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developed privately by informed and qualified individuals, have now folded since the maintainers thought Wikipedia superseded hosting such information on one's own website.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.

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: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?