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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.
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.
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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.
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
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.
They're typically not forked to create a new community with similar goals but differing means of getting there, but typically as static scrapes to leech ad revenue.
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
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.
But that warning box is a huge turn-off. I'd be okay with it if they could "cuteify" it somehow. Maybe put a cartoon puppy dog next to it or something. Right now, the design of those boxes are downright oppressive.
Despite what some would say, design matters. It matters a *lot*. And right now, the design of wikipedia "warning boxes" gives the whole website a pretentious overtone that bleeds into attitudes projected by its editors and contributors.
If those damned [Citation Needed] boxes printed out a picture of a kitten saying "warning kitten says 'Citation Needed'", you'd see a whole lot less power-tripping on wikipedia. Design and presentation matter as much as content. Wikipedia is living proof of it.
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.
I think you're missing the point. While there are spammers and others who wish to manipulate wikipedia, there is also a strong leftist bias to the site. Thus article on even relatively obscure topics are innacurate because when subject matter experts edit them to be factually correct and neutral, these edits are then undone by the "trusted users' or the cabal of insiders, who revert them back to their biased idea of "neutral".
I gave up on contributing to wikipedia when a page for a topic I am intimately familiar with was repeatedly reverted to bash a particular viewpoint (while pretending to be neutral) by these insiders.
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 strongly disagree. On many search terms, I hit the Wikipedia result first, and use the rank button to push it higher, because Wikipedia provides pretty accurate information in a presentation form that I am used to.
Try the search term "Flipflop" (the ones used in electronics). Ignoring the shoes for now, you will find some university sites with crazy color schemes, about some specific flip flops, many hobbyist sites and other crap. "Ajax" brings up tutorials, frameworks, but nothing that tells you what Ajax is. Worse even for search terms like "Homeopathy", where all kinds of crap pops up.
When people bitch about Wikipedia, they always forget that the rest of the Internet is even worse.
I agree. I've contributed to Wikipedia articles and made corrections. If I go there and see some important information is missing (or is wrong) I will make a quick edit. But, I've never learned how to do "cites". It's confusing and I don't have 10 hours of time to spend learning the subtle nuances of how Wikipedia works. Someone needs to come up with cite-wizard that does two things: 1.) Asks you for the quote you're citing and 2.) Asks you for the link. Done! I'm not going to study the "grimoire of Wikipedia" to figure out the incantation needed to do cites to make some anal-retentive asshole happy.
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.
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.
What you describe, the failure of your search terms to find what you are looking for, simply proves that Search does not work as well as it should. It doesn't, in any way, validate Wikipedia. It merely shows the limitations of Google, being why Google needs competition.
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.
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".
I was just looking for a general idea of why the Chinnese consider "May you live in interesting times" a curse.
So it doesn't matter to you whether or not it's an actual Chinese curse? You're perfectly happy to go on spouting the "'may you live in interesting times' is a Chinese curse" line, even when it's almost certainly not?
Wikipedia is supposed to be a resource for people who want to learn facts, and those who want to help others learn facts. How well it succeeds in that goal is certainly up for debate, but attitudes like yours have no place in the debate.
Of course, if you can't figure out why it's supposed to be a curse, you're probably not capable of learning much of anything.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Google seems to do all right for me:
Flipflop
AJAX
Maybe you just need to learn how to use it correctly.
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.
"Leftist" is a relative term. What is seen as neutral by an average American, appears as rigthwing propaganda to many Europeans, and vice versa. It depends a lot on where your "centre" is, and I don't think there's an objectively "correct" answer to that.
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
Wikipedia (and related sites) is aiming at this point to be standard reference. That's high up there on serious and pretentious. I don't see anything wrong with them taking the job seriously at this point.
Beating Britannica has consequences and one of them is what they say is treated with weight, and should be.
In reading (and responding above) I don't think there is much problem with flagging. What this debate has really turned into is a debate on deletionism. The question is how it is used.
Semi protection was a nice compromise. Flagged versions seems like a nice compromise.