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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."
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.
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
did you read the summary let alone the article? They will flag things like politician's pages, pages of hollywood stars, etc.
most articles at least in the begining won't be flagged as they aren't important enough.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
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.
Knol is Google's child and it sucks badly.
That leads me to the conclusion that, while Wikipedia isn't perfect, it is better than everything else we have, including "serious" encyclopedias like Encyclopedia Britannica.
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!
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.
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.)
Comment of the year
> An inclusive worldview and a fact-based decision-making methodology are embedded in the
> foundation of progressivism.
Sorry, but that's not the case. Inclusive worldview, perhaps, though really only inclusive of those who agree with you; others can be tolerated as long as there is hope to educate them to agree with you. As practiced in the US today, even that tolerance is running thin.
But there's nothing fact-based in the decision-making methodology progressivism was founded with. There was plenty of religious feeling, and a good bit of the emotions that Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden" describes, albeit with education replacing race. Remember, one of the less-advertised successes of progressivism in the U.S. was Prohibition. There was a fair amount of dressing-up in fact-based guise going on there, but at heart it was people letting their inner Puritan loose.
You might argue that things have gotten better in the last 100 years in progressive-land, but I have some serious doubts to that effect. There is an incredible reliance on group-think, reliance on indiscriminate faith in "science" and "scientists" (and I say this as someone with a certain amount of scientific training), reliance on numbers without regard to how much they have been cooked. From where I stand it seems that a number of people lost faith in God and the Church and replaced it with faith in another set of organizations with inscrutable political infighting, priests, priestly robes (lab coats), dogma, and so forth. It's not clear to me that it's been much of a change for the better.
This is not to say that a lot of people don't do good science. It's just that even more do crap science, and most people can't tell the difference and don't want to try. They'd rather just believe (and send tax money towards) the scientists who confirm their preconceptions.
You note correctly some of the issues with modern conservative politics, but modern liberal/progressive politics as practiced on the Federal level is no better.
All that said, reality does have a well-known liberal bias if one doesn't look very closely. It also has a strong bias towards winners writing history. These things are not unrelated.
Coming back to our original topic, I don't believe anyone, including the Wikipedia folks, has ever accused them of "fact-based decision-making"....
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.