faster and with universal agreement if there were more 'experts' shows no understand of human nature what-so-ever. The best WP can hope for is that everyone agrees that, yes, a prominent NYC newspaper says {Hezbollah statement 1} and a prominent Delhi newspaper says {Hezbollah statement 2}. Note, this results in information that is usable.

If an expert-based WP would work, there would be one. At best, it would grow slowly and many topics would be half-complete. Think of the times when you've looked for an obscure topic on the web, only to find that the best source of information is someone's personal web project that was last updated in July 2003 with "Sorry about that long absence, I'll update more from now on." If you insist on having an experts-only volunteer system, that is what you should expect.

If you're happy with the goal of having all important (or sometimes just -all-) facts related to a topic located on one mostly up-to-date page arranged in a somewhat-organized manner, then join me as a cautious WP fan and contributor.

If you insist on anti-anti-elitism, then I suggest you get all of your information exclusively from the most expensive peer-reviewed journals possible, but make sure that you personally investigate the backgrounds of every author and duplicate experiments when possible, because nobody in the world but you can do it right...right?

If you're not happy with this false dichotomy, then note that I only cared enough about what you have to say to write this post, and not a damn cent more.

Re:Vanadlism is not Wikipedia's main problem

[sethg]

A co-worker of mine, an Eastern European emigre, observed that many of the articles in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia were untrustworthy, but everyone who hadn't swallowed the Party line could tell which articles to distrust. Slashdot draws its commenters from a certain slice of the nerd population, and if you disagree with the technical/political biases of that slice, well, you should read Slashdot with the appropriate skepticism. With Wikipedia, because the people trying to influence the process are all over the political map, there's no way to apply a similar correction factor.

A reputation system that treats all user accounts as equal is going to provide yet another route for motivated people to game the system. And as long as Wikipedia has such a high profile, there will be no shortage of motivated people on all sides of every controversial issue.

Re:Vanadlism is not Wikipedia's main problem

[mdwh2]

You're missing the point of an encyclopedia - it's not useful because it's written by self-appointed experts - if I want that, I go to a primary or secondary source. It's useful because it collects together facts, and provides sources for those facts.

Now not every Wikipedia page has references, so there is much work to be done, but this shouldn't be a case of trusting random strangers, whether it's Wikipedia or some random book or website.

As far people rewriting history the way they like it, the fact remains that Wikipedia ends up being far less biased than any other freely available source of information (please don't tell me you're willing to believe news corporations!)

Re:Vanadlism is not Wikipedia's main problem

[DuranDuran]

> note that I only cared enough about what you have to say to write this post, and not a damn cent more.

what if he put it on wikipedia, hmm?

Re:Vanadlism is not Wikipedia's main problem

[rtb61]

Put twenty experts in a room all fighting for their version of the truth and you end up with a teenage idiot

. An expert version of wikepdia will takes years possibly even decades to take off, edits will be slow and fought over, as experts will fight to preserve their status over other experts who are trying to achieve status.

Whilst a unipedia driven by universities from around the world would be great, it will take a lot of deflation of egos and a corresponding increase in maturity for that to actually happen.

One Idea from the artical that was worth while

[AndyG314]

First off, most of this artical was a bad idea. One thing that did seem like a good idea, was to somehow (perhaps by marking in red or some other visual clue) indicate what part of an artical was new, from the part of the artical which has existed for a while. This would help in several ways:
1) People looking for reliable information would know that these parts of an artical have not been exposed to long term scrutney, and therefore may be inacurate.
2) The new, and therefore unverified parts would be more obvious, which would help focus accuracy checking on new material.

It would seem logical for "new" text to remain new, untill it had been viewed a certain number of times, allowing enough sets of eyes to read it, rather than a set time limit, since some articals are not viewed very often, which allows them to remain inaccurate for a long time.

Re:One Idea from the artical that was worth while

[jabelar]

Yes, a "freshness" indicator by color coding would be easy to implement and easy to understand. I think that's a great idea. The whole point of wikipedia is that information that withstands is more likely to be correct.

Wikipedia worked fine!

[Anonymous Coward]

All these proposals to enhance (read limit) Wikipedia always misses the point. There is a huge amount of evidence, TWO MILLION PLUS ARTICLES, proving that the basic wiki model really works! All changes that try to further limit the openness of Wikipedia need to take that into account.

The reason that proposals that limit Wikipedia seem so attractive is because only the negative sides is making the headlines. It is similar to how most people believe the crime rate is going up, while the statistics show that it is decreasing in most places. The media and its sensationalism is to blame. Instead of carefully measuring vandalism rates and the average time it takes for vandalism to be reverted, we have guys like John Siegenthaler publishing an editorial in Washington Post whining about how Wikipedia contained libel about him for many months. Ofcourse that is very bad for him, but decisions on how Wikipedia should work shouldn't be made solely due to so exceptional screwups. In general, Wikipedia articles are factual and do not contain libel.

It is very unfortunate that Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) have bought the journalists sensational thinking and are now in the process of implementing more and more protective measures which will make the Wikipedia process more like a normal boring editorial system. Nupedia's fiasko seems to have been forgotten...

And for evidence of how worthless reputation systems are, and how much they raise the barrier to entry, check the modding score of this fine comment.

Re:Wikipedia worked fine!

[Anonymous Coward]

All these proposals to enhance (read limit) Wikipedia always misses the point.

I think you missed the point of the article. The article provides a way for users to get better information about the reliability of information in Wikipedia without limiting or changing the process through which it is edited.

Hardly

[Cybert4]

Some of the most brilliant stuff I've ever read on the internet had a -1 Overrated on it. I think that's the god-modding by the editors--who seem to have a huge conservative streak.

Re:Hardly

[catbutt]

Yeah but some of the most brilliant things on the internet might have a low "page rank" on Google. Still, Google's reputation system (which is exactly what it is), does a pretty good job, even with the fact that it must infer ratings by links. Obviously, they have to work pretty hard to make it hard to game.

Re:Hardly

[Millenniumman]

The editors have a conservative streak? That is amusing. Or are you forgetting the editors' comments (in the story summaries) about the free market being a failure, fahrenheit 9/11 being very insightful and wishing it would sway voters, and numerous other such comments? Most of /. is very far from conservative.

Re:Hardly

[AlHunt]

> Some of the most brilliant stuff I've ever read on the internet had a -1 Overrated on it. I
> think that's the god-modding by the editors--who seem to have a huge conservative streak.

Say what??? The fastest way to get modded up on /. is by bashing anything conservative - republican - Bush - "war on terror" or practically anything "mainstream". Alternatively, you can bash MS or praise OSS/Linux/Mac. Do any of that and you'll be insightful, informative, funny, you name it. This will probably get modded -2, offtopic, meanspirited, spiteful and ugly.

Al

Re:Hardly

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't go so far to say 'most'. I've seen all sorts on Slashdot, from anarchocapitalists (hi, Dada21!) to socialists and everything in between and beyond.

Really, the only thing they all have in common is that they all - to a man - consider themselves an island in a sea of ideological opposites, when really, most of Slashdot doesn't give a shit.

Re:Hardly

[AlHunt]

>(Score:0, Offtopic) ...
>bash MS or praise OSS/Linux/Mac. Do any of that and you'll be insightful, informative, funny, >you name it. This will probably get modded -2, offtopic, meanspirited, spiteful and ugly.

See? Told you so ... I suspect they'll be creating the "meanspirited, spiteful and ugly" modifiers just for this post.

Re:Hardly

[Kattana]

I would not say that /. is necessarily very far from conservative but /. is very *rational* as a group of people with a strong technical and/or scientific background.

Re:Hardly

[jc42]

Nah; someone just observed that the article (bashing '. users for being anti-MS and pro other good things) didn't mention wikipedia or say anything relevant to wikipedia. So it was off topic, and they gave it the obvious rating.

(With any luck, they'll do the same with this message, though my mention of wikipedia might slow them down for a few seconds. ;-)

Wikipedia hubris

[kindbud]

They need to stop worrying about being authoritative or credible. Wikipedia is useful for discovering links and keywords to use in a subsequent search for authoritative material. It's a place to start, not a place to finish. The more people that give a shit about a topic on Wikipedia - whichever side of a controversy they are on - the more useful the content posted to that topic becomes for the purpose of getting more research leads.

The topics on Wiki that are least useful are the obscure, non-controversial topics dealing with facts, where Wiki contributors would just be copy/pasting stuff from somewhere else. That's boring, so few people do it, so topics like that are usually absent or just a stub on Wiki.

Re:Wikipedia hubris

[sanso999]

Exactly! Reader beware, is all they need as a caveat. Wikipedia is a good basic, and a great way for teachers to find lazy kids. Online info tends to send the reader hither and yon with links (which is why I usually try and stay away from here unless I have lotsa time). People need to recognize plain stupidity, but also see ideas from more than one side.

Re:Wikipedia hubris

[value_added]

They need to stop worrying about being authoritative or credible. Wikipedia is useful for discovering links and keywords to use in a subsequent search for authoritative material.

Sounds fair, but there's that tricky part of obtaining the cooperation of everyone who cites a Wikipedia article as an authoritative source to go along. Judging from posts on Slashdot, for example, I'd suggest the "It's on the internet, therefore it's true." approach is, if not alive and well, valid enough to garner enough nods of approval to merit mod points, which in turn lends more credibility to something that can often be characterised as somewhere between innacurate and vaguely wrong, or lacking enough context to make it misleading.

Human nature being what it is, I find myself agreement with those who view this as a social problem rather than a technical one. That said, I'll continue reading Wikipedia as a primer on certain subjects, but defer to the pipe-smoking-cardigan-wearing old guys who publish their work elsewhere.

recognition for good edits

[j1m 5n0w]

The link's web server does not seem to be responding, so I have no idea what they are proposing. I think a reputation system somewhat similar to slashdot's might be very useful if correctly implemented - users could establish a reputation for themselves over time, and edits by users with a bad reputation (or no reputation) might receive more scrutiny.

This might help with an unrelated problem: giving recognition to people who make good edits. I suspect a lot of people wouldn't post as often (or word their posts as carefully) here on slashdot if they weren't trying to acrue good karma. Getting good karma is in one sense a game; it gives users a goal to achieve. But it's also a way of telling users they're appreciated by the community. I know I get a warm fuzzy feeling whenever my posts are modded up. I think that Wikipedia could benefit greatly from a similar system of community recognition for good contributors.

The danger is that a reputation system might encourage groupthink, but I'm not really sure that happens much here on slashdot.

Here's my suggestion

[aplusjimages]

When you create an account you get the opportunity to create one article. Then the moderators get to vote on the article (because lets face it those editors read everything posted). If you get enough votes, then you can post another article. If you don't get enough votes, then you have to fix up the article until it can get enough votes to write a new article. The votes will also go into a total votes system. So after a month or so of submitting one article at a time you accumulate 100 votes, then you can level up to someone who can submit 2 more articles, then those articles need less votes to allow 2 more article entries. So those who contribute a lot will have the opportunity to do so, and those who want to goof around can only do it to one page. Once you reach a certain level, then you'll be able to go in and correct articles or dispute articles you find incorrect.

TFA

[master0ne]

OK for all of you who couldnt or havent RTFA, basicaly the idea is this (i beleave i saw someone wondering about it somewhat above me) basicaly, determin credibility of text based on age, not user status, as you dont need to have an account to edit a wiki, every user has the same trusted status: untrusted. as such, every edit he makes will apear in red. over the course of time, say 20 edits past his edit, or idealy 200 pageviews or some such time keeping measure as that, the orignal edit gains credibility as noone has corrected it. and will eventualy fade to yellow, then gree, and finally black for fully mature content. as such vandals can keep vandalizing, but its obvious the text has been recently edited, and hasnt had much peer review....

I dunno...

[earthbound kid]

According to some preliminary research by Aaron Swartz about who write Wikipedia, while it's true that most of the editing is done by regulars of the sort who would have karma, most of the original content is added by people with few other contributions to Wikipedia. The regulars just go back and put everything into Wiki format, add tags, make things follow style guides, etc. Since the real work is done by anonymous people who may never come back to the site, it's important to keep the process as open as possible for people who are still new to Wikipedia.

views

[nostriluu]

I don't think a single reputation system is a particularly good idea, but I think having site member points of view, which are either edits or endorsements, and the ability for people to choose other views, would work well. Since the wikipedia content is all gfdl, other sites could represent their own points of view, and this content could be exchanged, and no content would need to be censored.

Browsing a site might consist of choosing which views you want to see by default, and accessing other versions/sites if you aren't happy with what you see.

Not sure about this-'un.

[Chas]

Yes, a credibility system might improve the situation. Readers could know that certain entries would be from people with a history as a high-quality contributor.

Then again, it may not. Karma-whoring and alias-building could hurt badly. Also, exactly HOW are you going to indicate which chunks of text came from whom? And what kind of resources are going to be necessary to track this over multiple series of edits without a reader going into the version tracker and conducting a line-by-line comparison?

Visual Cues

[teslar]

I propose that it would be better to provide Wikipedia users with a visual cue that enables them to see what assertions in an article have, in fact, survived the scrutiny of a large number of people, and what assertions are relatively fresh, and may not be as reliable.

And I know just the way to implement this! New text starts with font colour #FFFFFF. At every edit, if the text survives, the colour value is decremented by 1. When it hits #000000 it is forever barred from being edited ever again.

It's useful: New text is only really visible to the very enthusiastic editor and easy to ignore by everyone else if they so chose.

It's healthy: all those pretty colours will soon make you forget your gloomy daily life, cheer you up, and will have you stare at them and consequently absorb new information for hours on end.

Plus, many years from now, a wise man will philosophise that no colour patterns of any two wiki pages have ever been alike. Isn't that deep?

Re:Visual Cues

[Al Dimond]

But not only will new text be nearly invisible under this scheme: text slightly more than 1/3 and 2/3 the way to undeletability will be nearly invisible. You'd need to trace a smoother path through the colorspace to make such an idea like that work: a gradient of grays (straight line from white to black) would be boring, but something like the heat scale might work.

And as far as the wise man goes, he is trivially proven a fool. Every page has the same color pattern just after its creation! Besides, certain patterns of editing early in an article's life could be common, such as appending sections onto the end of a new article without touching the original entry.

Re:Visual Cues

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried this. It's a very appealing idea but it is much trickier than it sounds. Even defining what you mean by "text that stays the same" involves nontrivial compromises. Once you have a decent definition, you discover that text generally doesn't survive, in any meaningful sense, on a frequently edited page. Worse is that the few times when text does survive a long time it is the least informative and most boring stuff... the skeleton of the article, so to speak. On articles that have breaking news, the recent changes may even be the most important. Finally, it is just plain distracting to read an article where the text color changes with every sentence!

Re:Visual Cues

[teslar]

Yeah, I wasn't really being serious... as your sibling AC points out, it'd be very hard to define what text can be deemed not to have changed after an edit - for instance, what happens to previously valid sentences that are not changed per se, but moved to a paragraph where they become meaningless? Or sentences in which numerous typos get fixed?

As for the colours, obviously the only way to do it would be to implement some kind of coarse-grained grayscale. That at least will be doable and you can even mine wikipedia for statistics of how many edits an article needs on average before the majority seems to be satisfied with it, which automatically gives you an idea of how many levels your grayscale needs.

I thought the idea was completely bonkers when I posted it, esp. with the potential of rainbow-coloured text appearing everywhere, but thinking about it now, it does have an appeal... especially the question of how to define when text has changed or not will give me something to do on this boring day ;)

The wise man needs to express himself more clearly, btw... he meant to say that no colour patterns of any two pages have ever evolved in the same way. Just like no two games of Go have ever been alike, you see...

Re:Visual Cues

[Al Dimond]

Yeah, I responded to your post because it was clearly a joke but had this relavent idea in it. The best part of your idea in my opinion is that the color changes were gradual. And it wouldn't have to be grayscale... a continium of colors can be defined that follow a clear pattern, such as the so-called "heat-scale" (I can't seem to find any references to it on Google, I heard of it in an image processing class); in computer graphics we usually define colorspaces as three-dimensional, and any continuous path taken through the 3-d space could be a usable continium in this way.

The difference between Go and WP pages is that Go games end. WP pages aren't finished evolving, and there are at any time many very young pages that are likely to have undergone very similar patterns of edits. Sort of like how no two Go games may ever have played exactly the same way, but that certain opening sequences have probably been repeated very often. That said, there are probably certain short Go games that have been repeated, even though the overall possible number of games is overwhealming and there are certainly possible games that haven't been played. But I'm no Go expert, so I may be wrong.

Tyranny

[Archangel Michael]

We are dealing with man's nature towards tyranny.

Should the "majority" hold the power, it becomes Tyranny of the majority.

When a "minority" can muck it up for the rest of us, it is Tyranny of the minority.

The US' founding fathers understood this, and created a system that in theory should have prevented both (but hasn't been realized because we no longer use that system in its original form).

Once you realize the problem, only then can one begin to work towards a solution. Since there is no real "solution" to tyranny, the only solution is to stop seeking a solution and make everyone responsible, equally, for themselves, and ONLY themselves.

I am not opposed to dealing with those that muck up the system, be they majority or minority stakeholders, it just needs to be done. A system that recognizes and emphasizes differences of opinion and the inate value of facts could solve the problem.

Think of Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Purple lables for those pieces of disputed information / opinion. This way we could have ALL the information, and it wouldn't be subject to political bias (since all sides would be represented).

Most of the flame wars on Wiki are not over facts, but the value of, and which facts ought to be included. One man's "LIE" is another man's "fact".

So now we rate people too... Bad move.

[kinglink]

I'm not going to get in the politicing and all. The simple fact is the only response back you'll get from this is how many reverts have been done when you post and those arn't always your fault.

The best parts of Wikipedia is a fast and easy way to edit information, no hassles, no extra effort required. You get out what you put in and that's it. You want to put in the work to be a vandal you're a vandal, but in the end you already know what you're doing. Type in a good sentance but someone replaces it with a better paragraph that's fine.

But instead of working on the core of the experience now we are going to spend time rating each others' facts, rating each other. Basically just killing time. The simple fact is we don't need it, this system is in place in a lot of other places and in effect it basically weeds out the bad apples at the inconvience of all the good users. "You'll have to do 5 discussion posts before you can edit an article" "you have to edit three more articles before you can add an article". This stuff doesn't help or appeal to anyone but "karma whore" types.

If I write a well written page about the new player on the Red Soxes, I should be able to go in to a page that links to it create that page, set up my links and go. I should be able to do this on the first day as well as the fifth year with the same ease. Adding in safe blocks and guards will only hurt wikipedia's overall goals, not help the ideas it promotes. The best thing to do is start handing out serious penalties for vandalism or obvious weasel words.

This doesn't even get into the idea of being able to do fast edits with out logging in, something that's helpful at times.

Re:So now we rate people too... Bad move.

[gnugnugnu]

> penalties for vandalism or obvious weasel words

that would require input checking, of which Wikipedia does _NONE_.

It is a lot more efficient to allow users to spellcheck their own work and warn them of obvious mistakes (like saying now/recently/yesterday in an encyclopedia) than crossing your fingers and hoping a million monkeys will randomly correct your spelling. Wikipedia has failed horribly to provide tools to automate task and help users review their own work and provide higher quality input.

Creating this encyclopedia is not even a brute force search, it is goddamned bogosort!

Re:So now we rate people too... Bad move.

[kinglink]

weasel words and vandalism isn't incorrect data or mistakes. Both are direct and purposeful attacks. Vandalism is the destruction of a page or addition of information that is flat out wrong and has no backing (elephents tripled in population, a noob is kinglink, gnugnugnu is lame).

Weasel words is very hard to define but it's stuff that implies but doesn't actually state non true or misleading facts, or basically stuff that has no basis. Bill Clinton was the greatest president of the 92-2000 years. Wikipedia is a better encyclopedia than most. Vanilla icecream is better than other flavors.

technology is the answer

[klenwell]

One point with Wikipedia that seems to get overlooked -- or at least taken for granted -- is the power and ingenuity of the code that runs it. Technology is part of the solution here. If nothing else, Wikimedia deserves credit for putting together a state-of-the-art wiki machine -- an open source state-of-the-art wiki machine. Some of its features are dauntingly obscure and complex but it falls back quite gracefully to allow even the newest user to function with it effectively. I'd argue Wikipedia has succeeded in large part due to the technology.

That said, there seems to be two alternate proposals here in the summary. (1) A karma system and (2) a new color-coded visual feature. I agree that #1 would be vulnerable to all sorts of gaming schemes -- which isn't to say it wouldn't help, but it'd have to be smart. #2 sounds like it would be a more unequivocal benefit.

Both would be interesting innovations and consistent with the progressive user-friendly code behind Wikimedia.

Re:technology is the answer

[amRadioHed]

#2 sounds like it would be a more unequivocal benefit.

Maybe, but even if you managed to get it to provide meaningful insight into the reliability of the content, could you do it without turning the page into a rainbow striped eyesore?

Re:technology is the answer

[klenwell]

could you do it without turning the page into a rainbow striped eyesore?

This is where an astute graphic designer or visual artist could be of some assistance. Use paler hues for the majority of the (presumably older) stuff. Have the new stuff stick out like George Michael's day-glo lipstick from that old Wham video. Tweak it until you get it right.

And, naturally, make it optional.

Re:technology is the answer

[jc42]

And, naturally, make it optional.

No need. Any user can do it themselves. The /. page I'm looking at has a 60%-grey background, black text, and colors only for links. I told my browser to use those colors and ignore the page's attempts to set colors.

I also don't see any images at all, but that's because /. has a preferences setting for that and I used it. I do override the ads fairly successfully.

But it would be handy if /. had settings for all this. Then on the rare occasion when I have to use someone else's machine, I could log in and not have to worry about figuring out how to do all that suppression of "features" from scratch.

Face it; there's no content to /. other than the text. There's no point in wasting time and screen space for the eye candy and ads. Unless you like them, of course.

No, it isn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

The current way Wikipedia does these things-- the use of talk pages, strict documentation of edit and contribution histories, and allowing some people to have more clout based on past contributions-- is a social solution to a social problem.

A reputation system is not a social solution. It is a number. It is a technical solution.

The crucial difference here is that social systems have the ability to be smart. They can understand things like context, or changes in circumstances. If for example someone makes 400 high-quality additions to sports articles on wikipedia, then abruptly shifts gears and starts randomly seeding pages about World War 2 with outright falsehoods, a social system is potentially smart enough to realize something changed there and reject the World War 2 changes quickly based on their content, despite his edit history. But a rep system, a dumb technical solution, would be obligated to help this person along in his changes to World War 2 articles based solely on the numbers gained from his sports edits.

Re:Wikipedia would benefit from tagging good versi

[Anonymous Coward]

A more refined version of that is currently being tested on the German WP. The outcome of that testbed will dictate whether it should be trialled (and then possibly implemented) on the English language version.

Basically the system proposed is effectively as you describe the "stable" "unstable" variant. The user browsing by casually will see the stable version - a version which has been checked and is free from "I waz ere" junk. A "live" version will also exist, where folks are working on things and will operate much as the current entire system does. The points needing ironed out are how the stable versions are agreed upon, and how "updates" are made to it. Votes? Just an admin? Consensus or unilaterally? The fear is if this system is effectively "controlled" by the admins then they will effectively control all content that is (on first glance) publicly viewable - the argument runs that that is not what admins are there for. They are just normal editors with the odd extra ability to delete, block and housekeep (stuff that every user couldn't have or there would be pandemonium) - the current admin setup in no way has enough rigidity to suddenly make them the guardians of everything that is (immediately) seen.

TBH I think it will come - it has to. WP has outgrown its "all come into the shed and join us" model. That is not to say that good new contributors are not joining every day - they are. It is just that WP is now at a point where its own success has led to every half wit, POV pusher and vandal with an internet connection on WP vandalising - either by just scrawling swear words everywhere, or by making sneaky changes that push their agendas.

I expect when it is implemented it will just be rolled out to the "big" articles - articles that ATM are pretty much permanently semi-protected (means anon's and new accounts can't edit them), such as G Bush, Islam etc etc. Perhaps in time it will move out to all articles, but the danger with that is someone who wants to add a lot of good content to a 2 line stub article on a town in Idaho will be forced to jump through 10 hoops of red-tape before they can get their content moved from the live to the stable. Ultimately Jimbo will be the driving force - and I think the high publicity WP now receives (and the amount of that that is reflected back onto him) will mean WP 1.0, (as it is called) live/stable version will be the ultimate result.

Complete solution not needed

[dwheeler]

A "perfect" solution isn't really needed. Indeed, given Wikipedia's stellar success, you could argue that the current situation is already good enough. People already use Wikipedia, and make improvements to it... and since it has many readers and writers, it's a success by any mreasure.

But I think that discussing ways to improve Wikipedia is very valuable; only by proposing ideas and trying them out can things get better.

This is not a user reputation scheme; it simply colors text based on how many edits the text has survived unchanged. If the text is part of an edit war, then it'll stay "recent" (e.g., red in his scheme). As it survives more and more edits, it will become different colors until finally it's black.

Actually, I like this idea. There are refinements possible too (maybe after many reads, by many different people, should SLIGHTLY increase its rank). Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. But it seems worth trying out.

We do know one thing: avoid Slashdot mod system.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia should never use the Slashdot mod system. It is little better than a popularity contest that promotes the most popular ideas.

Wikipedia articles should strive for the truth, not the most-popular urban legends.

Haha..

[nexarias]

If it eventually ends up that people with more reputation gain an edit advantage over people with none or less, than Wikipedia really becomes a simulation of real-life with the "establishment" and its rebels.

Web of credibility

[jemenake]

About 10 years ago, when I learned of PGP's "Web of Trust" system (where I could choose to trust everybody that you trust), I turned to a colleague and said "What we need next is a 'Web of Credibility'..." where individuals in the community can bestow credibility points to others... and the points I can bestow to you would depend upon how credible the community thinks *I* am, and so on. In other words, if Noam Chomsky or Lester Thurow vouch that you're highly-credible, then that would boost your credibility more than a few glowing scores from your cable guy and the kid at the local sip-n-go. Ultimately, it would be a measure of how likely (or unlikely) you were to spout off on something that you had no clue about.

Having not yet RTFA, I'd just like to say that I agree, wholeheartedly, with the general notion... and I look forward to the day when our credibilities are incoporated into our digital signatures (that I hope we're also all using someday). - Joe

Slashdot has it down

[theg]

Moderators and meta-moderators, add the concept of eBay and digg and you've got what you need for Wikipedia. Allow changes to be made immediately. If people agree with what you add, then they say so, by doing so they are given points 'potential points' to moderate with in the future, when a 'trusted' meta-moderator agrees with the moderation the points are actually granted. These points allow someone to gain noteriaty and use their points for saying someone else's additions were incorrect, unfair, etc. Without rating people positively, and then being meta-moderated to create a check and balance, you don't have points to tear people's posts down.

When enough 'trusted' people use their points to 'undo' a modification, it actually becomes undone and is only viewable in a history. If someone has several of their stories taken down by different moderators that are unrelated (by IP/e-mail/etc) then they are prevented from their changes (or changes at their IP) being immediately added to the system and a moderator would view said changes first and approve them.

The community would police itself. :) I might have missed some of my concepts, but I have thought about how Wikipedia could implement this for a long time because there are three types of Wikipedia users:

1) Content getters (read-only types)
2) Content posters (the occasional update/edit/addition)
3) Wikipedia nuts (massive amounts of work and time spent on Wikipedia)

The vast majority is a #1, I happen to be a #2 as many of you likely are, and #3's are just #2's with too much time. This really focuses on helping #1s (and the rest of us) get better information from Wikipedia by the #2s and #3s getting more involved (and encouraging more #1s to become #2/3s)

Digg!

[Temeriki]

Considering what Digg is now going through I think a rating system based on reputaion has to be given some serious thought, especially on wikipedia, where someones personal opinions hace a great effect on political articles (many other things could be effected but IM having a serious brain fart). Piss one guy off and he could cause a whole mess of damage.

Congress & Christians

[EmbeddedJanitor]

You just have to look at how Christian groups etc use their powers to influence what could be a democratic process. The truth etc soon dies in favour of what is politically correct or is acceptable to people with enough passion to screw things up.

Mix this with other ideas...

[jouvart]

Another idea for improving the quality of collaborative resources has been to have experts verify an article before publication. Why not take this idea and mix it with user reputation? Have some experts in specific fields rank user's contributions to the Wikipedia, and then have karma/reputation rise for that user. There could even be different reputation scales for different areas of expertise, so you might have users who are marked to make good contributions to physics articles, but are untrustable on political articles. This might prevent some of the mob-think moderation of other "democratic" ranking systems (e.g. digg).

Re:Mix this with other ideas...

[geekoid]

How do you determine who is an expert?
The internet has proven that talking about something a lot, and 'correcting' people does not indicate expertise.

PageRank, TrustRank and DMOZ

[mcguyver]

Search engines use a similar variation of the idea that trusted sources lead to accurate results (PageRank & TrustRank). However anything can get manipulated. Search engine rankings are always abused. And look at DMOZ - editors that act as gatekeepers for submissions demand money. Corruption is rampant on DMOZ. But maybe wikipedia has too little commercial motivation to lead to high levels of corruption. The whole colbert thing with african elephants seemed like a good test of the system and wikipedia did a good job of combatting the vandalism. /rant off

Re:Tyranny -- or is it

[Gnostic Ronin]

I think you're missing a fundemental point here. The site purports to be giving information on various topics. The Majority, in the case of Wikipedia aren't experts on many topics. Yes they know all the trivia on Geek(tm) TV and Movies (Dr. Who, Babylon 5, DS9), but when it comes to giving information about other things, I'd rather have the minority. The monority may be editing the page on politics because they know what the hell they're talking about.

All the rainbow colored text in the world can't change basic facts. Either Barack Obama was born in Kenya or he wasn't. Either Kerry earned 3 purple hearts or he didn't. I don't think that we should turn wikipedia into a system in which one can have conflicting "facts" side by side.

I can't imagine a system like that would do much good.

Barack Obama was born in [1971/1973/1966] in [Nigeria/Kenya/Zimbabwe]. He was elected to the US Senate in [2001/2003/2006].

We may be entitled to our opinions, but we aren't entitled to our own facts.

Insularity is the key

[MythoBeast]

Any sufficently insular group can convince themselves of any idea they choose simply by weeding out those that don't agree with them. This is a given. What you have to do is identify the obvious biases of a group (i.e. Slashdotters hate Microsoft) and ignore any opinion in that direction. You'll still get plenty of actual facts (or at least well supported truths), but those will require supplementing from an inversely biased truth source.

What you CAN do is identify those thing for which there is no natural bias in the group. That's a little harder, but not impossible. For instance, I don't belive that Slashdotters have a particular reason for supporting Democrats over Republicans, so political statements don't need to be taken with as large a grain of salt. Comments about GWB are an exception to this because Slashdotters notably value intelligence, and he's a blatant idiot.

With Wikipedia, you have a group that is very stringently non-insular. There are people of all biases, and they are encouraged to intelligently consider each other's ideas. The way they rate each other is by how well they back up what they have to say with supporting fact. They're notorious for disregarding credentials as an ad-hominem attack - only the information is important. I think that this particular scale of superiority is especially resistant to the kind of flaws that other rating systems fall prey to.

Re:Insularity is the key

[jc42]

What you have to do is identify the obvious biases of a group (i.e. Slashdotters hate Microsoft) and ignore any opinion in that direction.

Well, I've noticed that it's difficult to find anyone anywhere who doesn't hate Microsoft. The users of Microsoft software seem to hate them the most. So you're going to have to ignore almost everyone.

This phenomenon does have interesting implications for "the Market" and "market forces" that some people do seem to like so much. Think for a while about why it might be that so many people keep buying software that they hate from a company that they hate. And then ask yourself what you believe about the rationality of the marketplace.

Sounds good in theory but in practice:

[The MAZZTer]

• Everyone will give points to moderators and administrators. Why? Who knows. Maybe they think it's like a bribe.
• Lots of people who contribute won't be noticed by everyone who's giving mods, admins, and big editors/posters points. Thus these people end up not getting points. Unless:
  • Everyone gets a point for every day they do something on wikipedia and don't get marked as a vandal, for example.
  • People have unlimited points to give or are otherwise set up with limitations that encourage wider spreading of points.
• The minority in any issue, even if their stance is perfectly valid, legal, and within boundries of freedom of speech, and allowable by the rules, could theoretically get ranked down into oblivion. Fortunately I think Wiki's community is more mature than this.

Yes, but worth the effort

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

Pardon my nerdocratic hubris here, but IMO Wikipedia would be a fantastic petri dish for evolving a robust reputation system, and the result could be useful in a wide variety of applications that facilitate pseudonymous communication & transactions.

In the beginning, I'm sure this would just gather data & have little to no impact on the content. But over time, it could well become increasingly effective at improving content quality as its designers started to identify patterns & meaningful correlations in the collected data.

This isn't so different from SPAM filters that need constant training, or PageRank, or eBay feedback scores, or AVN forum posting rules, etc. One needn't restrict the reputation data to any one data species; you could use a composite of community feedback + usage statistics + genetic algorithms etc., and over time tweak the weight any category of data is given to account for its sample size, its expected margin of error, and its track record in terms of predictive power.

Sure, it's a time consuming undertaking & it'll take patience before we see results, but I don't see the real difficulty being in rigging up the system; I think the real difficulty will be in defining exactly what constitutes a quality article.

Now, take a minute to share a utopian dream with me: Imagine the day when registered Wikipedia users with good reputations will be able to make edits from a Tor connection. :-)

I give you religion and mysticism

[Cybert4]

Bash any of these and get godmod-nuked to negative karma.

Mod system for Wikipedia

[nephridium]

Well there are good arguments on both sides.. How about two versions of Wikipedia, one as it is now and a 'peer reviewed', maybe even moderated 'stable' version people can go to if they believe the current version has been tempered with. An 'aging color' system that can be toggled would be great as well and shouldn't be hard to implement.

Re:Tyranny -- or is it

[Archangel Michael]

You obviously missed my point then.

How about the minority of one? Given your example, only ONE is a TRUE expert on Barack Obama, that is Obama himself. Everyone else is less .... informed. However, Mr Obama may wish to hide certain "facts" or dispute them, for political reasons. Should HE be the only one adding such information and controlling it? Tyranny of the minority. On the other hand, Republicans may wish to post "facts" or dispute them, again, for political reasons. Because they are in the majority (illustrative purposes only)should they get every edit they want? Tyranny of Majority.

There is no way of accomodating either side 100%, and neither should we try.

Using your John Kerry example it should be noted that he did earn three purple hearts, though the circumstances of one or more of them are disputed by people who were there. Should the details of the disputed events be excluded because Kerry wants them to be? Tyranny of the minority. Or should they be included because the swift boaters say so? Tyranny of Majority (or whatever you want to call it).

My point is that tyranny is the natural state of man.

I do agree with you about "the Majority, in the case of Wikipedia aren't experts on many topics". I would probably go farther and say the Majority are mostly ignorant about most things in life. However, the minority experts on one topic, may not be experts on anything else, making them like the majority on most topics.

But isn't that the description of Wikipedia in a nutshell?

How does one keep the nuts, fruitcakes and wackos, some of whom may have a valid point (US staged 911, who "really" shot JFK) from wacking the system?

I know for a fact that some of my views on some topics are considered quite "wacky" by some if not most people. But on the other hand, I can be quite reasonable, somewhat knowledgable and mainstream on other topics. Do you want me editing only the topics you deem that I am on the more "normal" side? How about my "wackier" side? Who gets to decide?

Pimping Oneself

[mutube]

Although it's the most obvious use for this sort of system, Wikipedia isn't the only place it would be useful. Indeed it's a shame this sort of ability isn't included as standard in most browsers - think checking accuracy of news sites and technical documentation.

While accuracy is more relative outside of areas of testable fact (science, one would hope) it is still possible to give good indications of the "confidence" a reader can have in a particular source. It's "the boy who cried wolf" as algorithm: Repeated inaccuracies, frequent changes or bias do not preclude an individual from inspired and balanced reporting, but they do reduce the likelihood. Monkeys can write Shakespeare, just not very often.

I've been working on something similar as a Firefox plugin, allowing citation attributes to be added as additional markup in text. The biggest challenges are implementing a system which provides easily recognisable metadata without harming readability of text or clashing with existing standards. I'd be interested to hear of other systems, solutions & problems...

So, we're back to E2 again?

[datavortex]

Sounds like looking forward is just like gazing into the past. The system they propose sounds strikingly similar to the now-dated system over at Everything2. This has worked pretty well for this non fact-oriented wiki, I suppose it could also work for a reference piece. How long until they want to start calling it "noding?"

Re:So, we're back to E2 again?

[l-ascorbic]

The E2 system works for a number of reasons related to the major differences it has from wikipedia. Primarily, each writeup has only one author, who is accountable for the whole thing this removes the problem of having edits of varying degrees of reliability within one article. Secondly, there is no concept of an edit war, as users cannot edit each others' writeups, and only admins can delete stuff.

Credibility isn't like Trust

[grahamsz]

Credibility is very much specific to the subject matter and it would seem to be hard to apply to wikipedia.

I know people that i think are absolutely credible sources about technology subjects, but who I wouldn't consider credible in discussing say politics (although i'm sure they feel they were qualified).

I see your point about having to assess how likely it was that someone would spout off something inaccurate, but i feel that most people do that at some point or another (see Slashdot)

Re:Credibility isn't like Trust

[jemenake]

I know people that i think are absolutely credible sources about technology subjects, but who I wouldn't consider credible in discussing say politics (although i'm sure they feel they were qualified).

Well then, if they often expounded about technology topics *and* political topics, then other people would be giving them a blend of high and low credibility scores... yielding a score of "so so". However, if they knew to keep their trap shut when the topic turned to politics, then they wouldn't get as many low scores and their resulting score would be higher.

So, it's not a score about how much you know... it would be a score about if you are *aware* of how much you know *and* if you are conscientious enough to stay quiet when you realize that there are more-knowledgeable folk in the discussion. For the *consumer* of this data (ie, somebody viewing your credibility score) it all boils down to "How likely is it that the information they're giving me is accurate?". If you spout off about stuff you have no clue about, you might not be aware that you haven't any clue... or... you might be perfectly aware that you have no clue and just not care. That doesn't matter to the consumer of your information. All that matters is the probability that the information you offer is accurate.

Sure, it would be nice if we had credibility scores for the millions of topics out there... but there are millions of them. What I think we'd have to settle for is a measure of how well each person "self-governs" the information they offer. And the information they offer doesn't necessarily need to be accurate, so long as they don't *portray* or qualify it as such. For example, how often do you seen Slashdotters start with "IANAL, but...."? So... maybe it would be a measure of how accurately *I* represent the accuracy of what I'm saying.

So, in that sense, it doesn't matter if I am an expert in that subject... as long as I realize and admit that I'm not.

Re:Credibility isn't like Trust

[sendai2ci]

It's not hard to imagine that were such a system implemented, the system would handle various metadata with-regard to your credibitily.

I think a tree of topics in which you are considered credible would work, with weighing based on how many sub-topics others consider you credible.

Easier For Users Than Text

[Garrett Fox]

Reputation is an idle thing, oft got without merit and lost without deserving. -Iago

Having a basic reputation system like that of E-Bay or Slashdot is fairly easy for individual users, but harder to do for the text itself. Wikipedia tracks changes by paragraph, so that you can see that on such-and-such a date, I changed Paragraph 3 by deleting X and adding Y, and added a new paragraph below. But it's hard to say that a piece of text is "mine" and link it to my reputation, since it's a subjective judgment how much of my writing is left after a dozen people have edited it. And you can't just judge text by the average reputation of its editors, since the trolls will drag it down. If a piece of text has been edited a lot, that might mean it's really good, because many people have been polishing it, or really bad, because there's an edit war between people who don't know their stuff anyway.

A more basic problem is that we're not just judging factual assertions like "The diameter of Mars is 4,200 miles." If we stored raw factual data only -- and we do have such data as part of sidebars for certain articles -- people could challenge that data in a fairly objective way and we'd know exactly what facts are disputed. But what about disputes that involve emphasis of different points, or order of presentation, or associations to other concepts? For instance, do you agree that the subjectivity of Wikipedia's main article text is "a more basic problem" than how to identify frequently-altered text? A lot of the brainstorming about large-scale changes to articles seems to happen on the Talk pages, which makes it hard to notice that aspect of an article's evolution.

Quick example: I recently added to an article on Wikipedia, adding what seemed to me a newsworthy event that happened to cast the article's subject in a negative light. My text got summarily deleted, and I fought a bit over it before giving up. But the dispute was over relevance, not accuracy. How should we distinguish between fights over "this doesn't belong here" and fights over "this isn't true?"

Xbox live

[SnprBoB86]

It certainly helps with Xbox live.

You mean

[joshetc]

Sort of like the reputation all our dumb congressmen have when they spew on and on about how the internet and computers "work"? Just because you have a reputation in one field doesn't mean you know shit about another. It also doesn't mean you will relegate yourself to the fields you know (as with our politians)

Disclaimer: I am American, so when I say "our" I mean the American people. If you aren't American I've got nothing directly against you or your politians. I also don't like cheese.

No

[4D6963]

Short answer : No

Long answer : No..

I know of some wikipedia user who has a good reputation but vandalizes afrocentrism-related articles to push her personal agenda, so reputation is nothing actually. It's as if you believed in whatever scientists claim due to their reputation, as we know very well that even some reputed scientists make up some crap for non-scientifical publications from time to time for various reasons.

Re:FP

[nickheart]

The thing is, it doesn't bug me that people post "first post". It's really not that bad. You just scroll a few lines, they get to feel good in their little worlds, and we all move on down the page.

What bugs me is that people continue to waste mod points marking them "troll". We all know that, and we should be looking primarily for the good posts to move up the mod chain.

Reputation Theorist

[Anonymous Coward]

Chris Allen writes pretty regularly on reputation systems (from a game designers point of view usually). I have read through a few academic papers on the topic, and I find the writing at lifewithalacrity to be of unusual breadth, clarity and brevity...

http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/

$0.02

Everything2

[mr100percent]

Look at how Everything2 does it. They use an XP system, and don't have messy edit wars. Users learn to trust those with high XP, and it encourages real factual content or creative stuff (poems, stories, etc).

Re:Everything2

[l-ascorbic]

But as you obviously know, E2 does also have editors who will quickly delete anything that isn't up to standard.

Attack resistant

[antikronos]

It appears to me that the proposed solution is not resistant to attacks and abuse. Reason is that it measures 'edits' as opposed to the reputation of the author. A better aproach would be to implement some trust metric like Ralph Lévien has proposed to Wikipedia and already implemented in a Wiki(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato).

Re:Attack resistant

[jc42]

[The proposed approach] measures 'edits' as opposed to the reputation of the author.

Over the last few weeks, I've contributed to an example of why counting edits isn't necessarily a good idea. As part of an "i18n" project, I've been reading some of the wikipedia stuff on a few writing systems such as Chinese characters. Incidentally, I've made a bunch of edits to some pages, mostly adding tone marks to the pinyin. These aren't edits in the sense of correcting errors; they are edits in the sense of making tiny additions that will help other readers who don't know much Mandarin (like me ;-). They also make the text a better test for software, since it contains more non-Latin1 chars. This is fairly easy to do, especially now that there are a couple of good Chinese dictionaries online. I've also started working on understanding the problems with Arabic and related scripts, and I've made a few small enhancements to a few of those pages.

Anything that treats such edits as corrections or criticisms is simply wrong. But I don't know how you'd write software that would generally distinguish the various kinds of edits. I could write an ad-hoc check for the pinyin-tone case, as that's a fairly straightforward test. Just remove marks from chars and see whether this gives the original text. But in general, it takes human intelligence to distinguish enhancement edits from edits that attempt to change the information.

Why does this have to be a problem?

[Nux'd]

I don't see how this proposal has to mean restrictions / unfairness etc. Isn't it simply an attempt at giving the user more information about the article they are dealing with? Isn't it an intuitive way of telling the difference between old and new text. If so, then it is only the opinions/biases you form from the information that can cause trouble (at least directly). Say for example a piece of disputable text survives not by people agreeing with the content but through simply not disagreeing. If a portion of the reviewers decide that information must be correct if it lasted so long, then the information is more likely to survive a correction and erroneous facts may be taken as gospel. So long as the system is used sensibly, there should not be any disadvantage (other than perhaps a frustratingly colourful article). I'd also like to point out that opposing views don't have to conflict with public interest in factual representation so long is it is accepted that the opposing views exist. Surely to give the different accounts of what is true, is more universally true than bias to a particular side.

Re:Why does this have to be a problem?

[Nux'd]

..and of course, when a novice comes along and makes a huge block of black text because his page-breaks were lost in the HTML format he was apparently typing in it doesn't nessecarily become more obvious as a huge red block.

just keep all comments and have votes for top...

[Anonymous Coward]

top comment

instead of everyone changing it on each other just keep ALL views for a more complete encyclopedia. :)

A good idea for more qualified text...

[Sabathius]

As a design element, it might be good to use a black font for new edits and increasingly lighter grey fonts for the text that has undergone increasing scrutiny. (not too light that it is unreadable, of course).

This would give the impression (similar to the new Slashdot look) of fresh ink on a page being dark and bright, while the older ink has settled into the page and has become 'dim'.

Re:FP

[Sarisar]

Yeah they should make something in the moderators FAQ... maybe something like 'concentrate more on promoting the demoting'...

(yes this is meant to be funny before someone points out the obvious)

I beg to differ.

[Anonymous Coward]

Try posting something on-topic that's also critical of Ayn Rand or the state of Israel. Watch your karma burn... just because you haven't noticed the slashdot moderation bias doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

You theory is good...

[Per Abrahamsen]

...but in practice, it seems like the articles on prominent controversial topics tend to be excellent. The people who complain are usually people who have a strong partisan interest in the subject

The problem isn't 20 idiots. The problem is 1 idiot. The low quality articles are mostly in areas that doresn't have the wide interest, and thus have very few authors.

In order to properly use Wikipedia, you need to look at the history and talk page.

Works for me

[Per Abrahamsen]

I enter text in Wikipedia, and it is automatically improved, especially with regard to spelling and grammar. Maybe it is done by a million monkeys, I don't care.

Occasionally I'm one of the monkeys, and fix mistakes that are obvious even to me. I don't see that as a big problem either.

Irony

[aldheorte]

The article dismisses reputation systems early on and instead focuses on age of information as a n indicator of credibility. I find it ironic that:

1) The poster didn't read the article.
2) The editor didn't read the article.
3) Most of the people posting here didn't read the article.

Yet people here discuss the article on the basis of the the incorrect title and summary as if the article were about reputation systems, when it is not. Go figure.

Perhaps the first challenge is to make sure the information in the resource is credible. But perhaps the greatest challenge is insuring that the people who make decisions based on the information... actually read the information.

I have a slightly different Idea

[gurps_npc]

Basically the problem with wikipedia is that anyone can edit it. But that is ALSO one of the best things about it.

To combine the advantages of a 'fact checked' encylopedia and a wikipedia, all you need do is:

1) Have a bunch of 'super users' generally accepted as 'fair'. To become a 'super-user', you must have posted a certain number of things, and had your content been found worthy by an administrator.

2) Have super user posts look different (different color for example) and only be editable/removable by other super-users.

3) Allow normal people to flag 'super user' content as untrue. Super users must examine at least one unexamined flagged content from another user before they can add any other content.

4) Super-users that have their content changed by other super-users too often will acquire the notice of an administrator that may choose to revoke super-user status.

Enough Said

[ashwinds]

I posted this last year

---snip---

Maybe Wikipedia needs a content rating/ moderation system - say "Reliability Index" Content rating must be assessed based on stats like how many no. of reads, no. of edits. - these are just samples which indicate how many independent people have had a chance to assess the content. Maybe a Rate this Content would also help build some assessment of the reliability People should work towards improving the reliability index by correcting if necessary a threshold can be fixed where content is considered "autoritative"

---snip---

Re:Wikipedia would benefit from tagging good versi

[jilles]

Agreed, articles should go through some lifecycle where, as article quality increases, it should become harder to edit the article. Articles would start out editable for everyone and at some point, it would reach a stable state where approval of key individuals would be needed to publish further changes.

For example some articles like the one on Pythagoras are quite elaborate, extensive and by now probably more or less stable. There might still be valid reasons for making changes but probably reviewing such changes would be preferable to making them and then having others fix the damage later.

A nice model would be to have a built in delay (2 days) in the publishing + notification and the ability to object/ammend the change. So a user would add 'math suxors' to the pythagoras article and all the interested people in this aricle (previous authors?) would have 2 days to ammend/delete the change. After 2 days the change is published automatically unless somebody objected. In this case, the change would never be published.

You don't want this model for all articles, just for important articles (many hits or many refs to them) and stable articles. Both of these can be identified automatically. Ownership of articles would default to whomever did any changes to the article previously. Any disagreement with a change would prevent the change from being published until the conflict is resolved either by friendly discussion between reviewer and author or by normal wikipedia conflict resolution processes (whatever those may be right now).

A terrible idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wiki:
Leave it public or admit that it's a failure and shut it down.

Don't ruin it with a handful of partisan admins.

The Long and short of it all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps this debate is part of an ongoing human struggle.

http://radicalsociety.com/article_32_02_01.html

Referenced from here:

http://3quarksdaily.com/

Randomness destroys Wikipedia's progress

[harmonica]

For example, changes were not posted until approved by a randomly assigned editor. The random part is important.

This contradicts Wikipedia's principle of everybody works on what they like and understand best. If I have to start editing articles on fly-fishing or the Italian opera of the 18th century I'm outta there.