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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."
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.
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.
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.
Yes. But it isn't surprising. Remember that Wales never wanted wikipedia- his original idea was for a free encyclopedia written by experts. That was taking way to long, so he did wikipedia as a way to create articles which could be edited and brought into the "real" encyclopedia. He's always hated that the bastard child took off, and always wanted to move back to his original idea. If he could kill the idea of a user edited encyclopedia, he would. He's *just* practical enough to know he can't, but it will get progressively less open as he closes it as much as he can.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The german wikipedia has this system for quite a while now, and it works pretty well. Approvals for edits (sighted) come in fast, and that's the criteria for displaying your edit. The next level would be a confirmation by an expert, but I have yet to find an article that has this flag.
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.
Amazing how some internet "services" become popular (ebay, youtube, etc) and then get progressively destroyed by the ones that own them and how they destroy what made them once great. Let's hope it doesn't happen to gmail and google.
Although the architecture of internet itself sought to decentralize delivery, it's funny that humans always gravitate toward provided services that are so centralized. I wish there was a way to provide these services in a more decentralized fashion while not being completely chaotic, but that likely won't happen.
So, you say? "People will find and edit, no problem! That's why we have vandalism patrol, RC patrol etc! The system works!" - does it? No, it don't. Apparently, Ms Tavares "preferred color of vibrator" sat, untouched, through such measures, and according to statistics, had over 1,000 visitors. The vandalism was only reverted after being pointed out in Wikipedia Review, a site that goes to great lengths to expose a lot of the more nefarious back-room manoeuvrings that plague "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit" (and thus has garnered such a great deal of spite from certain factions at Wikipedia (uncoincidentally, many of whom are exposed for their part in said manoeuvrings), that there have been times when WR was added to spam blacklists to prevent linking to it from WP, and proposals, one called "BADSITES"(!) were raised to curtail any mention of sites which said negative things of WP (and yet, here people are screaming "NO CENSORSHIP! Except for the things WE don't like!"). Even now, if you find yourself caught up in the WP TLA bureacracy, (RFC, RFArb, MED, AN, ANI, etc, etc, et al, et al), or trying to gain, say, Administrator status, it's a nice way to poison the well by having someone point out that "Gasp. Such-and-such is a KNOWN WR CONTRIBUTOR!".
Flagged revisions do no more, and no less, than allow people to tag revisions which have been reviewed to be vandalism-free. They don't prevent anyone editing. They don't censor information.
I find it highly telling that the "anonymous reader" trying to rouse support for the "end of Wikipedia as we know it" has not the courage of their convictions to name themselves.
[citation needed]
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
How sad that I'll never again get to read that Nicole Richie was born in the town of East Bumfuck.
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.
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
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
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.
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!
You sir have master (with incredible (and absolute)) skill the art of parenthetical (the use of parenthesis to denote (or markup (or provide additional detail))) writing.
My hat is off to you :)
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That is not what happens, according to the description. You can only edit the most recent revision. The flag just determines which revision you get when you view the article without any particular revision suffix in the URL.
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.
At least save us some time and link to the fun version of the article.
(Fun content is at the end.)
Please mod OP up.
This is a keen insight that needs more attention. He forgot to mention Yahoo. A lot of internet projects started out great and then died when the copyright czars or PHBs mucked with them too much. And a lot of this has to do with fear of lawsuits and legislation.
Americans should be concerned. If we keep letting incumbents (I'm looking at you Disney) fuck up the new media market it will eventually be taken over by someone else. Think I'm kidding? When Google implodes I guarantee you it's replacement will be Chinese.
The decentralized systems you talk about DO exist and they ARE widely used. It's called P2P, in particular bittorrent. It's just that it's very difficult for the copyright czars and decency police to control such systems so they fight to shut them down. This is the essence of the new media conflict.
Actually he never closed the first parenthesis. Count 'em - 5 openings, only 4 closed.
At the bottom:
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
You sir have master (with incredible (and absolute)) skill the art of parenthetical (the use of parenthesis to denote (or markup (or provide additional detail))) writing.
My hat is off to you :)
You write with a lisp.
> 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.