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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."
are they forgetting the what made wikipedia successful in the first place?
Absolute power corrupts, absolutely.
Need an automatic screenshot taker? Try here.
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.
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
Flagged revisions do no more, and no less, than allow people to tag revisions which have been reviewed to be vandalism-free.
What about vandalism that's not so easy to spot? Like a subtle change to an article that (presumably) is not on a lot of people's watchlist? How would the FlaggedRev system handle these types of edits? Would it create tacit approval for these changes? Would it be difficult to revert them at a later time, since at that point the rv would itself look like vandalism? Just a thought.
Cheers, Mike
Agreed. Wikipedia was great a few years back, but it's been growing ever more elitist. That would be justified if the elite actually were the ones writing useful content (as Jimmy thought), but a recent study proved him wrong -- actually, the people who frequent the site (these "trusted users") are actually the ones who sit and nitpick the knowledge they weren't knowledgeable enough to contribute themselves.
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.
Its a nice story, but i stopped giving a shit about wikiadmins when they showed they were elitist pricks, comics aren't good enough for Wikipedia, nothing on the internet counts as a reputable source, etc. Sure this could be used to stop vandalism, but at the end of the day it will just be another way to keep information OFF wikipedia
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
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?
Parent tl;dr: Only the people who don't have anything worthwhile to do and have an interest in forcing through a particular view will care to fight on Wikipedia - end result being that Wikipedia is a cesspool worse than 4chan run by the most socially retarded misfits.
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.
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.
Sure, it's bad if vandalism doesn't get spotted, but what does the Sara Tavares example have to do with "Admins, Mediators, Arbitrators, Checkusers, Oversighters, Bureaucrats, Stewards"? What "nefarious back-room manoeuvrings" are you referring to? That might apply if an admin reinstated the vandalism, but the vandalism has been removed, and no one is contesting it AFAICS.
Why bother with WikipediaReview - why not just revert the vandalism?
I don't see how flagged revisions would help either, for cases where people miss the vandalism. Or to put it another way - it was over a month until someone came along to check this article and remove the vandalism, but over a month delay on good edits getting in is going to be a huge backlog. And like it or not, Wikipedia's appeal is being able to edit without waiting weeks to see if your edits are approved - I'd say that's what made it so popular.
I don't think flagged revisions are bad - but this kind of delay is.
Ah, so I can just add a filter rule to add "version=current" and avoid all this nonsense, good.
The more the regulars on Wikipedia become concerned with "Editorial control" and not "Maintenance/usability", the more "joblike" updating Wikipedia will be and the content will suffer worse from that than it does from childishness or spams.
Actually he never closed the first parenthesis. Count 'em - 5 openings, only 4 closed.
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.
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?
This is the Internet! Wikipedia is on the Internet! There are entire, large, long-standing, communities here that have virtually no coverage in "multiple third-party published sources with a reputation yadda yadda."
For instance, I used to play MUDs, like tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people. MUDs have been around since the mid-80s, all modern MMOs (which have "multiple third-party yadda yadda") are based off MUDs to some extent, and yet there's maybe... 2-3 books and a dozen articles on the entire thing. So I can't write a Wikipedia article on my MUD, which had hundreds or thousands of users and lasted > 10 years and had revolutionary RP-based features which still hasn't been replicated in any other game, because we never got an article in the Wall Street Journal? Fuck that.
Wikipedia has put a bar where, for many communities, is simply impossible to reach. The most famous example being web comics, and of course my MUDs. And this problem will only get worse as the Internet gets bigger and more popular. (If it hasn't already maxed out.)
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Google seems to do all right for me:
Flipflop
AJAX
Maybe you just need to learn how to use it correctly.
The problem is that a whole lot of people with no fucking lives have decided to make policing Wikipedia their life's devotion. To say it's biased is an understatement, but Encyclopedia Dramatica's "bureaucratic fuck" article makes some points. The rules work until you get Rules Nazis. Then you end up in a neverending arms race to define exactly what the Rules Nazis can and cannot do while they tirelessly work to be bureaucratic fucks, which destroys the entire spirit of what was supposed to be going on.
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
Look below, and you might start to grasp the idea why wikipedia is based upon verifiable facts (same as science journals), rather than faith:
I can't write a Wikipedia article on my [leprechauns], which had hundreds or thousands of [leprachanish citizens] and lasted > 10 years and had revolutionary [gold-finding abilities] which still hasn't been replicated in any other [continent], because we never got an article in the Wall Street Journal? Fuck that.
I can't write a Wikipedia article on my [revolutionary Commodore 64 Star Trek game], which had hundreds or thousands of [players] and lasted > 10 years and had revolutionary [polygonal graphics in three-dimensions] which still hasn't been replicated in any other [8-bit game], because we never got an article in the Wall Street Journal? Fuck that.
Get it?
If wikipedia was opened to just anyone, and the claims were not verifiable through citations, then wikipedia would no longer be an encyclopedia. It would be a mythology journal. That can not be allowed to happen.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Or I could just not edit Wikipedia at all, since every time I try to improve it (in good faith, which I believe is one of their confusingly-acronymed rules!) my changes get reverted with no explanation and no discussion.
Your workaround is basically to spend ten times the time/money (yes, hosting costs money) writing an ENTIRE WIKI so that I can get information added to Wikipedia-- but oh wait, it's still not in Wikipedia, it's in a link on Wikipedia. Which would probably get reverted anyway (see the other reply to your post.)
Fuck that.
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