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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."
Wikipedia is good enough for personal information or simply a quick look, i.e. unimportant information, however I doubt it will ever become the encyclopaedia it supposedly hopes of becoming. However having said that, it is certainly an interesting experiment and look into human nature (or at least American nature) with this trust-based scheme simply making the experiment more interesting.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
Er, won't wikiscanner just move the corporate/political vandals to home? This is leaving out the fact that wikipedia will never be seriously trusted due to it's open nature, to be taken seriously requires it to close off public access and to change to specialised, academic authorship - something that would corrupt it's mission.
i know not what weapons the next world war will be fought with, but world war IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Seeing a 'Is Fox News fair and balanced?' poll as the ad for this story makes me amused.
Evolution ceases when stupidity can no longer be fatal.
I stopped editing wikipedia due to some extremely biased, shrill, and bludgeon-you-with-the-rules (claim you were violating the rules when you weren't) editors.
One of these editors was an admin, another was on ArbCom. It was basically a group of people who would camp one specific subject and keep it edited to support the cultural status quo/their religion's position on the article. They did it through keeping information out of the article that would cast the subject in the disfavorable light it should have, and does in most of the non-english speaking world, and some of the english speaking world.
These individuals would probably pass whatever trust-checking mechanism.
The truth is not reached via consensus.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
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."
There is nothing wrong with Wikipedia as it is. I have never trusted traditional encylopedias more than Wikipedia. There is often much more information available in Wikipedia than in a traditional encyclopedia. Furthermore the this comment is just plain dumb "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 organisations the contributions were made by." Who gives a crap who made the edit I'm only concerned with the accuracy or value of the information present; if you believe everything you read no amount of academic authorship is going to help anyone. I for one like to listen to whatever anyone has to say on any subject be they retarded or wearing a tin foil hat or if they are teaching at university.
Common, even /. is more trustfull. Trust is not something you can buy with another set of features.
root of all...
Here is Wikipedia's page on Flagged revisions
Extension:FlaggedRevs on mediawiki.org
And yet the simplest and most effective quality control, requiring registration, is still considered sacrilege to the Wikipedia overlords...
I think reaching the truth via consensus is realistic; it seems to work pretty well in the scientific world. The problem with Wikipedia is that each editor self-selects himself to work on the tiny part of Wikipedia he wants to, and so people with an agenda are overrepresented in some articles. I do agree that people with agendas using legalism to try to weed out dissenting opinions seems to be one of Wikipedia's biggest problems (and I'm not even an editor).
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.
If you want a quick -- nay, exhaustive -- overview of the 5th season of "Buffy," or come across a reference to "Boba Fett" in an online forum and want to learn more, Wikipedia is the site to hit. It's value as a font of pop culture knowledge is augmented by its geek-contributors obsessive behavior. Politics? Religion? Any chapter in History or Current Events involving Politics or Religion? Reader Beware.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I tried adding something once to an article but they kept bludgeoning me and removing it due to that it wasn't referenced. I did reference it to a reliable source but I put it in a "External Links" as I couldn't add it to the citations/sources without being a registered user for some reason. If I have to become a registered user to add a citation, and if I have to add citations to add things without them being automatically deleted (regardless of their merit), that destroys a lot of anonymity. Which may be good or bad depending on your POV.
Wikipedia is pretty good as a resource in my experience, but lately they have been obsessed with being SEEN as accurate and are implementing rules that get them SEEN as accurate but I don't know if the actual result is that they become more accurate or just more orthodox and accepted by the establishment. They have been already shown in a study to be as or more accurate than Encyclopedia Brittanica - I think the direction they are heading actually does not lead them toward their ideal (accuracy) but more toward the mob rule/(orthodox accepted truths).
The trouble with trusted editors is that any large organization can afford to pay someone to become a trusted editor. All you have to do is hire someone reasonably smart, and tell them to spend a day per week helping Wikipedia. Then, once and a while, you tell them to fix what you want fixed. Some would refuse, but others would not want to risk their job.
Since large organizations spend millions on PR, they would happily spend the small sums it would require for this plan. We're talking about US$40,000, which is not a lot. The only reason this plan would fail is that it would be too tempting to demand a lot of edits.
Ultimately, the problem comes down to anonymity. You really want people to put their reputation on the line, and you need people who care about their reputation. Paying university professors to write articles is one solution, though there may be others.
Alternatively, you just accept that Wikipedia is what it is: good for the stuff that everyone knows, of dubious value for controversial stuff (though often surprisingly good!).
I like De Alfaro's statistical approach of ranking both blocks of text and editors.
:-)
I also like the approach of checking IP addresses, although I was caught in that: earlier this year I added an article on machine learning, but someone from my ISP had done vandalism; I was blocked for a few days until I went through their system; no problem, just a delay.
The whole topic of trust is a very interesting problem, one that also occurs on web sites, the semantic web, etc. (Imagine trying to perform reasoning with RDF on the web when some contains fake information).
I (slightly) embarrassed myself last night by sending a link to a parody article to a few friends and family, not realizing that it was a parody - I had to send out a "never mind" email this morning.
I have mixed feelings about private anonymous use of the web vs. the benefits to knowing who people are. I very recently turned off anonymous posting on my web blog - too many anonymous posts offered opinion that I doubt the posters would express if they represented themselves.
As an open platform (hopefully forever), the Internet will evolve in interesting ways
I really wish /. posts would stop asking if wikipedia is "trustworthy" or "reliable". All of the cynics reply in chorus "no, it can't be because X can vandalize article Y, and group Z can gang up and bully topic Q into having systemic bias omg wtf @!$!".
No kidding. This happens. Guess what? It happens in print encyclopaedias also. Replace vandalism with plain old errors, replace the systemic bias of group Z with that of the editors and voila.
Then you have the camp of "ex-editors" who are really nothing more than bad editors who haven't taken the time to understand what the mission of wikipedia actually is, rather than what their contrived notions lead them to believe it is who say things like "I got scared away because what I added which was so clearly invaluable to me was removed by a long-time editor which clearly means I'm right and they're doodie heads with an agenda omg wtf @!$!".
What they don't realise is what they add has to be verifiable from reliable, secondary sources, with no new opinions of their own. Wikipedia seeks to add established analysis, not what you perceive to be right. And this is exactly what makes wikipedia more reliable than any print encyclopaedia - it has inline cited references to back up it's claims. Any part of wikipedia that does not yet have these inline citations (that anybody can and should follow up on) should still be considered works in progress - consider finding the source yourself!
So I guess my question is, why do you insist we hold wikipedia to a higher standard than other encyclopaedias? Stop being afraid of dynamic content.
Science isn't. Facts aren't. The sky is blue, the planet is billiions of years old, two airplanes flown by terrorists brought down the World Trade Center, intellegient design is myth.
If enough people say otherwise aggressively enough, though, Wikipedia--even if they don't outright say otherwise--will leave it gray enough to be contested.
Dude, where's my packet?
I now find contributing to Wikipedia unbearable. At one time, everyone was supposed to contribute what they knew. It was a place for the world to create a new form of reference based on everyone's knowledge. Now, I find that if I contribute about things I know, I am told to find a citation. Thus, incorrect information with citations is allowed on, and good information without citations is removed. The goal is to look academic (like tradition resources) and not to let everyone share (like it originally was). It was incredibly frustrating to have people who had no idea what they were talking about start telling me that I was in the wrong for changing things.
I can understand people wanting to make sure that the right stuff is put on the wikipedia. But shouldn't it be people with experience in the subject matter of the topic who go through and find what is wrong? Instead it seems like people attach themselves to articles and feel like rules changes in the wikipedia give them the power to control articles and show their academic formatting superiority, even when they know nothing about the topic. I still use the wikipedia some, but this change has actually made me lose some of my trust in it. Whereas before the wikipedia more openly admitted that it was imperfect and I took it for what it was, now it pretends to be perfect and in order to do so is reducing its validity and I distrust it for that pretension.
Trust isn't the Wikipedia's biggest problem at all. Its biggest problem is that it is an encyclopedia that is treated by many as a primary or secondary source. When someone argues that the Wikipedia is not appropriate for citations in something like a research paper, they get flamed by people claiming its more accurate or has more information than traditional encyclopedias. But thats completely missing the point; no encyclopedia (or any other tertiary source) is an appropriate source for citations.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
If you had to pay to edit Wikipedia, only the serious editors would do it.
[sig]
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.
It is true that cited information that happens to be incorrect or misguided will often be difficult or impossible to remove due to the existence of a citation — this is clearly a problem. However, I do not see the other direction as being an issue.
The fact is, nearly everything that is correct and accurate can indeed be cited. Wikipedia has, for very good reasons, a policy of not allowing original research — so anything you determine yourself is not admissible. But everything else is.
I'm the sort of person that "knows" a lot of stuff. I have a lot of trivia and information stored in my brain; I'd wager many Slashdotters are similarly of the "know-it-all" variety. But I cannot tell you how many times I have sworn that some factoid or other was true only to discover in the course of research that I was either mistaken, or that the knowledge was somehow so obscure that no one else made any references to it whatsoever (which, let's face it, probably means I was mistaken).
Unlike you, apparently, when this happens I thank my lucky stars that WP encourages citation of sources. When something is correct, finding a cite is a trivial endeavor, as it only amounts to telling them where you read what you're saying. When something is incorrect, your inability to find a cite will prevent you from looking like a daft fool by insisting something is true when it's not.
Many people who think they are experts tend to assume that the "cite everything" policy that WP has adopted does not apply to them — but more often than not, these people are not actually experts. Real experts, who do research and read on their subject of expertise in an academic setting pretty much full time, are accustomed to citing their sources (although they are often not accustomed to WP's prohibition against original research — but that's something else entirely).
As a rule of thumb, if you can't find a citation for what you know to be true, it's probably not true, and so I cannot empathize with your distaste for the citation requirement. However, I think you are right in your assessment of the problem in the other direction: citations can be of poor quality and be incorrect themselves, and people can be very unreceptive (read: belligerent) when you suggest that citation or no, their statement is either incorrect or POV or whatever.
One thing I wish Wikipedia would do is cache the citations; if the citations are made to a website. I've noticed a slightly out-of-date wiki entry would usually have a good majority of their citations lead to pages that no longer exist. I'm sure there are legal and technical issues that make it difficult, however, transparency of works cited is crucial.
The article says that "trusted editor" status will be based on number and frequency of Wikipedia edits. I don't know about others, but I think that in many situations I would place considerably less trust in people who are constantly editing Wikipedia as opposed to occasional contributors- as a group they represent a very biased selection of the public at large*, and as individuals they often have agendas they're pushing which represent a major (if not the major) motivation for their continual editing.
*I was about to submit and realized this statement could be misread to mean that they're more biased people than average. That's not what is meant, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_bias.
WikiScanner does NOT allow people to tell the "motivations" of those who make changes... it simply identifies those parties (in some cases), and other people draw their own conclusions. Those are not the same things.
Further, WikiScanner is probably going to work itself out of a job, because now savvy people will not use Corporate sources for making their self-serving changes. Of course, WikiScanner will still continue to uncover the clueless... but if anybody in business is smart at all, its popularity is already making it less useful.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at.
Finding primary sources in print is hard and extremely time-consuming, and requires access to a big library. Completely agree. It's totally beyond the scope of most students in public primary and secondary schools, and probably most college students who aren't at a big university.
However, this is where Wikipedia is better than Britannica. In a Britannica article, you usually get a few print sources as references. In a Wikipedia article, you usually get a ton of references, and many of them are electronic (and if it's a recent event, many of them are both electronic and primary sources, e.g. links to news sources).
Take, for example, the WP article on George Washington. It has 49 direct citations, most of which are to sources that are available both freely and electronically. And many of those are to well-respected institutions that you could cite directly (the LOC, the Smithsonian, etc.). And beyond that, there's a separate list of suggested reading, which includes electronic versions of George's actual writings, a short biography published in the NY Times, and a collection of primary-source material related to slavery in Philadelphia by the Independence Hall Association. In five minutes, starting with the WP article, I turned up more primary and citable secondary sources than I probably could have found in an afternoon's worth of searching in a good library.
That, to me, is the real strength of Wikipedia. Regardless of its strengths or weaknesses as a source itself, it is an excellent portal to a vast quantity of electronic information, available to anyone with an Internet connection. While a student forced to use nothing but paper sources is hobbled by the size of their school's library -- which is almost always directly proportional to the wealth of the area they live in and the importance that the community places on education -- allowing student to use (good) electronic sources narrows the gap considerably, provided both have access to the Internet to begin with.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."