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Wikipedia 2.0, Now With Trust?
USB EVDO writes "The online encyclopedia is set to trial two systems aimed at boosting readers' confidence in its accuracy. Over the past few years, a series of measures aimed at reducing the threat of vandalism and boosting public confidence in Wikipedia have been developed. Last month a project designed independently of Wikipedia, called WikiScanner, allowed people to work out what the motivations behind certain entries might be by revealing which people or organizations the contributions were made by. Meanwhile the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that oversees the online encyclopedia, now says it is poised to trial a host of new trust-based capabilities."
Here is Wikipedia's page on Flagged revisions
Extension:FlaggedRevs on mediawiki.org
also, wikimedia does already have OpenID support.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OpenID
Instead of using a link to a sub-optimal blog site, how about a link to the actual New Scientist article.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Actually, if there's one thing WikiScanner showed, it was that not requiring registration is useful to us in identifying problems.
Registration is a small hurdle. While it's impossible to bot-register accounts, and thus requiring registration would provide a layer of insulation from vandalbot accounts, we haven't actually had a serious vandalbot attack in years. For your garden variety fuckwittery, registering an account doesn't fix much - most of our total fuckwits are registered.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
Registration is a very poor method of quality control. Registering a nickname provides far more anonymity and less accountability than posting your IP address. Unlike on Slashdot, the IP addresses of edits made while not logged in are public on Wikipedia. Mandatory registration would make corporations completely safe from WikiScanner and similar tools.
Stable and unstable versions exist on the German wikipedia, but the English (main) Wikipedia users and admins have been very resistant to the idea.
Dude, where's my packet?
I wholeheartedly agree. And am in exactly the same position, I'm sure there are many of us.
The issue of trust is not one of sock puppetry, viral marketing, vandalism nor shill behavior of contributors. That is only to be expected -- and is of course absolutely rampant throughout the site.
That will NEVER stop. The perpetrators will simply get better at hiding it. If you run a large corporation, NGO, government etc etc, and you are not using Wikipedia to manipulate your agenda, then you are an idiot, because your competition / opposition most certainly is.
No, the most serious abuses of trust where Wikipedia is concerned lie with their admins. Some (if not in fact many) of them are corrupt and have a clear agenda. It seems to start at the top. Jimmy's agenda has been (rightly) questioned here many times.
Adding a new technology layer to that won't change a thing. If anything it will make it more obscured.
The fundamental issue is that the Wikipedia goals are arrogant and impossible. The solution is simple. Remove all admins. All of them. Put a big disclaimer at the top of every page saying something like that "the info below may or may not be factual. It is offered only as a starting point, and may not represent the truth".
That will go a long way to solving the issue. Wikipedia is an exercise in vanity and control. It's very clear that some people become admins because they believe their truth, and inwardly that they themselves, are better than everyone else. Their Wikiality is what you will accept... or else.
No. Fire all the admins, and Reality will take care of itself...
Unlike many encyclopedias, Wikipedia actually requires editors cite sources. All added information is required to have a source, otherwise someone else will come by and add a [citation needed] notice. You can check out all the articles that don't have sources cited.
Try clicking on the numbers next to each sentence next time you stop by.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
This is an really interesting problem. In my opinion vandalism is not an issue with wikipedia but the quality of the research work involved with each article is. Every article has a varying degree of quality to it. Some are "good" as in someone who did thorough research has written the article. Some are "good" because many people did little good bits of research and the combination is good. Some are "bad" because the research was flimsy or the article is tainted by the bias of the author. Not all articles have been well researched. Not all articles have been reviewed or corrected by people who are experts on the subject. And finally the really hard problem. For some articles there is not enough "good" material elsewhere online available to cite or use by people who do want to do good research. For some topics in order to write a good encyclopedic article one would have to spend 5 month researching secondary sources which are not freely available online.
So we wind up with a situation where some parts of wikipedia are good because the topics covered have alot of good research material to rely on and some topics are poor because the cost/motivation of doing proper research are too great for an average wikipedia editor. This is the really tough problem to overcome since most of wikipedia is volunteer work and most people are not willing to dedicate large portions of their life to it.
Nevertheless this new tech is going to at least solve the vandal problem a bit better. Right now its a little difficult to spot vandalism in the see of changes. This bit of automation would make it much easier for the "police" force of wikipedia to spot and eliminate any obvious vandalism.
This is incorrect. Stable versions do not yet exist on the German Wikipedia.
i'm not putting your position down, but the 'copied' sound could have actually come from an external sound library... ie both st:tng and signs (haven't seen that so i don't know which tng alien sound you mean) could have used the same sound library. i have copies of both sony and bbc sound libraries, and it is interesting how many 'rubble falling 2' sounds you can recognise as having heard on movies.
:)
i remember the door opening sound in the original doom games (1 and 2) being used on something else (can't remember where though), and i think a smashing pumpkin's song using the exploding barrel sound. those could have been ripped from doom itself, or from an external library, i don't know. i just found it interesting