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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.
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.
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
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.
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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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.)
At the bottom:
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.
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.