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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.
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...
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.
Truth by consensus? That's not how the scientific world works. There's the whole experimental model and reproducibility of experiments that leads to consensus.
Thalasar
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I dunno. Out of the 30 articles featured and to-be-featured on the main page in September, 7 are popular culture articles. (An article on D&D, the "Bus Uncle" video clip, the pilot episode of Smallville, OutKast's "Hey Ya," Alison Bechdel's graphic novel "Fun Home, the Indian film Lage Raho Munna Bhai, and tomorrow's featured article on Blood Sugar Sex Magik) Yes, that list skews a bit geek (Though the Bechdel graphic novel is about as far from a geek comic as one can get), but there's still 23 featured articles this month on such geeky topics as meteorology, European rugby, Soviet history, and American industrial disasters.
It's more accurate to say that we, compared to similar reference works, have a disproportionately good coverage of geeky topics. That does not appear to have come at the cost of our coverage of other topics.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
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.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
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.
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
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.