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."

Comments

Re:An interesting experiment

[CRCulver]

The problem is that many other reference sites on various topics, developed privately by informed and qualified individuals, have now folded since the maintainers thought Wikipedia superseded hosting such information on one's own website. And now, such information on Wikipedia can be vandalized at any moment right before someone would go look at the page, and kooks can twist the page to their own ends.

Better Living Through Benjamins

[RobotRunAmok]

1. Pay contributors, i.e., give them revenue. Even micro-payments will do, pennies. (The added side-benefit of this is that it means contributors will most likely need paypal accounts, which most likely means they will be "of age:" No more changing entries as result of bets made in the back of the school bus.)

2. Fire contributors who screw up, depriving them of that revenue.

3. Problem solved.

Anything else is a hippy-dippy feel-good buzz-word Web-X-point-something-or-other that begins with the letter "cluster."

Re:Better Living Through Benjamins

[mrnobo1024]

Plus, any kind of payment system would have people trying to game it, to the detriment of quality - if Wikipedia paid by the edit, they'd have people dragging out trivial changes through as many separate edits as possible, making the history tab practically unusable.

Whereas on the other hand, if Wikipedia were to pay by amount of content added, this would be likely to lead to the rather undesirable consequence that editors of the aforementioned Internet-based encyclopedia might pad out their edits through the utilization of wholly unnecessary verbiage, guided by the realization that this practice would vastly increase their character count and therefore result in a larger payment to be made to the editors in question, granting to them a larger share of their economy's purchasing power - considered by many to be a desirable state of affairs, and certain to in some cases override any aesthetic misgivings that they might otherwise have had regarding the practice of composing overly long sentences such as this one.

rfta

[distantbody]

And yet the simplest and most effective quality control, requiring registration, is still considered sacrilege to the Wikipedia overlords...

Re:Truth vs consensus

[smallfries]

Well, anyone who reads self-help books has a problem with understanding reality, let alone truth. Let's examine this wishy-washy new age idea that truth is a consensus consisting of a lot of compromises. I think that this idea is completely flawed on every level. You obviously do not. What consensus do we reach; that it's only partly a bunch of shit?

To back your point up you mention that things like "history" work less well than things like "thermodynamics". Do you really believe this is because people understand each other's views on science subjects more than arts subjects? That a consensus position can more easily be reached?

The basic problem with this theory of truth by consensus is that it assumes that truth is not discrete, and it can be reached by majority voting. In many subjects truth is discrete, and the voting model is closer to winner-takes-all. The reason that the truth crystallizes in this manner is because it is objectively testable. This is why we refer to the set of things that behaves in this manner - science. That which can be studied by the scientific method.

Furthermore, I think that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what wikipedia's purpose is. It has very explicit design goals, using your terms, it attempts to construct articles that have all of the known facts. That it, is ignores "understanding" as you put it, or POV as wiki puts it. If a fact can be attributed to a respectable source then it goes in. Understanding is left as an exercise for the reader.

You miss the point that wiki is better for science, because in terms of establishing what the facts are, science subjects are the low hanging fruit. History (for example) is harder because the facts are not always in an objectively testable form, and usually have to pried from subjective observation. An ideal wikipedia article is not a "compromise" between all of the opinions that went into it - it is a collection of all of the facts that could be verified regardless of whether or not the contributors agreed upon them.

Re:Wikipedia: Pop Culture Resource

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for the notability crackdown. Unless the 5th season of Buffy is notable in some way, articles about it will probably be deleted with prejudice. I used to go to wikipedia to read trivia about every single episode of Futurama, but they've started cracking down on that; if a TV episide hasn't been nominated for an award, you might not be able to find it on WP in the coming future. (There are other possible reasons for something to be considered notable besides nominations, of course). "Trivia" sections are being removed from articles; long articles about "uncommon" subjects are being replaced with short summaries; articles that don't affirm their own notability will get speedily deleted; and, articles without adequate citations or good references will be tagged for future removal.

Some editors say, "No, that's exaggerated---we rarely delete things!" That may have been true a few years ago, but that is not the currently policy. I've studied the recent editing guidelines and asked numerous questions in <irc://irc.freenode.net/#wikipedia>. Search wikipedia for something that doesn't exist; now, the 'not found' page has a new line, something like: the article may have been deleted for not meeting quality standards. Open an edit window for an article that doesn't currently exist; there are now multiple boldface warnings about certain things being candidates for speedy deletion. I'm afraid to contribute anything anymore. If I really feel like there's an important fact missing from an article, I'll try to visit a local college library and come up with some good sources, but, I wouldn't dare create a new article, because I know it would have little hope of surviving unless an editor happened to feel like looking for references instead of hitting delete.

"Imagine everyone having access to all of human knowledge^W^W^W^Wonly the stuff we've deemed notable and non-frivolous. That's what we're trying to do."

I used to resent the Wikipedia-Watch referring to the editors, arbiters, and overseers as a "hive mind," but, the recent policy changes have made increased the likelihood of a hivemind emerging.

There's also a new system where there are a few overseers-to-the-overseers who can make an article or particular edit be deleted without showing up in the history log or deletion log; it's supposed to be reserved for the removal of private information, specifically in instances of the "right-to-disappear" and "right-to-anonymity" systems which allow an editor to protect their identity, if they so desire, when necessary. This can lead to strange situations where one user can make another user appear to be a vandal by careful manipulation of a page and posting of private information through multiple accounts; then, looking at the edit history diffs for a page can make vandalism appear to be caused by someone that it isn't, since certain edits are completely hidden. There's no way for anyone but the overseers-to-the-overseers to be able to tell if these kinds of nearly-invisible changes have even occurred on a certain article (or, at least, the pages outlining this policy seem to indicate this; whether some pages and edit histories might have a "Notice: some revisions are hidden to protect certain individuals' privacy, and some diffs may be inaccurate" notice somewhere on them is not documented, although I would hope that sort of notice will be added if it doesn't already exist.)

I also wish that deleted articles could be viewed by the general public if they so choose. I understand that sometimes deletion is used in cases of illegal content, but, what about the perfectly-legal but uncited or non-notable deletions?

There are also two database admins who have the power to do anything at all without leaving an audit trail (Jimmy Wales and one of the lead Wiki code developers, iirc), which is a little scary. It seems to go against the ideas that WP is supposed to stand for (opening edit model, visible history, etc). I only hope that it's usage is severely limited and that some am

Re:Won't change a thing

[TheRaven64]

The whole 'notability' requirement was one that really irritated me. I would have thought 'usefulness' was a much better standard for an encyclopaedia with no real size constraints. If a page is getting hits from people reading it, then it should count as sufficiently notable to remain, and not be deleted because it doesn't meet someone's standards for important. It's not like it's wasting shelf space...

Re:An interesting experiment

[bob.appleyard]

I actually know someone who is a lecturer, and when he sets papers, goes on the relevant Wikipedia entries and inserts misinformation. Then, when this nonsense crops up in papers, marks them down in a "haha pwnt" sort of way. He says it's a way of teaching people not to rely on such sources.

Of course, this raises questions of ethics. He's sabotaging a source of information in order to "teach a lesson" to his students. Wouldn't his time be better spent improving said source of information? isn't that his job, after all?