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

Won't change a thing

[LordKazan]

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.

Re:Better Living Through Benjamins

[Snowspinner]

Wikipedia gets hundreds of edits per minute. I don't think even micropayments are going to be cost-effective.

Link to the actual New Scientist article

[sczimme]

Instead of using a link to a sub-optimal blog site, how about a link to the actual New Scientist article.

Re:An interesting experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know. Personally, I have found exactly what I have wanted from wikipedia every time I have looked into it - on articles ranging from people, geography or technology. Every time I wanted somebody to know something, wikipedia has never failed me. Granted, you may see traces/evidences of vandalism, but give me a system without any amount of noise in it. While you jump up and down shouting 'because anybody can edit it, it can not be trusted', I can simply not think any other website/reference/system capable of replacing wikipedia. And what I find funny is that you - the doubters - end up using it nonetheless.

Give me an alternative to wikipedia with less noise in it, or shut the fuck up.

Re:An interesting experiment

[Ash Vince]

Actually I think alot of you miss a vitally important part of wikipedia when used to serious research: The references at the bottom of the page.

I would never actually quote wikipedia as a source in serious documents, but you don't have as a lot of the best pages have a bibliography at the bottom which quite often refers to thoroughly respected publications.

Re:Truth vs consensus

[Thanatopsis]

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.

Re:An interesting experiment

[nine-times]

Every time this issue comes up, I make the same suggestion: the Wikipedia should branch into something like "stable" and "unstable" versions. Let the kooks vandalize the unstable version, but try to get trusted editors and fact-checkers to check-in changes to the stable branch.

First, this keeps the kooks out. Second, if you limit trust strictly enough, then you limit the number of people who can do damage to the stable branch. You set up a review process for those people, which should be easier since there are fewer of them and they're somehow in your "trust" system. Give them instructions that all information that's presented as fact needs to be cited to a reliable source, and have someone watching the watchmen. If any of your fact checkers or experts violate their trust, revoke their trust.

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.

No longer everyone's knowledge, now just citations

[kingduct]

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.

Re:An interesting experiment

[Kadin2048]

Yes, kids use Brittannica as a primary source, along with other Encyclopedias. People don't start citing research papers or hard data until college (and even then, only in Grad School for a lot of colleges - sad huh?). The reason it's acceptable, is because the Encyclopedia companies try to ensure all the information is accurate, and then print it. It can't be vandalized later, so it's generally more trustworthy than wikipedia is assuming it's not a really old edition. You say this as if it's a fact carved in stone, that can't be changed. If Wikipedia replaced Britannica for initial research, but teachers stick to their guns about not accepting it as an actual source (which they should not), perhaps it will force more students to start doing real research at a younger age. Using Britannica as a source seems just as inherently lazy as using Wikipedia, and I don't think that should be acceptable even at the high-school level.

It's not like it's especially hard to drill down to real sources from most WP articles. Most controversial ones have citations, or at least a list of suggested reading, near the bottom. (And some articles, like ones on particular recent events, have direct links to primary source material, which you don't typically get in a traditional encyclopedia entry.) In some ways, it's a lot easier to begin doing real research from WP than it is from Britannica, and I think WP does a better job of encouraging skepticism and fact-checking skills.

Re:An interesting experiment

[maxwell demon]

Actually to be sure you'd also have to check those references[1]. Because otherwise you still might fall for fake information[2] or original research pulled out of one's ass[3], as is proven by Murphy[4]. And by the way, one plus one is three[5].

[1] April Fool: What you can do with references. Journal of Applied Fake 26 (1987), 424
[2] Joe Sixpack: Resources I trust. Yellow Press Magazine 25 (2001), 321
[3] A. S. Smith: Pulling and pushing. Yesterday's Research 42 (2010), 1876
[4] Jack Murphy: What can go wrong. Oops Conference Procedings 7 (1991), 112
[5] Frank Fake: New Arithmetics, Page 42. Stupid Press, New York 1976, ISBN 0-123-45678-9

Re:An interesting experiment

[MT628496]

Give me an alternative to wikipedia with less noise in it, or shut the fuck up. Just because you don't have an answer, doesn't mean that there isn't a problem.