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Edit-Approval System Proposed For English-Language Wikipedia
An anonymous reader writes "A group of powerful Wikipedia insiders are pushing for FlaggedRevisions which will require a 'trusted user' to approve of edits before they go live on the online encyclopedia. There is also opposition but with support of founder Jimbo Wales it is likely to go through. The German version has tried the system, leading to three-week delays between edit and publication. The English wiki with its higher number of anonymous editors per trusted user is expected to suffer longer queues if FlaggedRevisions is implemented on all articles. This comes just a few days after Britannica announced that readers will be allowed to suggest edits and have them reviewed within 20 minutes. Will we see the day when Britannica can be edited almost instantly while editing Wikipedia requires fighting bureaucracy, patience and the right contacts?" Note that, according to the quote from Jimmy Wales in the linked article, this system would only be used "on a subset of articles, the boundaries of which can be adjusted over time to manage the backlog."
This is a disaster. No hierarchy is why I like Wikipedia. *sigh* end of an era.
Seems they could have the best of both worlds; if they gave users the option to see either
1) the most recently edited version, or
2) the most recently approved version.
are they forgetting the what made wikipedia successful in the first place?
I like the fact that Britannica is trying to get into the "free dictionary" sphere, wiki may be good, but several independent (free) sources are always better than one!
Absolute power corrupts, absolutely.
Need an automatic screenshot taker? Try here.
I hope so. the popularity of wikipedia will decline, the articles will become better and google Knol ( knol.google.com ) will get a chance to shine.
Right now we have an unbalanced monopoly half assed solution which is crowding the limelight. hopefully it will go away and the best service will win.
Will we see the day when Britannica can be edited almost instantly while editing Wikipedia requires fighting bureaucracy, patience and the right contacts?
Sure, I'd say it's probably inevitable at this point. It is human nature to overcomplicate things to an insane degree, because we have a penchant for fiddling: we just can't leave a good thing alone. It's one of the things we do best. And when that happens to Wikipedia, when it has become too topheavy and hidebound to be useful, someone will start a new project that will attempt to learn from the lessons of the old, and go from there.
Nothing really new to see here, when you get right down to it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
... am waiting for a Chrome checkbox in the toolbar that automatically removes all the wikipedia entries from a google search.
... while editing Wikipedia requires fighting bureaucracy, patience and the right contacts?
Ehr, that's pretty much what it is now.
In the beginning I had to much trust in wiki content, this was corrected after reading some reviews and case studies. Today I simply ignore the whole site because I'm not interested in wasting my time to dig out the references.
In the end, when you need the data, you just end up checking Britannica.
"Violence is the last refuge of the competent, and, generally, the first refuge of the incompetent" - Thing_1
Seems to me that unless there's some sort of "Meta-something" that the 'Sighters' will have unchecked authority.
That's bad.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Let me be the first to say, as an infrequent Wikipedia contributor, that a FlaggedRev system would drive me away from the project.
Cheers, Mike
It's decent now, so even if it was frozen as is it would still be a valuable resource. And edit approval won't freeze it, it can still grow just more slowly.
Besides, there's enough dissatisfaction already with Wikipedia's policies to warrant a fork. This will just increase the likelihood of someone forking off a better wikipedia, a wikipedia for the masses with no notability bullshit, fewer rampaging herds of deletionists, and commitment to the original idea of an online encyclopedia which everyone can contribute to and edit.
Loose lips lose spit.
Britannica has promised sub 20minute delays. They have nothing to show they can do this. Wikipedia is on the other end of things. Summary writer is a knob.
If it aint broke, don't fix it.
So we can no longer use wiki to let the whole world know their favorite celebrity is gay?
Will we see the day when Britannica can be edited almost instantly while editing Wikipedia requires fighting bureaucracy, patience and the right contacts? At this point with whos running things at Wikipedia, I would not be shocked to see the day Britannica supersedes Wikipedia. Wikipedia has LONG to go to answer for its many sins of recent, the biggest being kicking Jimmy Wales and his cult to the curb.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
He can do it as an intermezzo between solving the economy, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Iraq, the internets, civil right, ...
"Violence is the last refuge of the competent, and, generally, the first refuge of the incompetent" - Thing_1
The overwhelmingly majority of edits to the German Wikipedia are flagged within seconds.
However, the single oldest non-reviewed or reverted change will often be a few weeks old. This is usually because someone made a large edit with a mixture of good and terrible changes, so no one wants to either sight it or revert it⦠so the draft hangs around awhile until someone improves it enough to justify publishing it, or until someone finally decides its crap and removes the change.
Under the old system edits like this, ones which were of mixed quality, were quickly undone. The new system is much better at conserving the users work.
Of course, everyone can see the latest draft version: There is a big banner that tells you the the version you are viewing is not the latest.
I think it has been an enormous improvement.
Is what is needed. Look, most people understand that they need to take anything they read on wikipedia with a grain of salt; a website that anybody can edit has to be. But see, wikipedia seems to project the aura that it doesn't think it's shit stinks. As a result, you get crap like the warnings for this. Look, who cares if that article isn't well referenced or cited. I was just looking for a general idea of why the Chinnese consider "May you live in interesting times" a curse. We dont need the damn disclaimer, it makes the place feel like it is full of anal retentive blow-hards on power trips. And the best part is, the article I linked to seems to have had at least one of those warning boxes since Sept. 2007! Nobody cares!
I used to remove every one of those stupid warnings when I'd hit an article via google just for spite. Now I stopped caring. When I see one, I just back out and go somewhere else. I certainly wouldn't take the time to do whatever the silly warning box wanted. Obviously I'm not alone or those boxes wouldn't have been around for more than a year.
My ideal wikipedia would not have any of that "citation needed" or "needs more references" bullshit. Just leave the damn thing alone. We all know the thing is never going to be a bastion of truthliness. We all use it for trivia and cases were we really dont care how accurate the information we get is. And if we spot bias, we just might edit it out. Isn't that the point?
Bottom line is wikipedia would be better served by removing every single one of those annoying warning boxes. Every one. They serve no purpose other then to project the aura of pretenciousness.
Restricting edits to trusted users is ideologically opposite to the core principles that made Wikipedia great. I think it is a terrible idea.
Instead, I've advocated alternatives in the past: article 'sets' based on quality and notability, and real-time feedback of edits/history and controvercial regions
article sets: instead of an "in or out" policy for articles... let people make any article the want - any person, any thing, but have a graded system for what makes it to full publication. For example: Level 5 articles, "Full Publication" are basically all the things on Wikipedia now. Level 1 are minutia of almost no interest to anyone but a select few, and only accessible to logged-in users. All new articles start at Level 1. Level 0 and -1 are candidates for deletion. Levels in between are various degrees of publication openness; community nominated moderation panels select articles' levels (think: meta-moderation). This would create an even more open ecosystem of creative expression that would lead to higher-quality publication of new articles in Wikipedia.
real-time feedback: The web pages need to include a sidebar or underlines, or some integrated, obvious feedback mechanism to flag recent edits and controversial (high-change-rate) sections of text. This is critical to understanding the longevity, accuracy and community agreement to content in a page. This would eliminate one of the most serious criticisms of Wikipedia, by letting readers know what was recently changed or what has been changed often. One would need to create many complex metrics about article edit rates, user reliability and content filters to make such an integrated flagging/feedback system work well.
These are the areas where the Wikipedia foundation could innovate and create things that are better than we have today - not with closing down edits with approvals.
Deletionists would be working hard to become 'trusted users' themselves, so that once in power, they can stop other people from adding to articles.
Forgetting that it take many, many small rough additions to grow articles to a certain size. Only then will trimming the articles be feasible.
It's like making a movie. Lots and lots of takes, lots of cuts, only the will the movie contain enough material to last 1 hour.
i dont want it. if i wanted another britannica, or larousse, i wouldnt use wikipedia.
a group of dimwitted morons can propose it. but if anyone actually puts in motion, they can shove wikipedia in their butt - im sure an alternative will come up.
Read radical news here
How about a Slashdot system that stops the one guy with 20 accounts from making 4 opening comments on each article then modding them all to "5", that happens with EVERY SINGLE ARTICLE here on /.
[citation needed]
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The problem is that Wikipedia can't decide what its focus is. It can't decide whether or not it's an encyclopaedia that focuses subjects of universal importance with a large number of eyes on each subject, or a central clearinghouse for pop culture and trivialities.
So what you end up with is what we have: patches of admin and users on each side defending their own little piece of ideological turf and leading to a heinously uneven project that ranges from brilliant to utterly useless.
The alternative will be Britannica. YOu will find a lot less more article about your favourite sf series, but at least the discussion about how you need to discuss will silence.
Let me gues teh subset of articles involved.
A All articles that are locked now for anonymous editors.
B Articles about living persons (since they sue, and there different rules for those anyway.)
C Articles about beliefs.
This a good method to smuther any non wikipeidans about those articles, and the expert wikipdeians will be the same incrowd, that causes to dimisihed the growth of wiki, prevent anything "original research", or people who do not have references on the internet dispite writing several books about a subject.
Set up a timeout limit, with a fallback to what happens now. In other words, if an edit hasn't been approved or rejected in days/hours (with a default, but customisable per article), the edit is flagged as "approved via timeout".
Ask me about repetitive DNA
this breaks the entire reason that wikipedia worked!!!!
Gee, considering the amount of babysitting some of those articles get one would think this sort of system wouldn't be needed.
I have nothing compelling to say
im a wikipedia reader. i read it, i use it as an easy link to present evidence in discussions, debates, and conveying info to friends. linking it.
if we stop doing that, the 'in crowd' in wikipedia can edit each other as much as they want, in their closed 'in' circles, all by themselves. as i so elaborately and eloquently put it ; they can shove it up their butt.
Read radical news here
I wrote some time ago an article about peer reviewing Wikipedia:
http://cameralovesyou.net/random/wikipedia-digital-signatures.html
I submitted it to Wikipedia Village Pump about six months ago, but at the time it didn't go through to the implementation phase.
The basic idea was that a revision of an article could be peer reviewed, so that it could later be referenced as if approved by the peer reviewers. The idea looks actually quite much like the "flagged" revisions that are now under discussion. :-)
- Ismo
Then morons will stop citing it as primary source for their bad science and history.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I approve of this change, assuming they are actually able to effectively keep up the number of poof readers so that the lag between change and implementation is minimal like ur mom lol
If they can do that then they can keep wikipedia more "correct", with formal checking of citations and sources prior to implementation, while simultanously eliminating almost all vandalism. balls
The only problems I forsee:
- vandalism could evolve to waste proof-readers' time with near-correct submissions that contain bullshit near the end
- a lot of citationless truthiness exists in wikipedia, but at the same time, a lot of "obvious" truth that doesn't have an obvious source exists too, like ur parentage. Wikipedia would evolve to be more formally correct and have higher information accountability, at the expense of volume.
how mny hitlers duz it take 2 screw ur mom lol
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
And a general idea is all you'll ever get on Wikipedia that you can trust. Those warnings seem like some form of propaganda which tries to project an aura of reliability that the Wikipedia does not have.
The way I would do it would be to allow only logged-in edition and institute some form of "karma", where users could label content as "vandalism". Users with a high level of vandalism in their contributions would be banned.
In short, I would make Wikipedia somewhat like Slashdot, only I think the Slashdot criteria for moderation isn't very good, I would let any logged-in user with enough karma to moderate. That would create a herd-mentality, for sure, but I believe it would be in the right direction. People who just wanted to troll would get tired of it pretty soon.
I'm sure there are many people who are willing to work seriously to make Wikipedia work. Just look at what they have created, despite all the bullshit the overlords impose upon us, the humble contributors.
How do they choose these 'trusted' users? On many topics in Wikipedia a gauntlet is formed by a Wikithugs. They decide they own the topic, and sit there and revert every change that comes along for the most trite of reasons. Most of these translate to "I wrote this article and I don't want anyone to change it." You can revert it back yourself of course, but they'll just revert it back. And they have more time that you: they seem to have nothing better to do. Challenge their credentials and you'll be directed to some pretty Wikihomepage declaring all the wonderful Wikicliques they belong to. I've seen wikithugs sitting on insignificant topics, but on larger ones they form a circlejerk and jump to each others defenses. "Oh sure. Don't put down BasementDweller215 - they've been a Wikipedia editor for X years". Since these cliques are self-policing, there's a lot of back scratching and no reason for them to be responsible. Basically it smells of "We were here first - Keep out the Noobs."
It's why I don't waste my time editing Wikipedia any more. Why waste time researching and writing a change when it'll be reverted and re-reverted until you go up? Any system for choosing "trusted editors" from the wikithug crowd is doomed to fail. Hell. It would make the system even worse. Bad idea.
...precariously close to censorship. What really makes wikipedia great is the fact that anyone can contribute and that poor content will be weeded out by the multitude of readers (these also being the editors) who recognize it as such, not by a chosen few who have an effective veto.
Maybe the way forward is to keep the main Wikipedia as the lawless land it's always painted to be, but work more on spin-off encyclopaedias targeted to a specific audience or area of knowledge. I'm thinking for example of the SOS Schools Wiki project, which delivers a fully-checked general set of articles covering all areas taught in the UK's National Curriculum (the govt-mandated list of subjects that should be taught in all schools). The subjects and knowledge are so general and broad that it'll only ever need minor revisions, and is of course useful for anyone wanting to acquire a 'baseline' level of knowledge, no matter where in the world they live.
Leave WP to concentrate on disputes over whether episode lists should be in scope and instead grab all the brilliant general knowledge that has already been created and do something wonderful with it. What would have cost a school hundreds or thousands, in the form of twenty heavy, expensive books that can only be used by one person at a time can now be used by an infinite number of people, all on one DVD-ROM.
Not all subjects are so controversial/disputed that they need this Edit-Approval system IMHO. Certain subjects could be flagged, like political and religious content, the rest could be "peer-reviewed" as it is today. That might cut the possible backlog a bit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F
This comes just a few days after Britannica announced that readers will be allowed to suggest edits and have them reviewed within 20 minutes. Will we see the day when Britannica can be edited almost instantly while editing Wikipedia requires fighting bureaucracy, patience and the right contacts?"
As I believe I mentioned in the original thread, I find it hard to believe that a subscription service will be able to have enough 'eyes' to make good on this promise. Sure, the existing Wikipedia system could be improved, as could KDE, The Gimps... The important thing is, both the improvements, and the improvement process itself, are open to deep public scruntiny.
TFA quotes Jimmy Wales as stating that a poll of members shows 60% are OK with the new system.
That's a poor analysis of what the membership is telling them. They're considering a major change that 40% of their members ARE NOT OK with.
Splitting your membership in half and improving life slightly for those that remain is rarely a good strategy.
They probably will only allow as peers people with 10k+ edits.
In other words, people who have no life besides wikipedia.
I infer this from how they selected people who may vote on wikipedia issues.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Who writes Wikipedia?
That story was on /. about a month ago. My thought is that what TFA refers to as "Wikipedia Insiders" is the same 500 or so nuts detailed my linked article.
It might not be a bad thing but a lot of things I have gone to "the pedia", as I call it, have been items that are changing quite often at the time. The fact the Wikipedia can stay up with recent events and discoveries means I get the best information available. Even if I found some other site with relevant information on any given subject it is very likely the information is stale at best.
Plus if I am not sure how current info is the pedia gives me a way to check exactly when it was added, who added it, and mostly cites credible static pages or articles.
Why go from that level of usefulness to a (possible) 20+ day delay governed by a group that (presumably) is not the best or most knowledgeable on the subject matter?
I don't know why, but the fact that he's constantly reffed to as Jimbo annoys the hell out of me and makes me dislike him. Anybody named Jimmy who wants other people to refer to him as Jimbo instead of Jimmy or Jim after the age of 12 or 13 has issues.
Allegations of "leftist bias" are almost always specious. An inclusive worldview and a fact-based decision-making methodology are embedded in the foundation of progressivism. On the other hand, modern conservative politics are almost entirely built on deceiving a large ignorant group to vote against its economic interests. Conservative bias has been far more common during the last 30 years than anything else. In short, "reality has a well-known liberal bias". Stop whining.
Try entering a search query but prefacing it with "-site:wikipedia.org." So here's the original search:
http://www.google.com/search?q=+shakespeare
...and now here's the one with Wikipedia excluded:
http://www.google.com/search?q=-site:wikipedia.org+shakespeare
Doubtless you could rig your own Firefox search bar plugin that includes this option for you.
Breakfast served all day!
I'd be down with that.
Warning, the above comment may contain sarcasm. Don't say I didn't warn you.
I couldn't have said it better myself. Man I wish I had mod points right now because you knocked this one out of the park. The good news is that if Google doesn't fix things like this competition will come calling. It's only a matter of time, and unlike Microsoft, Google doesn't have a way to lock people in. If a better site arises I'll here about it just like I first heard about Google and I'll make the switch right then and there which is why, again unlike Microsoft, Google can't afford serious missteps for long. People will simply go someplace else.
Why else do you think so many conservative pundits and politicians like to bash "elite west coast liberals", "ivory tower eggheads", "liberal scientists", etc? One should question a political ideology lead by people who dismiss those with education.
Reality, indeed, has a well-known liberal bias.
...when they stopped allowing weak content to grow, in favor of just deleting it. The attitude used to be that people shouldn't worry about the rules; that's how articles grew. Nowadays, if you write a big article and don't cite it, the article will usually be deleted, as opposed to someone actually taking the time to cite it.
The whole idea of Wikipedia is its 'crowdsource' nature. It shouldn't be 'perma-locked' this way.
What would be nicer to me is a 'subset' of Wikipedia that was exactly what is suggested here. Something that, among other things, would be 'safe' for use at elementary and middle schools.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
[citation needed]
http://www.wikipidia.org
Sounds like Encyclopedia Dramatica is just the place that you're looking for!
I have mentioned this problem here in Slashdot before, only to be modded and flamed like crazy. "Everybody", apparently refused to believe these problems with Wikipedia really existed.
Well, I do not often do this, but I will take this opportunity to those people "I told you so".
In part because these problems have not just been ignored but actively amplified in some cases by Jimmy Wales, my opinion is now that Wikipedia is a lost cause.
The favoring of citations in every case over the expertise of the poster, the problem with "Administrators" and campers on articles playing favorites, etc., only degrade the quality of the published articles.
Wales has failed his own project by allowing it to be politicized. Very sad.
Which is that, especially on certain controversial topics, your reversions would themselves be immediately reverted... not so much in cases of vandalism, but in the case of articles that have certain "high-level posters", or even just campers, watching over their content, who want to enforce their version of that content.
In fact, it has been the development of moderators and administrators that has been the largest part of the problem. When anyone could edit with the same authority, the problems did not arise.
comics aren't good enough for Wikipedia
Today I was reading an article on Wikipedia about DC Comics' Final Crisis series. Which deleted articles about comics that have been the subject of non-trivial coverage in multiple "third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy" are you complaining about?
nothing on the internet counts as a reputable source
What do you mean? Please name a specific third-party source or type of source that Wikipedia has rejected, and show us that it has "a reputation for fact-checking".
On all articles, it sounds liek a disaster. One some articles, like the most viewed, perhaps it would be a good idea.
Is that you, Mr Data, who remembers Unix Segfaults from 8 years ago?
Remember, don't mod the karma whore down or he'll un-inspire and un-interest you!
In case this goes through, the easiest way to filter Wikipedia pages from your Google results is to add this to your query string:
-site:wikipedia.org
What a sad end it would be for such a beautiful idea. Let's hope it never happens.
There are entire, large, long-standing, communities here that have virtually no coverage in "multiple third-party published sources with a reputation yadda yadda."
If the liberal-leaning news media don't care, and the conservative-leaning news media don't care, what makes you think the median reader would care? Instead of trying to get into Wikipedia before making the news, perhaps you could try posting about your community on a dedicated wiki on the subject, such as one hosted by Wikia.
We must make sure no information gets in that exposes the heroes of the left or refutes the causes of the left. Wikipedia has a proven far left bias.
Its something that can't be solved. Its hard to tell the difference between a crank and an expert. Well its not, but its hard to create a rule that does.
Plus I frankly I don't see how an expert wouldn't be able to find citations.
I was involved with Wiktionary for a bit. Back there was a bit of the insane running the asylum regarding some policy decisions. But from just causal browsing now, Wiktionary has gotten much better since then.
Its handy even when you're just researching.
I think most of the mainstream critics of wikipedia don't like that they are obviously required to read critically. Some articles on Wikipedia are crap, some are good, but its easy to tell the difference. The big "this article doesn't know what it's talking about" warnings are a big help there. :)
Went by self-identifying. Most of the editors posted with labels such as "liberal," "green" (which is "left" in all the countries I know of) and "communist." Very few self-identified with anything that could be considered "right."
Even within a country it generally remains leftist. When the John Edwards adultery scandal broke, there was a concerted effort to keep the news out of Wikipedia using every reasoning necessary. It was only included when Edwards admitted it, and then grudgingly.
Or even the case of Obama's citizenship. Whether it's true or not aside, there were cases before the Supreme Court, and the fact was kept out of the Obama article, not notable, tin-foil hat. You'd think a case at the Supreme Court automatically makes it notable within the USA. There was an effort to cover-up his anti-gun activities too.
I'm surprised some of the bad stuff about Al Gore remained, but it was edited into obscurity. His work on the Clipper Chip and Key Escrow got moved away and renamed. His personal wasteful lifestyle is mentioned, and the next couple paragraphs are used to mitigate the fact that he doesn't practice what he preaches.
Meanwhile, negative information was fairly welcome for any American who could be considered "right."
I'm curious about how carefully the editors check the edits if they approve them in a few seconds. It wouldn't give time to look up external references to check newly added facts.
Wikipedia was an interesting experiment. With the stress on experiment. It taught us the Do's and Dont's of a massive collaboration effort.
However, as with all experiments, lots of things turned out to be different than we thought, or more difficult. Wikipedia suffers badly from the grey areas around its core idea. Deletionism is the most famous one - the fact alone that even after years of discussion there is no consensus should serve to illustrate that there's still something to be done here. Edit Wars are another topic of that kind. There's obviously a problem here, and no one has found a solution so far.
What has been done for the past two years or so is patchwork. It reminds me of DOS/Windos. You've got something that through luck and being there at the right time exploded into this huge, dominant system, and now you're stuck with all the legacy crap.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This comes just a few days after Britannica announced that readers will be allowed to suggest edits and have them reviewed within 20 minutes. Will we see the day when Britannica can be edited almost instantly while editing Wikipedia requires fighting bureaucracy, patience and the right contacts?
Wow, talk about putting a spin on the story! The sky is falling and stuff!
The wait times of several weeks don't sound realistic to me for most articles, because heavily edited articles are also heavily watched and scrutinised - I can't imagine there being much bigger delays on getting up-to-date information on current events than there is now.
Also, I don't believe anyone really wants more bureaucracy than there already is. In my personal opinion, article sighting powers should be handed out like autoconfirmation is handed out today: Automatically after a set period of time after article creation.
But let's talk about history.
Last time when we did a major move to "limit the editing", we introduced semi-protection. A lot of people felt limiting newly registered users from editing article was a blow against the principle of open editing. But also, these people didn't stop to consider what the alternative to the semi-protection was.
The alternative to semi-protection was full protection. Either everyone is allowed to edit, or no one is. Which one do you prefer: Wait a few days to get yourself a confirmation to edit all semi-protected articles ever, or always bother the much-hated administrative nazi bastards and hope they add the precious bit of information to the protected article? I'm pretty sure most people feel the former is more within the spirit of open editing.
Flagged revisions aren't taking away open editing either. Instead, they are a tool to let people scrutinise the new additions better. No one's taking away the ability to view the bleeding-edge versions, if you want them. The idea is just to make sure that someone has at least checked the recent edits.
So what's the alternative horror scenario?
The alternative horror scenario is that no one looks through the stuff. Semi-protection is entirely mechanical in nature: we can't technically define a "suspected vandal" as "unregistered or a recently registered account", vandalism is a social issue, and social issues are solved by social interaction, not by computers. The only way to introduce social problem-solving is to let people vet the edits. That's how real editing process works in real life.
by experts in their fields trying to contribute to technical articles, only to have "campers" on those articles alter or even revert the contributions as being "orginal research"...
Not all cutting-edge research has been published in peer-reviewed sources, and in some cases that is for good reason. There have been some problems with some of these peer-reviewed publications.
Hello. Disclaimer: This will probably flagged as flam-ish.
HA HA HA! ( I.e. Laughing Out Loud ). Pardon my French (BTW I am a French man) but Wikipedia-wise you are the exemplification of a wanker. So many of you thinks WP is their-little-pet-project-I-do-what-ever-I-want-out-of-it. Ça fait pitié.. :-)
OK. On a less flamish tone. WP is not and has never been anarchy. There were and are many rules one has to follow in order to contribute. This was and is the project of J Wales. Those signs that are annoying you, are there to remind user that WP is not one-more-my-space-n-co i.e. pure utter jabber-teen-ager-commercial-crap-I-want-you-to-believe. I suggest the following question : Without any attempt at forcing WP users to cite and reference their statements, would you be reading Wikipedia ? My bet is for a plain no. I have already had some conversation about WP-pseudo-freedom here and here. How about plainly ignoring those warnings ? The fact you don't want to accept that you can't write just anything you fancy is your freedom. You are not forced into contributing. Yet, working with WP means you will have to abide by JW rules. Unhappy boy ? Well... fork.
With regards. Z.
That's because the Sighted Versions system in the German Wikipedia is only used to verify that edits don't include obvious vandalism ("Bob's mohter is gay!!eleven"). You don't need any expertise to identify such obvious vandalism. Checking the accuarcy of those the newly added facts is done the same way it was done before this system was implemented (watchlists, wikiprojects, casual readers/editors, etc..)
And many edits by anonymous users are just corrections of typos, linkfixes, layout changes, etc.. those can be checked in a glance and flagged as "sighted". And edits by users with the sighter status (older than 60 days, more than 300 edits, clean block log) are flagged as "sighted" automatically. At the moment, there are about 5800 users with this status.
The Angels have the Phone Box
> many edits by anonymous users are just corrections of typos, linkfixes, layout changes, etc
Got a link/statistics for this claim?
It was nice while it lasted.
I don't know the specifics of the comics issue but I would agree that deletionism has gotten way out of hand on wikipedia.
1) the most recently edited version, or
2) the most recently approved version
this could be even more interesting if it was made clear and easily accessible. like adding an extra tab at the top :
* Article
* Last approved
* Discussion
* Edit this page
* History
* Move
* Watch
so cry-babies who are too easily offended by crap thrown in by vandals know which tab to click to feel better.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
excuse me pal, but if someone is unable to tell apart obvious and unobvious signs of vandalism in a subject s/he is interested in, they should not be on the internet, talking anyway.
and as to 'why not', i cant limit my freedom of information to a narrow window that sits in between the new edition of an article and a 'trusted editor's 'cleaning up' of it.
i dont want editors. that's 19th century. if they want, they can start a fork of wikipedia with information taken from it, but by implementing their victorian information strangling.
Read radical news here
You could easily prevent the back log problem, by making it so that any change not rejected in X days is automatically accepted. I does not HAVE to have a slow buerocraciy type of problem if you choose for it not to have one.
I've done an experiment in a wiki article too. Just changed one of the numbers from like "3 gigabits" to "3.9 gigabits" and watched the thing for a whole year until I got bored. It was never changed.
If you are a so-called editor on wikipedia and don't know about the subject you are editing, all the rules in the world won't protect the article from what I did. After all, why would anybody change some random number (which had no citation to back it up anyway) in a article unless they knew what they were talking about? Wikipedia articles are wide open to that kind of psuedo-social-engineering.
ps: the thing was later changed to the proper number when the whole article was revamped.
I wasn't being serious to suggest we use a kitten or puppy--those are extremes given only to make a point. But something about the design of those boxes needs to be changed to make it look less oppressive.
There are all kinds of ways they could have their cake an eat it too. All of the changes I suggested are simple ones that would go a long ways to improving the website's tone.
Wikipedia has had, for years, had 'protected' pages that could only be edited by admins. This was reserved for pages subjected to 'edit wars' and very frequently vandalised pages (e.g., the front page, Adolf Hitler, etc.)
Then, in 2005 they added semi-protection, which allowed only registered users to edit the page. This is used for frequently vandalised pages (e.g., Adolf Hilter) and was step toward more open editing, not less, and yet at that time many outlets, including Slashdot ran stories suggesting it was the opposite.
If this 'subset of articles, the boundaries of which can be adjusted over time to manage the backlog' is entirely (or very nearly entirely) limited to protected pages, or if it's limited to protected and semi-protected pages and trusted users consists of any registered user, it is once again making editing more open.
I doubt it's quite either of those, but it seems incredibly unlikely that this change will close editing of Wikipedia to any significant degree (and incredibly likely that reporters and commentators will decry this as the death of Wikipedia).
We don't like locking articles, but we can do it already. Flagged Revisions is just another form of locking, and it's unfortunate, but there are assholes who have nothing better to do than sit around and wait for their favorite article to get unlocked so they can start vandalizing it again (like this guy). Whenever we try to unlock the article again (because, astonishingly, Wikipedia editors - and, contrary to what you might think, Wikipedia is very much run by its editors, it's far too vast to be effectively policed by any cabal) the vandalism starts again. We want to be able to deal with it in a way that's simple and fair to other editors. Flagged Revisions seems the best compromise, and it's hardly more Orwellian than locking the article to admin-only edits. Can you suggest a better solution to our problem?
If that MUD is already dead, maybe you can contact the developers and convince them to release it as open source on SourceForge? You could also try to convince them to add your explanatory article into the documentation section.
Wikipedia doesn't have to contain every piece of information itself.
Why? i mean if it can be verified and interests more than one person why bother deleting it? That is why i no longer care much for Wikipedia its lost sight of its goals! What was wrong with trying to be a repository of knowledge? why cant trivia be included? why cant articles about comics stay? etc,
There's a few reasons. First, the idea is to create a repository of useful information. There's a lot of junk on Wikipedia that doesn't fit into that definition by any standard.
The cost of managing excess data is not zero - there has to be some effort to verify that it's basically correct. Additionally, it's important that the data be not only factually correct but that it's expressed coherently - somebody who knows their way around the English language has to fix the spelling and untangle all the convoluted, ambiguously interdependent clauses that people stick into articles - possibly rewriting whole paragraphs or reorganizing the whole article, just to make correct-but-incoherent data into something people can actually read and learn from. It's necessary to give this level of attention to all content on the site in order to maintain the site as a useful and reliable source of information. A site like that can't simply be "contributed to", it must be cultivated.
Why can't trivia be included? Because there's no end to it, and it's generally not important information. Hence the name, "Trivia". When half an article is the "in popular culture" section, that not only wastes space with useless data, it actually makes the article less effective to the reader, because they're now looking at a two-page article with no more useful data than the one-page version without the trivia would have had.
Why can't articles about comics stay? Well, there's a couple angles to this question...
On the one hand, there's (for instance) what Penny Arcade did with "Epic Legends of the Hierarchs" - encouraged their readers to go on Wikipedia and contribute to a mass of articles about the RPG/CCG game setting they invented... That's kind of an extreme end of the spectrum, but at any rate the PA guys were apparently surprised when Wikipedia pushed back... Basically, Wikipedia is not a dumping ground for other people's pet projects.
Then another side of this question - why can't the article about my favorite webcomic stay? After all, it's a good webcomic, and it's fairly popular, and the author has generally been pretty good about updates... Thing is, comics like that are a dime a dozen. There's a neverending stream of them, and they come and go all the time. Plus, the people who would want to read an article about one of those comics tend to be the same people who would be qualified to write one. Basically, people are using Wikipedia to make fan-sites. There's no particular advantage to having this fan-site be on Wikipedia as opposed to somewhere else apart from the fact that neither the writer of the comic nor the writer of the author needs to pay to keep the site up. You know, if people want to find information about a webcomic, they can use Google and find the comic and any fan-sites.
It's the need for maintenance and clarity that limits Wikipedia's scope. This is why I believe it's worth getting the nonsense-data off the site, and concentrate on what's relevant and factual.
total classic!
More Wildcat is on t3h sp0k3 posts, please!
> many edits by anonymous users are just corrections of typos, linkfixes, layout changes, etc
Got a link/statistics for this claim?
Unfortunately, no. Just my own experience. I'm not sure if there are any meaningful statistics that include information about trivial/non-trivial contributions ratio. There are of course lots of big, non-trivial edits by anonymous users, but I just wanted to point out that lots of changes can be checked for vandalism rather fast just by looking at the diff page.
The Angels have the Phone Box
Why is there any discussion of Encyclopedia Britannica here at all?
They are irrelevant and do not provide any alternative to Wikipedia.
Encyclopedia Britannica has been dead for many years and the only reason anyone mentions them at all now is because they either have a dusty set on the bookcase or they remember referencing them in the antiquated school library.
This article and the first link on it appears to be a marketing attempt for Encyclopedia Britannica.
Do not be convinced. When it comes to debating the pro's and con's of which to reference when you need information... well there is no comparison.
This article is meant to make you feel that they are in competition. They are not. Wikipedia has won and EB should stop wasting paper and just close.
Reminiscent: I remember over 10 years ago being in a mall and there was a guy in a booth selling EB. I asked him what the companies solution for online access was and he said that they did not need to do that as they were a print based company. He was right and still right. They should remain in print and disappear with it too.
Even though there is no such thing as net neutrality, the expert approval system of the German wikipedia results in a strict POV enforcement by the Federal Establishment - That is by the parties and the churches who legally (ab-)use tax money (there was another slashdot article about that) for privately hired full-time editor "experts" on all matters of world, politics and history and life.
Their harm is worse than that of English astroturfer swarms as the latter can still be fought by differently minded collegues. The German editor-tyrants are invincible.
The Dutch wikipedia is the place where Northern Germans get their daily dosis of unconvenient truth. Where will you go, Brits and Yankees?
What you say is true to a degree, but on Wikipedia it has been taken to an extreme, and Wikipedia is suffering from that. That was a very large part of the point that was made.
Jim Wales actually wanted an encyclopedia that contained information from noted experts. What he created, instead, was a site that rejects input from those very experts, unless it is already cited in an article somewhere.
Also, the demand for citations on Wikipedia often ignores the reputation of the source.
But I think its a fair enough trade-off.
People who criticize the policy always frame it as "well I could've made it better but I couldn't", they're not thinking about all the crazy cranks that might be let it if the policy was more flexible.
You are talking about something completely different.
According to Wales himself (and as mentioned at least a couple of other places in this topic), he expected Wikipedia, though egalitarian, to naturally "evolve" into a system such that experts would be those most contributing to articles. Unfortunately, this has not proved to be the case, and in fact Wikipedia's own "credibility" rules discourage it.
...except that the threshold for inclusion is verifiability, not truth.
$ make available