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Wikipedia To Require Editing Approval
The NY Times reports on an epochal move by Wikipedia — within weeks, the formerly freewheeling encyclopedia will begin requiring editor approval for all edits to articles about living people. "The new feature, called 'flagged revisions,' will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved — or in Wikispeak, flagged — it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia's servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version. ... The new editing procedures... have been applied to the entire German-language version of Wikipedia during the last year... Although Wikipedia has prevented anonymous users from creating new articles for several years now, the new flagging system crosses a psychological Rubicon. It will divide Wikipedia's contributors into two classes — experienced, trusted editors, and everyone else — altering Wikipedia's implicit notion that everyone has an equal right to edit entries."
altering Wikipedia's implicit notion that everyone has an equal right to edit entries
It sounds like everyone still does. They're just checking edits before making it live.
...The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Do you have any idea how long it takes to dig graves for twenty-three oak trees?
...it's done. The control freaks have won, again.
...make a fork of it?
Face it, Wikipedia is ancient history as far as the internet is concerned. All the heavy lifting was done in the early years, and now everyone's moved off to Twitter or whatever the latest hep fad is.
Most of the people who are still actively editing are cranks and and nutters with a political chip on their shoulder. They just want to editwar about Micheal Jackson or whatever nationalist topic is up their ass. They aren't going to maintain old pages on boring topics to ensure they don't fill up with uncited bullshit.
Either Wikipedia limits editing rights, or its just going to turn in into an unmaintained pile of useless garbage. That's the reality of the Internet.
"Altering Wikipedia's implicit notion that everyone has an equal right to edit entries."
"implicit" is the keyword here. Reality has been different for quite some time. They are only making it official policy now.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Why is a big lock better than a universal lock or case-by-case locks?
Oh please:
It will divide Wikipedia's contributors into two classes experienced, trusted editors, and everyone else altering Wikipedia's implicit notion that everyone has an equal right to edit entries.
For years, people here have ridiculed Wikipedia on the notion that anyone can edit it, and edits appear instantly without any checking by another person. Yet now they implement such a system - that's wrong too!
I don't know if this idea is good or not, but at least put forward a proper debate rather than claims about creating "two classes" or whining that people no longer have an "equal right" (hey, do I have an equal right to edit the NYTimes article?) It's always the same. Some people say that Wikipedia has too much fancruft. Others blame Wikipedia for deleting too much stuff. Some people complain that Wikipedia allows edits from anyone without sources. Others whine when their edits were reverted. Can't both sides argue among themselves, rather than blaming Wikipedia everytime?
Because the NYTimes don't cite their sources, it's hard to see what's being proposed. If it's like the current rules for protected article, then the decision on who can approve an article will purely be based on having an account for a given period of time. There's no unequal rights, no second class system, no old-boy-network.
I can see this making sense - when Wikipedia was new, allowing anonymous edits to appear straight away was important to get people hooked, and get as many people using it as possible. Now with 3 million articles, that's really not needed - what's needed is to stabilise mature articles, and to improve the quality.
In my opinion, this isn't actually censorship, but a rather effective anti-trolling measure.
Wikipedia is not a forum where everyone can post his opinion and let the user decide which one's right. It's an encyclopedia. If someone defaces it or uses it as a means to alter someone's reputation (for good or ill), it will lose credibility.
For one, this "control freak" measure can be used, for example, to prevent mad scientologists from removing negative remarks on their current leaders, or right-wing zealots from removing negative aspects of their favorite political candidate.
If your contribution is indeed impartial (remember we're only talking about living people entries), it WILL get accepted. Just not as fast as you'd want to, but it will.
Isn't this the best of both worlds? In fact, I'm tagging this story "abouttime".
It's been divided like this for years, as anyone non-anointed who has tried a perfectly accurate revision well knows.
The cake is a pie
As Gabe of Penny Arcade said it best: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad.
Ultimately it catches up to anything. Forums, blogs, and now Wikipedia. I'm not sure this is a good change for Wikipedia, but at some point you have to do something to stop the fuckwads from completely tagging the place.
I felt a great disturbance in the Net, as if millions of vandals suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced...
Fork it....
ie. You can't contribute knowledge to the Wikipedia... only regurgitated leavings from other websites. It's just a dreary collection of the web predigested by a wasp hivemind mindset hiding behind the mask of NPOV.
So they have just added another layer to enforce that fundamental limitation further. So what. Try everything2 instead.
Or just about any place.
I never write anything down anymore... I just lose the paper on my desk anyway. When I find out something I want to remember, I write it on the web somewhere anywhere and let google index it for me.
Note to self: portablexdr is the name of the lgpl xdr library I want to use.
.
Has Wikipedia's success killed it? We report, you decide......
Fuckwad + Audience = Total Fuckwad.
Everyone edit all the biographies to say that people died in 1997. Then we can say whatever we want!
This is not really a Rubicon. I edited for several years with a WP account. Then I decided WP had evolved into a thing that was no longer fun for me, and to reduce my temptation to get involved in any more WP stuff, I disabled my account by munging the password. Ever since then, I've been editing without logging in. There are already a lot of things you can't do without being logged in. You can't upload an image, can't mark your edits as minor, can't make a new article, can't edit certain articles. WP's official policy is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with editing anonymously, but people are often very snotty toward you if you edit anonymously. There's a strong tendency for both humans and bots to revert anonymous editors' edits, even if it's a good edit, with a good comment line pointing to discussion on the talk page.
Find free books.
Just trial it for a couple of months and see the difference it will make.
Isn't that what Uncyclopedia already is? A fork of Wikipedia for people who like to vandalise?
- Chuq
Wikipedia may be working their way into having stringent editorial standards, but slashdot will always remain free and unencumbered by such things.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Can I set a cookie or something to always view the newest (unapproved) version? I also didn't see a greasemonkey script yet.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
"Wikipedia's implicit notion that everyone has an equal right to edit entries."
Due to the presence of "administrators" who can bar non-administrators from editing (i.e. locking an article), that has never been true.
Not that I agree with increased restriction but at least the anons can still submit edits and they'll be evaluated by editors who probably won't have the "what I say goes" attitude of the administrators.
We just had a story a short while ago about Wikipedia having plateaued. With the current system, barely any revisions by members outside the WP "elite" actually make it through. Now with forced moderation, that will likely drop to zero. There's a distinct line between janitor and censor that I believe is being crossed here. I can understand the community trying to rid WP of garbage. That follows with the protection of some commonly vandalized articles. I just think that protection of articles was supposed to be the exception; this change makes it the rule. Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that anyone can try to edit.
Over the past three years, the standards have tightened up. Now, everything has to have footnoted references. Wikipedia has always required that material be verifiable, but now, "verifiable" means correctly footnoted to a reliable source.
If you've published in refereed journals, or spent time in academia, this is no big deal. The problem for many inexperienced editors is that they're not used to writing with references. Most of the whining comes from people who just want to write their own stuff, not dig for references and write footnotes. Wikipedia calls that "original research".
This requirement first appeared in politically controversial articles. Then it spread to most articles on serious subjects. Now it's applied even to fancruft. ("What do you mean I can't write about 'Zords in Power Rangers: Jungle Fury' because they weren't mentioned in a Journal of Popular Culture article?") The detailed fancruft is gradually moving to Wikia, which has lower standards.
Wikipedia is an open source project with coding standards and quality control, not a blog.
As Gabe of Penny Arcade said it best: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad.
Ultimately it catches up to anything. Forums, blogs, and now Wikipedia. I'm not sure this is a good change for Wikipedia, but at some point you have to do something to stop the fuckwads from completely tagging the place.
As Gabe of Penny Arcade said it best: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad.
Ultimately it catches up to anything. Forums, blogs, and now Wikipedia. I'm not sure this is a good change for Wikipedia, but at some point you have to do something to stop the fuckwads from completely tagging the place.
agree 100% on this.
Nope, never been a mod, never been banned in anyway.
:-))
Closest I came was when some damn yanks were gaming the system by swamping the article on Waterboarding. Of course the could find thousands of references to Bushshite apparatchiks stating categorically that waterboarding isn't torture and the mods clamped the page at a revision stating it wasn't torture. (I'm please to see the article is now fairly good.)
But the incident made me take the fundamental problem with Wikipedia seriously enough to sit up and look out for it. Once I started to look out for that problem, I noticed it enough other places for me to now instinctively lower the ranking of wikipedia hits.
Of course, if you are an American WASP... you can look and look and look at the wikipedia all day and not see the problem with NPOV.
This won't work. The idea of encylopedia as wiki only works while editing is relatively straight forward and can be done by almost anyone. I know it hasn't REALLY been like that for some time, but I think what we're seeing is the next phase of a decline not a brave new world of better encylopedias.
The fundamental problem: Make too many editors trusted, and you have the potential for wide spread abuse by the editors going unchecked. Too few trusted editors and you get edits stagnating and awaiting approval indefinitely. Both will turn people off contributing, and striking a balance is next to impossible.
It's not a new problem. I remember the old "talkers" (social MUDs) in the 90's. Becoming a super user became a trophy win. You'd either get too few or too many, people would actually trade real world sexual favours for the privellege of being an SU (or use it as a pretext for sex - we're talking about college kids) and things would go to hell. If you don't have any experience with that, imagine how well a Unix system would run if every time you changed file permissions, a super user was needed to approve the change.
This change has doomed Wikipedia. In a decade we'll all be reminiscing about it. The staff at the paid encyclopedias must be cracking open bottles of champagne. Wait and see.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
That's always been the point. What you add has to have been published elsewhere first (and not just websites; scientific journals or other reliable sources are preferable to some nutcase's Geocities website). They aspire to create an encyclopedia, and such works do not have original knowledge in them -- the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy being an exception.
Isn't that what Uncyclopedia already is? A fork of Wikipedia for people who like to vandalise?
<sarcasm>I thought that was what Conservapedia was for</sarcasm>
(and no. I'm not going to provide a hyperlink. those trolls don't deserve the pageviews)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I, for once, welcome the return of the priest class. now more pervert than ever: here, wikipedia controls you.
This means that, further, individuals with expertise will be probably undone when correcting common myth, perpetuating more falsehood.
I used to be one of those gung-ho wikipedia defenders until I started trying to participate. THAT was an eye-opening experience. You know the type of person that is commonly known as the "bureaucratic fuck?" The type of person you find in government that is nothing more than a peanut in the system but has power over you so they wield it like a tot with a lightsaber toy? That is the wikipedia "bureaucrat" in a nutshell. They don't care about what the actual facts are (and are quite proud to say so), they care more about rules being followed and WILL revert or otherwise defend false information if it's corrected in a manner they deem against the rules. I was editing out obvious bias and conspiracy theory nonsense and got reprimanded for undoing his edit three times. The guy had a fetish for the article in question because he had some kook bias and watched it like a hawk adding in his garbage all the time. The wiki staff told me to "let the community sort it out" but a month later his garbage was still on the page and they wouldn't do anything about it and I still couldn't revert it out over three times.
Eventually I did win especially when wiki started requiring more stringent citations, but I lost faith in the sham of their "arbitration" process. I once heard that wikipedia was just a bunch of nerds roleplaying a bureaucracy, and I'm convinced that's true. I'm sure the moderators and such watching over article revisions will be much like how the rest of WP works--the pro-Israel and anti-Israel crowds warring over the Israel article, the pedophiles whitewashing the pedophilia article (this occurs, I shit you not), and so on. This time though, whomever has the most moderators, wins.
The way Wikipedia does it now is like letting anyone add code and make a new build from the new code that serves as the "stable" build anyone uses. The planned change seems reasonable from the point of view of that analogy. The parallels between code management and wiki editing are many.
You just got troll'd!
Either TFA is inaccurate about the new "feature", or it's much more restrictive than what German Wikipedia has been practicing. In German Wikipedia edits by non-members don't
sit invisibly on Wikipedia's servers
until approved, they are visible to everybody in a "Draft" ("Entwurf") tab. Logged-in users are redirected to the latest draft by default, if there is one.
If TFA is right and they're really planning to hide fresh edits entirely from the public, everybody will edit the latest approved version instead of the latest draft. Every draft will be its own branch. It will be real fun merging all those --maybe even conflicting-- edits back to the approved version. My prediction is that editors won't bother merging, and we will see many more instant reverts. I mean, we won't see them. Not even in page history. Oversighted. And they won't be instant reverts, just instant dismissals. One more step to a closed Wikipedia.
So does that mean: Audience = TotalFwad - Fwad?
Try mentioning Bill Ayers on Obama's page...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Wikipedia communications are non-existent, it's a total void. You are supposed to write on some page that is supposed to be the editor's message center or something where he bloats about himself ... there are no email addresses, formal form of contact, anything.
My question is: how will you get feedback if your modifications are approved or not? Who can you contact to appeal if you feel the approver is wrong? Is there a discussion process?
Trying to make sense of Wikipedia "bureaucracy on a fuckin' wiki!!" has made me throw my keyboard on the walls many times!
Please think of the keyboards! :)
This is a pretty stupid thing to do for Wikipedia because they are leaving their niche in crowd-sourced information and taking on the mainstream expert approach to encyclopedias. Why should I be trusting Wikipedia's group of still-anonymous devotees more than I should actual experts in the field? Without the benefit of having the data being constantly checked and rechecked by the effectively informed and unbiased collective, what's the point of using Wikipedia instead of Encyclopedia Britannica or any other expert source? Wikipedia is making this about personal legitimacy, a game for which they are particularly unsuited.
I smell a banned mod.
Sorry, chili gives me bad farts.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
"The change is part of a growing realization on the part of Wikipediaâ(TM)s leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable."
Freedom is sooo childish and unnecessary...
Pandark
before there is a non-elected government "czar" appointed, with extra-constitutional powers to oversee "online content".
There, problem solved.
"everyone can edit it... so long as you reference and summarise something somewhere else. "
Yes, that's exactly the policy Wikipedia was founded on. "An encyclopedia not a journal... No original research". So they're still doing that right, then.
Got an actual criticism there?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
It's probably a good idea for reasons of liability and quality control, but IMHO it IS admitting the failure of the Wikipedia model. I suspect this is just the beginning of greater editorial control. Eventually, the editorial bottlenecks will slow its progress until is asymptotically approaches the cumbersomeness of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
and I can tell you that from the Wikis that I have been on. Many times I had to revert an edit because:
#1 Someone posted a "X is gay!" comment on the article about their friend or school mate.
#2 Someone blanked the page.
#3 Someone did a personal attack against an admin or another user in the article.
#4 Someone used swear words to describe the article and what it was about.
#5 Someone linked to 4Chan type links or Goatse, Lemonparty, etc.
#6 It was a Spammer adding a link to their web sites that have spyware popup ads on them.
#7 Someone uploaded nude or porno images and the article was not about those things.
#8 Someone posted personal information and tried to cyberbully someone else. (Usually this needs an Admin to remove the edit history from the server and as a normal user I cannot remove it, so I flag down an Admin on their talk page to deal with it.)
#9 Random nonsense is scribbled all over the page making it unreadable, and no it is not in a another language put a bunch of 1's and etc like this "11111112222333jrjfjdsubf3875uott7".
#10 Sexual references are made throughout the article and the article is not about sex, but it is a form of vandalism.
But in the case of Wikipedia they do things like say Ted Kennedy died when he didn't. Which seems like some sort of practical joke when many celebrities had died at once like Michael Jackson, Farra Fawcett, Billy Mays, etc.
I am guessing to be a trusted user, one has to have gained enough trust to be a Wikipedia Admin and thus approve of edits to an article. The rest of us are just editors. Administrators always had more power and rights than the average user anyway, they just got a new power to approve of edits on protected articles.
Ironically Wikipedia's rival Conservapedia had a system like that for quite a while, and also shuts off new user registrations from time to time. You'd expect that out of Conservatives, but most Wikipedia Admins are left-wingers, but they understand that these new controls are needed to protect the accuracy of the articles.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
It's simply another forum for Left Wing Loony Toons.
Right now, the bureaucratic layer is the almost instantaneous reverts that people make to new changes. It just reorders where the instantaneous reverts occur. This reminds me of the Columbia disaster. Because of the high-publicity launch, the NASA management told the engineers that if they cannot prove the Columbia takeoff would be not safe, the takeoff would happen. This is as opposed to the NASA management telling engineers that if they cannot prove the Columbia takeoff would be safe, the takeoff would not happen. Instead of A->B, they wanted ~A->~B.
Dir sir,
As Czar of Internet Contribution Efficiency (formerly "Czar of Resource Access and Consumption*), I think your Slashdot user ID is suspiciously low for you to possibly be a worthwhile contributor to any society, virtual or real.
Henceforth, will you please consider refraining from consuming precious online resources? Any further postings from you that don't include the phrase "get off my lawn" will be investigated thoroughly by other un-elected officials.
* Alas, that title was changed due to the unfortunate acronym formed by certain smarty-pants of questionable political reliability, with whom we have dealt with...
This message has been approved by the Director of Internet Communications. Please report dissenting views the the appropriate authorities.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
"But the incident made me take the fundamental problem with Wikipedia seriously enough to sit up and look out for it. Once I started to look out for that problem, I noticed it enough other places for me to now instinctively lower the ranking of wikipedia hits."
Wikipedia's designed intent is to accurately reflect the consensus culture's view of knowledge. Seems like it's doing that just fine. In cases where that culture itself is bitterly divided, and holders of various positions sling names at each other in the media, from governmental pulpits, and in published scientific journals, were you expecting Wikipedia to somehow magically rise above this and achieve perfect truth?
Because if you could bottle an algorithm for doing that, you'd get the Nobel Peace Prize. Or be assassinated, or both.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
That...is the sound of inevitability...
While it's all nice and touchy-feely to allow ANYONE to edit, therein lies the problem.
ANYONE can edit. Meaning jackasses, as well as well-meaning people. And worse, even with the well-meaning people, bias creeps in.
That Wikipedia was eventually going to have a "trusted group" assume moderation of changes over even a portion of the entries was a foregone conclusion.
TANSTAAFL.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Here's the actual policy draft. The so called "articles about living people" are actually specific heavily vandalized articles that are already eligible for semi-protection, and the "experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia" is any account at least four days old that's made at least ten edits. Not exactly the epic failure of Wikipedia's core principles that the mainstream news media would like it to be. It's heavily ironic that that the NYT is too busy bashing Wikipedia to concern themselves with the facts of the story here.
...who have TOO MUCH TIME ON THEIR HANDS. Real people who are out DOING THINGS can't "volunteer" hours every day to make Jimbo and his lefty friends rich.
Wikipedia grew to where it is by allowing anyone to edit it. That is what makes (made) Wikipedia different from other Web sites and sources of information. Yes there has been a lot of criticism, but it is criticism of the core concept...a concept that has proven itself in spectacular fashion! So why would anyone listen to the criticism? Yet over time a small group of people has altered and altered Wikipedia in response to the criticism. This is yet one more step down that losing path.
How should one measure the success of Wikipedia? In "criticism" or pageviews? I would submit that pageviews is the right answer. If it is useful it will be used, criticism be damned.
Wikipedia is not in any less need of updating now than the day it started. In fact because it is so much bigger, it is in exponentially MORE need of updating than the day it started. It would be a huge, huge mistake to think that it is at all "finished" and ready to be put into maintenance mode. If anything the Foundation ought to be finding ways to make it easier and easier to update and correct pages.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
confirmed it? :)
Wikipedia is turning to peer review. And they need to. Because wikipedia is a top search-engine return, pretty much everybody who uses the internet understands it now, and every kid is going to want to joke it, and everybody with a gripe, the list goes on.
If you are so unlucky as to be portrayed by a Wikipedia article, and you've read your article history, you'll know about the folks with gripes.
Can you think of a way to have quality without doing peer review? Doesn't every significant Open Source software project have it these days?
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Command systems only do good if the commanding authority is good. If the command authority is compromised, the entire system is compromised.
A better, more flexible system is the wisdom of the crowds and the marketplace of ideas, which naturally tempers extremist viewpoints. See: Federalist #10.
I cannot believe I am having to make this point in a thread about Wikipedia.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
some are more equal than others.
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
I never write anything down anymore... I just lose the paper on my desk anyway. When I find out something I want to remember, I write it on the web somewhere anywhere and let google index it for me.
Note to self: portablexdr is the name of the lgpl xdr library I want to use.
I can't imagine how this is practical, and I'm astonished that the notion of trusting everything to the "cloud" has gone this far. But if you do trust the Web to hold your todo list and random thoughts, why not use a CMS like a blog or wiki or a service like PasteBay or Google Docs?
Maybe it seems quaint and old-fashioned, but I prefer a text file or note in my phone or post-it note. Do you never go anywhere without the Internet? Does your network never go down?
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
This requirement first appeared in politically controversial articles. Then it spread to most articles on serious subjects. Now it's applied even to fancruft. ("What do you mean I can't write about 'Zords in Power Rangers: Jungle Fury' because they weren't mentioned in a Journal of Popular Culture article?") The detailed fancruft is gradually moving to Wikia, which has lower standards.
I believe this is a conscious commercial strategy designed to drive more and more content to Wikia, which is a for-profit company founded by Jimmy Wales--who also happens to be the leader of the "inner circle" at Wikipedia.
I've written about it before
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Wikipedia should be whatever I want it to be today! So what if everything2 is what I want, Wikipedia should be too! (sorry, but like you I agree that people often make the mistake of assuming that something has a different purpose than it does, and thus effectively complaining that it's not what they expected)
And in other news, our glorious leader has raised the chocolate ration to 25 grams, from the already generous 30 grams of last month.
Did I miss a slashdot article? Steve Jobs owns Wikipedia now?
If someone defaces it or uses it as a means to alter someone's reputation (for good or ill), it will lose credibility.
Can we please let this argument die? It has no factual support. There have in fact been a number of very high-profile instances of defacing or altering entries and they have had no measurable effect on the growth of the content or the traffic. It's a meme that continues to live on solely by repetition.
Wikipedia is never going to be Encyclopedia Britannica. It's never going to be thought of that way. That's ok because in many ways it is much better than Britannica, despite the greater potential for abuse. Where was Britannica's entry on the London Underground bombs one hour after they happened, for instance. (But this new system could easily take that value away!)
So can we please let Wikipedia be Wikipedia and stop comparing it to printed encyclopedias? Give people some credit--they know it's not Britannica.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Victim of its own success hey.
Just another group of people who want to limit what other people say.
Of course, if you are an American WASP... you can look and look and look at the wikipedia all day and not see the problem with NPOV. :-))
Obviously you've never seen Conservapedia. ;)
Or, you could realize that any community edited system is going to have problems with political subjects.
Wikipedia seems good for facts, less so for political/geopolitical type stuff.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
There will be many arguments here each way and the other. There are good arguments both for and against this policy. For the argument that whichever way the winds might blow, wikipedia is crap, I offer only this bio of a living person known to most of us whose contribution may not be disputed, yet nonetheless is misrepresented in his article: Rob Enderle.
I dare you to fix it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Depends on your view of what an encyclopedia is.
If your view is that an Encyclopedia is compendium of all human knowledge... then Wikipedia is a dead failure.
If your view is that an Encyclopedia is a summary of somehow blessed, purified and sanctified knowledge... Yup. It works sorta for a remarkable and, umm, curious set of values for "blessed", "purified", "sanctified" and "knowledge".
There was an exciting and all too brief a period in the history of the Wikipedia when it wasn't spammed with ugly tags disputing the relevance, citation, neutrality, copyright, and importance.
There was that brief exciting time if somebody somewhere thought it important enough to write it, it was in.
And that was the joy of it. It was the compendium of things someone, somewhere, anybody, anywhere thought exciting and interesting and important.
Then they took all the fun out of it.
So this /. article is merely about the next step in the long established agenda of "remove the fun and interest"... hey, it's no news. They robbed it of it's soul years ago.
I have evil plans afoot to devise a competitor to Wikipedia that deletes nothing, sneers at the very existence of a Neutral Point of View, denies the possibility of Truth, but....
Wikipedia's designed intent is to accurately reflect the consensus culture's view of knowledge. Seems like it's doing that just fine. In cases where that culture itself is bitterly divided, and holders of various positions sling names at each other in the media, from governmental pulpits, and in published scientific journals, were you expecting Wikipedia to somehow magically rise above this and achieve perfect truth?
Agreed, but;
Especially in the English Wikipedia your statement is more than correct. That is, as the English language is de facto lingua franca of the global community, the "culture" you are referring to is divided. Divided by hundreds of lines, carved in stone for ages. I guess people will always agree about their disagreements, in such an environment. Assuming that English is your native language, let me tell shortly about my native language wiki, which is the Turkish version. There is a cultural division in Turkish Wikipedia that is reflecting the socio-political division (some kind of conservative left and some kind of progressive right, if you are looking for logic in politics, look at somewhere else...) of Turkey. This division exist in original articles directly written in Turkish. Most items that I am interested in are (bad) translations from en.wikipedia.org. The logical step for people like me, is to move to English wiki, and start writing there, because it is what we are reading. I guess a similar drive can be found in other languages.
Thus, the fundamental issue can be expressed in one question: Will wikipedia reflect the cultural divide that exists in its reader/contributor base? If yes, it would be very difficult to achieve, and if no, the decision would result in the loss of some (probably very big) portions of "other" people. I guess this decision is made, the answer is "no", thus no cultural fragmentation would be accepted and the chosen cultural center is American Culture (most likely American WASP as mentioned above). This, probably is a good commercial and understandable political decision.
My own position was that of a small contributor for Turkey/Turkish related items. I stopped writing some years ago, because it became more than boring to see some information you provided after some real research to be replaced by some (badly written) incorrect data. And for some months I realized that the material I read became less interesting for me, including "Today's featured article". I can see that in the future I will stop reading wikipedia. In order to see what American general population thinks (more correctly, what they are made to think) there are better sources, like CNN, Yahoo etc.
As I mentioned, the decision (which I assume will not be limited to "living persons' articles only, in the future) is a good decision that will increase the quality, and a bad one that brings in some strong borders. If I was an optimist, I would say "If they keep it balanced..." but I do not think it is possible to keep it balanced...
Do you never go anywhere without the Internet?
As often as possible.
However the set of places that don't have my desk is even larger.
I hope they understood that a crowd sourced "source" does not reflect their Professors biases and hence shouldn't be used to extract approval from crusty old bastards.
I never thought i'd find a website more disturbing than 2 girls one cup. conservapedia makes me want to go wash my brain in bleach to get the filth off.
They first step is admitting that letting everyone edit everything is a HORRIBLE IDEA! And if you're about to disagree, you're thinking right now "well...99.9% of people" because guess what, there's always some moron or self serving person or vandal out there. This stupid hippie notion that everyone is awesome and we should all get together and hold hands and write articles for the common good is unrealistic and they're finally backing off from that so it might eventually become a remotely respectable source of information.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
The proposed change will make Wikipedia easier to edit and more inclusive.
Today when fuckwads start shitting all over an article repeatedly it's locked so that only established users can edit it. See a problem with an article but actually have enough of a life that you haven't met the criteria of 'established editor' (account for a week; plus a couple dozen edits)? Tough luck.
With this new system you'll be able to edit it just like the article was never locked as far as it will look to you and anyone who has logged into the site edit went through just fine... but the general public will continue to see an older version until an established user comes along and makes an edit of their own or clicks a button to flag yours. (The public can still see your edit by clicking a link to get to the latest version).
The same feature has been in use on the german language wikipedia for several years now. It *increased* text contributions there, presumably because it made the site more fun to edit when things were not being removed in the panic to eliminate vandalism as quickly as possible.
Wikipedia is like a sausage-- it's all good until you see how its made-- and this simply makes seeing the gory sausage making optional.
Uncyclopedia is definitely more factual than Conservapedia :)
- Chuq
When I see sites like that, I have to wonder if it's all just an elaborate parody. It scares me to think that some people actually think like that.
How about Wikipedia stick to the facts? There's truth, or there's falsehood.
Waterboarding is torture. That's the truth. I'm glad the current revision gets it right.
Sideways responding to some posts above, we're saying that "wild doesn't scale." "Everything grows up" - when it gets big, people game it, forcing technical rules, thus forcing rules-hate.
Take /. for example. I have to read at 0 to get whole conversations, and then I start running into the Bad-Downed good posts mixed with the Bad-Upped bad posts. So for your Pedia2 or such, you have some math algs, but you still have to deal with the Troll MetaGame. I think we're at Web 2.1 or Web2.2 by now, perhaps with only 25% of the troll problem solved.
It would be fun if you allowed "original research". Make the site motto "Don't Cite Us" - meaning rankings can start to show value but explicitly noting that with so much "original material" floating in it, it's anyone's guess if there are errors.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
We believe all editors are equal. Just some are more equal then others.
Indeed. I teach physics and regularly tell my students that this or that wikipedia article is pretty good and that they should go read it for more information / as a reference.
Wikipedia's designed intent is to accurately reflect the consensus culture's view of knowledge. Seems like it's doing that just fine. In cases where that culture itself is bitterly divided, and holders of various positions sling names at each other in the media, from governmental pulpits, and in published scientific journals, were you expecting Wikipedia to somehow magically rise above this and achieve perfect truth?
I guess the difference is between "The culture is bitterly divided" and "A small cult with an agenda is bitterly divided from everyone else". Like in this case, where they're trying desperately to claim that a technique to force information out of prisoners isn't torture when torture almost by definition is the only way of doing that. Very often here on slashdot I see the advice "Don't talk to the police. Get a lawyer." to which you'd get a comfy cell while waiting and they'd be sent to Gitmo for waterboarding. Add 2+2.
Perfect truth is a straw man because it's not about divining some absolute truth - even the courts only say beyond a reasonable doubt. The point is that wikipedia sometimes differ significantly from the popular opinion if you were to make a poll with representative selection. True consensus you might get on the weight of the hydrogen atom, on everything else there's small anti-groups like neonazis or scientologists or creationists or whatever that strongly oppose the common understanding of things.
What wikipedia ideally needs is a set of neutral arbitrators that act something like judges in the court system, according to wikipedia policy. What you in many cases got are people that have done "service" keeping wikipedia clean, and have now been granted power and is on a power trip to enforce their POV on the matters they care about. It's a huge incentive challenge because ideally you should only arbitrate things you don't care about, but who does things they don't care about for free in their spare time? Too few, certainly.
Because if you could bottle an algorithm for doing that, you'd get the Nobel Peace Prize. Or be assassinated, or both.
Only if you get the prize first, it's not awarded posthumously. Probably the most famous example is Gandhi which was allegedly supposed to get it in 1948 before he was assassinated. That he hadn't gotten it earlier is also a big disgrace, but that's another story.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Actually it is a formidable source of information. The trick is to research properly by investigating the citations. You can't cite Wikipedia but it can be an excellent place to begin research.
I've had wikipedia editors removed my articles using standard wiki excuses for deletion. I decided to see if the editors who deleted the articles where biased, so I checked on their pet articles and backgrounds. These editors would delete, even when I got votes to keep it in I requested to undelete. Anything that confronted their pet projects would be deleted. Also, they are members in clubs that conflict with the articles.
I've experienced the bigots on there, and if an editor has a vendetta, smaller articles will be deleted. The use this to promote their own views. Its not open when editors can use the rules to fight off any thing that conflicts with their personal beliefs.
Sucks, because articles can have pros/cons on subjects, but seems only new subjects can be added. You try to add a person who had their 15 minutes of fame from the 70's, and most editors where not even born yet. So of course its not a valid article, articles about south park are..
Wikipedia has censorship, bigot editors, and children running it. Its a sad state of affairs over there. But yet I keep trying to use it, even after dealing with these people.
I find if anything other than fact based articles are ok, if they concern people, ideas, or beliefs, its too liberal to be fair, and too feminist to be accurate.
Not saying I'm against that, but there are counter thoughts to modern feminism, and other issues. But only the popular view will be published on Wikipedia with these editors.
within *months*, the formerly freewheeling encyclopedia will begin requiring editor approval for all edits to articles about companies and corporations.
A: The "Yanks" are a baseball team, so I have no idea what you're referring to here.
B: I have no idea what a "Bushshite" is--English isn't your first language, is it?
C: I've seen my fair share of Eurotrash like yourself swamping articles yourself, so don't act all high and mighty like you above that. If anything, I'd say most vandalism is from Europeans.
-Fartnog Buttstinkle
WP:shite
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Can you already see the drama that will invariably come with edits to current events? Someone dies, something happens and thousands of people will start editing, since they can't see that the entry has already been made. Usually, today, when something happens, if you're 5 minutes late you will already see it being added. Then, well, depends on how quickly one of the Powers that Will Be (tm) will be there to review the entries.
I bet you a sizable can of ice cream that there will be THOUSANDS by the time any reviewer wakes up and starts sifting through the edits. What will he pick? Hell, will he even read all of them? Unlikely.
What will he do instead? Probably do what every sane person would do, take the easy way out: He'll read a handful of changes made by "important" people (read: editors known to be at least all right) and then, depending on whether he's trying to do a good job or trying to suck up to someone, pick the best or the one from the most important person.
What does this lead to? Essentially, it will lead to you only having a chance to make a change (or rather, a change that will see the light of day) in respect to current events if you're already in the "in-crowd". Thus making it even harder for those not in this circle to gain "rank" in the normal, contributing way, forcing even more people into gaming the system mode, unless they just want to say "screw it" after being reverted for no good reason for the n-th time.
And then watch the drama fly. "But my article was much better, his only got picked because he is $important_figurehead". I'll get the popcorn, someone please bring the soda. We can watch it in widescreen in my apartment if you want.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Indeed, the time is ripe for Gitipedia. Put the whole thing (well, maybe not the images) into a downloadable repository, you fork it to your local machine and make changes, then send a push request. In the meantime anyone can browse your version just as easily as wikipedia.org, so if you want to maintain a Wikipedia fork which contains all those deleted articles on webcomics and Buffy characters, you can straightforwardly do so. (Wikipedia is several gigabytes large but this is not beyond the downloading reach of people at universities and other places with fast connections.)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Yes, yes it is - towards a day when the inner circle no longer has to use secret mailing lists, sock puppets, WP:CONFUSING, and the ol' boy network... They'll be the Law. And there will be no appeal.
Quoted is just one of many "END OF THE WORLD OMG I'M SO BETRAYEDED!" posts. The sound of a thousand 13-year olds biatching from their mother's basements as if the world owed 'em something. And they are all just pathetic and uninformed.
See, the license for Wikipedia is OPEN. You can download it, and fork your own damned wiki, complete with 3 MILLION quality articles to start with. And the cost to you for all this awesome shiat is nothing, nada, zip, zilch, zero, diddlysquat.
But hey, let's just ignore the facts, and whine and bellyache about the fact that the FREE (in just about every way) encyclopedia is being maintained (again, at no charge) by terms you don't like.
Geez, whiners! Don't like how it's being done? Grow a brass pair, and do it yourself! (or STFU)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Uhhh...forcing someone to undergo a simulated drowning should NOT be divided on whether or not that would be considered torture. Anyone not drinking the koolaid or with an agenda would be hard pressed to have any kind of rational argument about that particular fact.
Now one could argue about whether or not torture is ever justified (I say it is not and erodes our position and makes us no better than the enemy) but having a page on waterboarding changed and locked saying that it isn't torture is like having one of the moon landing is a hoax guys linking all articles on lunar exploration to Capricorn One. here is a nice article on wikitruth about NPOV, and how politics play a very heavy handed role on Wikipedia.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I think this is a bit like driving... It would be nice if the road systems allowed equal rights to everyone, but in practice it's better if you limit road usage to people who've passed a driving test. I don't really see a problem with this and I've often gone into an article and found that some illiterate teenager has attempted to insert some recent news into an article, even though their spelling and grammar is so bad you can barely tell what that paragraph says.
This has worked well on the German Wikipedia. You can edit an article as easily as before, but the edit will not appear directly on the main article page. Instead, a new "draft" "tab" appears between the "article" and "discussion" tabs. Anyone can click on the "draft" tab and see the current non-approved version. And anyone that is logged in, sees the "draft" by default. Once an editor has approved of the change, it will appear in the article page as well.
The natural order of progression for any project like this is to tend towards conservatism.
See, in any big project, when you start out, you got nothing. So *anything* that is kinda sorta there is a vast improvement. And for a while, the changes come fast, heavy, and hard, as bugs are found, and details are filled in. You see a rapid growth, towards ideal.
But as you get closer to idea, the harder it gets to make it better. The Linux kernel was, at first, deeply concerned by simple things like stability, ability to reboot after an unexpected power outage, and getting permissions right, blah blah blah. But after 10 years of heavy development, things become so stable and mature that something that most people would never notice become a big deal - like the scheduler. (You think I personally pay ANY ATTENTION AT ALL to the scheduler used in the kernel that comes precompiled from my distro?)
So as the project matures, as the value of the intellectual property (source code, engineering drafts, whatever) rises, more and more attention is directed towards preserving past efforts and less effort is spent on improving it, simply because the potential value of improvement is decreased.
Wikipedia is following this course. It starts out a brash project, where the first question was simply: would people volunteer their time and knowledge to improve the encyclopedia without pay? Now, the idea is proven so successful there is a buzzword to describe it: crowd-sourcing.
Yes, values are changing. And they should. It's a reflection of the maturing state of Wikipedia!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Well... Why wouldn't Wikipedia adopt slashdot-like moderation system? Could do good if implemented properly.
Doesn't the same apply to the so called trusted editors?
A "bureaucratic" layer is actually necessary, and it's already there
How about patently false entry?
The country I live in is a former British colony, and the official entry on Wikipedia regarding that country is firmly controlled by the government, and the history portion of the entry blames British for everything, something that is patently false
I have tried to correct those mistakes but everytime within 15 minutes the old entry are back, and finally I was warned by someone (supposed to be volunteer for Wikipedia) to STOP meddling with that particular entry
My experience is only for that entry, and God knows how many of such types of patently false information that are purposely displayed in Wikipedia
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
A: The "Yanks" are a baseball team
Wow! And here the rest of the world is thinking Yanks are by far the largest bunch of arms dealers and thugs on the planet... and they're really just a cuddly baseball team.
The rest of the world learns something new every day.
B: English isn't your first language.
English possibly is his first language, but I doubt if American is.
C: vandalism is from Europeans.
Yup. They invented it. East German tribe I believe.
Oh yes, and Trolls originated in Norway.
While reading over some the replies, one solution would be to copy the entire wikipedia and host it on a site with un-restrictive policies, have a fixed total of maybe ten administrators for the entire site (rather than the 1700 of Wikipedia) and let all vandalism be corrected by regular editors. All copyright-infringing material would remain online until a complaint is submitted.
o Who is a "trusted" editor?
o What is the qualification process for earning "trust"?
Hmm, that's easy. As all they want to do is to check for slanderous or praising-without-merrit articles, anyone who is unrelated to the author should do. I think that slashdots moderating system is a good example how wikipedia could work without needing to create a two-class-society. Just hold all changed articles until two or more randomly selected people have voted it ok. The catch of course is how to select those people, you need a constant and large followership, which is somewhat contrary to how wikipedia works.
Of course, we all know wikipedia sucks. The real thing is Uncyclopedia.
Now that Wikipedia editors themselves are approving and editing content about people, I wonder if they can be held responsible for information alleged to be defamatory. Before they could claim "anybody can edit this". Now they have to say "we approved and published this text".
The article claims that changes will "sit invisibly on Wikipedia's servers". This is patent nonsense, because it would disallow working on the article for "non blessed people" at all if they can't see the current working version. Maybe i've missed some recent development, but i don't think so. German wikipedia has flagged revisions for quite some time already and it just means that by default the latest approved version is displayed, but the latest working version can be shown and edited by simply clicking on "Entwurf" (draft). The author of the article should have noted himself that his claim does not make sense.
The online user-generated social networking site Wikipedia and the venerable Encyclopædia Britannica are both considering radical changes in how they are run.
Wikipedia is proposing a software change that would see revisions on some articles being approved before they went live on the site. "Our featured articles on subjects such as 4chan cannot be sullied with false reports and vandalism BUSH IS GAY LOLOLOLOL," said Jimmy Wales.
The change has proven controversial. "It's a slippery slope," said administrator WikiFiddler451 (real name WikiViolin451). "I don't see how we can reasonably keep the Pokemon and Naruto entries sufficiently up-to-date and welcoming of new contributors. I understand the queue for edits to go live could be up to an hour. The occasional accusation of paedophilia against minor public figures in the page thatâ(TM)s top Google hit on their name is a small price to pay for the most up-to-date neutrality."
Meanwhile, the Encyclopaedia Britannica has considered adopting "wiki"-like methods (from the Hawaiian word "wikiwiki," meaning "your proposed edit is stalled on a six-month discussion by obsessive nerds who failed a Turing test and speak entirely in WP:INITIALISMS"), particularly when it comes to their publicity. Under the plan, readers and contributing experts from Encyclopedia Dramatica will help expand and maintain press releases about those deemed "suppressive" by the editorial board, comparing them to public toilets and assorted unflattering Internet memes, and darkly insinuating that Google only pushes Wikipedia because theyâ(TM)re in it for the money.
Illustration: The hammer of Wiki crushes j00!
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I like the flagged revisions expansion and use it myself on parts of a fairly large wiki I run.
However, on Wikipedia, it does carry the danger that it will only make the inbreeding worse. Wikipedia's biggest problem right now is the fact that a fairly small, incesteous group of editors carries too much control and drives people away in droves who have a different vision. The permanent deletionism debate is only the most visible tip of the iceberg.
With flagged revisions, that effect will multiply.
So while it's a great tool, and has a big chance of greatly improving the quality of a wiki, it'll be interesting to watch what its effect will be.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
There was an exciting and all too brief a period in the history of the Wikipedia when it wasn't spammed with ugly tags disputing the relevance, citation, neutrality, copyright, and importance.
Yes, but then people started actually reading it.
And how about Keith Henson. His article makes him look like a total hero, but...
Two of his daughters publicly claim they were raped by Mr. Henson. One of them changed her name from Henson to Aurora. (Remember her? Valerie Aurora, the Linux file system developer and ex-ZFS designer.) In December 2007, the child molesting accusations were published on-line by her in a quite extensive article that includes links to other (reliable) sources. Guess why his wife Carolyn Meinel left him...
Is all this even mentioned briefly on his page, under a "Controversies" heading? No.
Even the discussion page is locked!
What wikipedia ideally needs is a set of neutral arbitrators that act something like judges in the court system, according to wikipedia policy.
You mean like the Arbitration Committee?
The country I live in is a former British colony, and the official entry on Wikipedia regarding that country is firmly controlled by the government, and the history portion of the entry blames British for everything, something that is patently false
So come on, what's the article?
If what you say is true, editors who read this will go and see if they can fix the problem. If necessary, raising the issue to get more editors looking at it. Whilst sometimes an annoying person can revert edits, there is no way to control an article, and anyone who keeps reverting will find themselves getting banned.
And if a Government is really doing this kind of stuff, that's something serious that will be dealt with.
So why not tell us what the article is, instead of us taking your word for it? (I just don't get it - people will often claim on Slashdot that an article is false, yet they never tell us the entry, and expect us to believe unreferenced claims made on a webforum...)
It's better than letting thousands of anonymous cowards destroy Wikipedia.
Fine with me to make WP articles 'moderated' if it becomes easier to become an editor. Basically everybody can become an editor provided this person can be verified (someone checks that it is a real person), and morons abusing this to mess with entries for political reasons or whatever should be permanently banned from editing Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a fantastic idea that would work flawlessly if it wasn't for the chaosphiliacs and the political idiots that seek to destroy what they don't like (or everything). But the world appears to be full of dumb people that think that accusing random people of being gay, dead or simply 'a wanker' on Wikipedia would make their life better or whatever. These people should be denied access to the internet in general and from access to anything of value in particular.
How is an echo chamber an improvement over Wikipedia? Have you watched Fox News or read DailyKos lately? Back-patting has no place in an encyclopedia.
Maybe, but it isn't as entertaining.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Seriously.
Yes, I understand that this is a privately owned website, but check this out. In order to ensure your articles get posted, you need to be a "trusted" editor. Now if you are new and want to write up your own article, it will get turned down extremely fast.
I know from experience, as I did research for my masters degree on the evolution of the internet and possible theories based on facts and the information I had is no more correct than an article about an actor or somebody's life.
If you want to really mess with the editors, just go in and delete absolutely everything that does not have a source cited. It is all fair, right? You want reliable information in the wikipedia, well that means if your source is not cited, there is no proof that the information you give is valid, and hence entire articles could easily be taken down. When I posted my information, since I was my own source, the article was up for less than 5 minutes before one of their "trusted" editors took it down.
All wikipedia is, is a huge message board. You post information up, and if you have not been a member of the message board for very long or have not posted much since you signed up, you will be flagged "a noob" and get rejected for everything.
You can seriously find entire articles without a single source cited and they are somehow more viable and more of a true piece of information than a person citing themself as a source. They both are really the same thing. what separates them is that the senior message board dudes reject the noobs, just like any other message board.
I might as well have posted my thesis in the gamefaq message boards, as I would have gotten the same response that I did from posting it in wikipedia (well, I know even the senior message board members would not have stripped it down).
I think it is completely retarded that you have to be known in order to post viable information. Why in the hell do I need to go and edit the word theater for UK/American standards 50 times over just so that I can post information. That is the dumbest thing I have ever seen.
In order to be trusted, you should make good edits, not fix gramatical errors. You should find articles with no source cited, and take down the entire article.
Seriously, I am highly thinking of getting an account, fixing 2000 gramatical errors to be "trusted", and then start taking down each and every article that does not have a source cited. Why? Well, I will be trusted. That means that wikipedia trusts me with edits. Hey, I editted 2000 times, that means that I must be trustworthy regardless of the edit according to many /.'ers and wikipedia. Then, since other articles do not cite sources, any information could easily be discreditted as opinion, as it should.
No source cited means information is invalid according to wikipedia, unless you are a trusted edittor, than it does not matter.
So why not, I am going to do it. Everybody else should as well. Seriously, go in and make 2000 gramatical fixes to be trusted (or however many gramatical fixes it takes), and then just take down every single piece of information that has no source cited.
What? That makes some of you mad. Too bad. Hey, it is a private server, and if the people who are trusted think it is a good idea to take everything down that does not have a source cited, it is their choice, because they are trusted.
Yeah, we could seriously do that. Now do you see how stupid the trusted person thing is?
A pretty good scam, isn't it?
Oh, it's a scam now is it, not a dictatorship?
Yes, I bet would-be scammers the world over are kicking themselves for not thinking of this one first:
1. Spend time and money putting up servers to allow people contribute to and access an encyclopedia, all for free.
2. Have everything released under free licences, so the contributors, and anyone else, can use the material for free.
3. ???
4. Profit!
For years, Slashdotters have pondered over the mystery of the ???, but it can now be revealed. It's: make subtle change to the way that edits are made on currently locked articles.
Brilliant! I bet all the other creators of Top 10 websites are now kicking themselves that they should have followed Wales's scam model and done it all for free, instead of making billions off of their sites like they did.
Wales has basically conned people into providing him with a fantastic quantity of content under the banner of free editing and free use, then he has moved to monetize it and lock it down.
Your evidence for this outlandish claim?
Contributions are clearly licenced under the GFDL (and now under CC too) - if you didn't like that, you shouldn't have contributed. Yes, that means Wikipedia can present the information you contributed (what, are you going to complain that Slashdot is allowed to publish the comments you post on this website?) But it also means that you still own your contributions, and you can still do what you like with it - as well as taking a copy of Wikipedia as a whole, if you like.
I'm not sure what you mean by monetising it - even if that were true, commercial use is explicitly allowed under free licences such as the GFDL. Whether it's Wales, you, or anyone else.
Locking it down? How does one lock down material available under the GFDL, exactly? And what articles can no longer be viewed?
Btw, it's already the case that articles have to be protected. This is therefore a step backwards towards more openness again, as it allows new editors to make editors to those articles again, albeit with this approval system. If you wanted to complain, you should've done it when they introduced article protection.
No need to worry - it'll be anyone who's simply had an account for a certain amount of time.
TFA doesn't mention this, but I found a better source at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8220220.stm , which says:
This would mean any changes made by a new or unknown user would have to be approved by one of the site's editors before the changes were published.
That's all. And "editor", in Wikipedia speak, is "anyone who edits". It's not an admin, not some second class of "trusted editors". All it filters out is those who haven't signed up for an account, and people who only recently did so.
I officially stop taking Wikipedia serious.
"Anyone can edit" was a delusional tree-hugging dream, that had nothing to do with reality.
It could by definition not work. And now we are getting the results of that. In the worst possible manner: Censorship.
But I have to explain that, to be taken serious: :)
First I assume that we accept, that everything in this universe is relative. Our position, our whole state, even time itself.
Ok, but then look at our senses: They are far from lossless/perfect. Everything that goes trough them is heavily modified. And different for every sense and person too.
And then there is the brain: A system that by definition processes all information trough a network that is completely defined by past information. Which of course always is relative too.
The result is what we call "bias", but what really is a check to see if it's compatible with our own view on the world.
So if everything is relative, then of course things can be very different for different people. And they can be both right... from their relative point of view.
Sure you can walk the walk, go down to the most basic rules of physics, and then define from that, what is "absolute". But first this might still be relative (like time/position), and second because of the processing power and knowledge of state that you need, in practice, it is impossible most of the time.
So we help ourselves with paradigms/axioms. Which definitely will not be the same for all humanity. Or even a nation. And we can't forbid others, because we got no proof that either of them is better. (But don't dare comparing this to the "intelligent design" loonies' non-arguments! It can't be used to support that crap, and if you think so, you misunderstood me.)
Unfortunately, Wikipedia is made for the "one absolute truth" paradigm. Which means you get useless fights. Where the stronger person wins. (Usually the one in his underpants, having nothing else to do all day long. Or the admins, which often are such persons. ;)
But in reality, and to work, Wikipedia should look like this:
1. Offer co-existing versions of articles, sections, groups, etc.
2. Also offer forking and merging. Even partial "overlay-style" forking, where you just define the difference like a generic patch. (Maybe a bit like git? ^^)
3. Then allow people to configure their Wikipedia like you would configure the style of a site in CSS. By allowing to choose the default, then add overlay groups of articles to it, layering all, to one final view.
4. Now go full circle, by allowing other people to use the views/groups of point 3 in their own view configuration.
An example:
Say a user comes there the first time. He then gets shown the "Wikipedia Admins default" view. But he clicks or "change/configure", and gets presented with a fitting UI.
There he chooses to prefer the "Daily Show Fans" view as an overlay for all political things, the "Local underground blogger" view (which only changes articles for local things), and maybe some more.
And finally, he got this trustworthy friend who also created an overlay (which itself uses other overlays), which he adds on top of it.
He clicks "save", and now he got his personal Wikipedia.
If you still don't believe that things really are relative, then I give you the example of Germany, which de facto does not have a constitution, but a temporary basic law, which is a leftover from the time after the second world war. It is law, that if there will be a constitution, people personally have to vote for it. But now, politicians went,and without asking anyone, changed this basic law more and more so that it now, according to them, *is* the constitution. Which of course is a like and high treason, one of the worst crimes possible.
But on Wikipedia, this propaganda is now burned in. You can't change it, and even *discussions* are 100% censored and simply removed.
Now I understand, that those who support it, can't otherwise but to strongly
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
You lost an edit war on wikipedia, therefore you dismiss the entire population of the united states as brainwashed. Clearly, you are not an extremely biased individual.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Very often here on slashdot I see the advice "Don't talk to the police. Get a lawyer." to which you'd get a comfy cell while waiting and they'd be sent to Gitmo for waterboarding.
No, honestly, that is not the result of refusing to talk to the police and asking for a lawyer. You're just paranoid, with delusions of 1984.
If an entire article has been "flagged", then it could be treated as a released, stable version. It would be the default version a visitor would see (by default). Anybody would be able to view the most recent version of the article by clicking on an appropriate tab on the page. Viewing this version would be analogous to downloading the nightly build of a program, and it could come with a disclaimer on top of the page.
tl;dr: Color-code vetted/"flagged" articles/sections. Treat "flagged" articles as one would treat stable versions of programs. Treat articles that haven't been "flagged" yet as nightly builds of programs.
This would still use a two-tier system, but it would be much more fair to editors who haven't yet jumped through Wikipedia's hoops, and it wouldn't hide any edits from anybody.
Have you driven a fnord... lately?
You must wait a little bit before using this resource; please try again later.
And I can't believe you can't see what is going on here.
Where do you think the "compromised" in authority come from? For every 10 in the command system there are 10x that roaming the streets.
Not everyone can be an astronaut or astrophysicist when they grow up. This especially pertains to gathering knowledge, expressing it in a coherent manner, etc.
"and the marketplace of ideas"
Ideas aren't facts and may not be an expression of knowledge. You want Wikipedia to be a marketplace for ideas, then call it Wiki-opinion. Don't call it an encyclopedia and don't LIE about what truth is.
The cookie you need is a log in cookie:
Just log in and you will get the most recent versions by default. You can set a preference to see the flagged version like non-logged in users, if you like. Wikipedia doesn't, as a rule, set cookies on non-logged in users.
You also don't need greasemonkey if you're logged in... Wikipedia allows registered users to add their own javascript. Just go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:myname/monobook.js
forcing someone to undergo a simulated drowning should NOT be divided on whether or not that would be considered torture
Why? Do you not respect the opinion that some people have, mainly that torture is something physically damaging to an individual, and not simply mentally damaging? I'd say, for instance, that driving tacks through someone's thumbs is torture. When you start throwing "mental" torture into the equation, where do we stop? Is solitary confinement in our prisons considered torture?
These are some of the problems with "NPOV."
Oh, I don't know about that. Is it that hard to imagine that someone would define naturally torture in terms of physical pain, not psychological distress?
Of course, for someone to go that route, they'll have to say that "Chinese water torture" isn't torture, either. And that's such an accepted part of the meaning of torture that it seems unlikely.
But I still don't find it hard to believe that someone would think, "Torture is about physical pain", without "drinking the koolaid" or having an agenda.
This is the same feature German Wikipedia has used for a long time.
Everyone edits the most recent version. All registered users see the most recent version. The general public may instead see something less recent than the most recent if the most recent changes have been made by new/unestablished users, but they can always see the most recent (and a diff to the most recent) by following a link or by creating an account. The next edit by an established user will make the general public see the most recent. Established users can also hit a button to approve newer edits without editing themselves, it's easier than reverting. All edits are visible in the history.
In short: Everything you said is wrong.
"altering Wikipedia's implicit notion that everyone has an equal right to edit entries"
Oh, please. Is the purpose of Wikipedia to provide an outlet for its contributors, or is it to produce a high-quality free encyclopedia?
... the compendium of things someone, somewhere, anybody, anywhere thought exciting and interesting and important. ...
That's the Internet in a nutshell.
With that said, the idea of a bias-based article ranking system seems interesting, and I would certainly enjoy hearing more about your vector mathematics jiggery pokery. I suspect at least one of us will find it exciting and important (myself).
A few weeks back there was an article on how the growth of Wikipedia had levelled off. The average rate of new/expanded/revised articles was tapering off in most subject areas. And that was with an "open" Wikipedia. Now if contributors are going to have to go thru the hoops to get something "approved" by editors appointed thru an obscure process and who might niggle on subject, content, extent or style, that sounds like a good recipe for stagnation.
AH, the Great Depression of 2009 has finally hit the 'pedia...
BTW, I am an extremely biased individual, I am not denying it. In fact there is nothing to be denied when it comes to be biased, as everybody has some bias towards some side of this issue and towards other sides of that one.
Your equation "American general population"="entire population of the united states", can be reduced to "general=entire", if we roughly assume "America"="the united states". This I believe, semantically is not very sound. YMMV. What I mean, if there is a need for an explanation, is this; The general public (of USA, of UK, of Turkey, of any modern country) can be manipulated easily via mass media (hence CNN, Yahoo etc.). Thus wisdom of crowds, if such a phenomenon really exists, is not neutral as assumed (as you assumed that I would claim to be un-biased). The results of this "popular culture", will be projected to wikipedia more strongly, because of new rules. However this naturally does not mean entire (which means all, with no exception, with no "other") population of USA is brain washed lemmings. There would be lots of "other"s. Good thing for USA is that non-conforming individuals can have a comparatively easier life there, easier than most other countries. Bad thing for wikipedia is that they will lose edges of averageness curve.
The sooner we have a distributed model for things like Wikipedia the better. This goes for sites like Digg and Reddit too. The challenge is not a simple one. There are major bandwidth and tracking issues, as well as whether I really want gigs of wikipedia articles I'll never read just in case a peer wants them.
But distributed models are the only way to prevent the central authority from magically deciding to make a bad decision.
> Yes, as opposed to the Republican and Democrat presidents and Congress who respect it oh so much.
... ;)
Ah, but why do they have to respect it so much? The last I checked, about 99% of the voters who count (i.e. the ones that vote) vote for either the Republicans or the Democrats.
So the people (who bothered to speak) have spoken and 99% of them have said "keep doing what you're doing". And if the Republicans/Democrats really have been trampling on the Constitution, the people clearly don't care enough, or they are sending the wrong message.
My point still stands, the People can tell the Government - "hey you haven't been respecting the Constitution, we're not going to vote for you this time round". If the People don't do that that's not the problem of not being libertarian enough.
In contrast the citizens can't really tell Corporations "you disrespected our precious Constitution so we're not going to vote for you this time". Since according to you it does NOT apply to them, thus logically if the Corporations end up having more and more power over greater and greater areas in the lives of citizens, it means the Constitution becomes less and less relevant.
And I'm going to laugh at anyone who says "But people could vote with their wallets". Given the way the voters have been voting with the ballot box (which only involves thinking a bit harder once every few years), guess how they are going to be voting with their wallets.
Say you had a US Government run/owned wikipedia/twitter[1]. If they censored stuff, you could go up to them and say "hey this is unconstitutional!". Can't do that for Wikipedia. If in practice that doesn't matter, then in practice the US Constitution doesn't matter.
[1] A Government run/owned Car Company on the other hand
"I bet you a sizable can of ice cream that there will be THOUSANDS by the time any reviewer wakes up and starts sifting through the edits. What will he pick? Hell, will he even read all of them? Unlikely."
Yea. Well, except they thought of that...
Everyone edits the most recent version. If you're logged in the most recent version is all you see unless you ask otherwise. If you're logged out and are looking at an older version and hit EDIT the site will show you the differences between the version you're looking at and the most recent then the edit box which displays the most recent. The general public is also always informed about the existence of a new revision and can view it whenever they wish so you don't even have to hit edit to see if the latest information has been added.
So, in short, your post is entirely and hopelessly off the mark.
You're still extrapolating way too much out of losing an edit war. That says *nothing* about the general population of any country. Such extrapolation is a sign of intellectual recklessness.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
that's what it will be good for now. nothing different then britannica. edited opinions the shitty few elite.
Read radical news here
I do not know where did you get the idea of an edit war. I keep my debates in forums and like them not so long. I do not debate in wikipedia. I have never/ever been in an edit war on wikipedia. I do not believe in discussing via wikipedia, because "anyone can edit"... So it is my guess (extrapolation if you like) that you are extrapolating something too much, but I frankly do not care what it is/was. My point is clear enough for anybody who is willing to try a little to see what I meant.
Thomas Paine in his book Common Sense said.
"Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher."
Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil;
Yeah yeah, I know Wikipedia isn't a govenment, but you get the idea.
http://p8ste.com - Web based Clipboard
What they probably need is a way to have peer consensus among the editors about the edit being requested. This way, one editor cannot have too much control over edits and yet, great amount of garbage edits will be prevented.
Seems like 200% to me.
To get some satisfation in your edit-war, go into the discussion of that article on the island nation and put all of your concerns there. You could even link to your post here.
Anyone who knows about Wikipedia knows the following: you can never talk about some modern conflicts without a very lot of scrutiny and reediting (a flame war) from many points of view on contriversial issues. Powerful ancestors of the modern rich can also be under some unknown scrutiny. Look to the article on Jay Gould and see how people try to white wash his role in history.
Also there are groups who go out of their way to phony up information that meets their agenda. There are others that seek to adhere to a specific ideology and always want to use the dialecticaly imperialistic language of their propaganda.
And so, in the Wikipedia, the 'article' is often just a propaganda piece. Thus discussion of the article will be a lot more authentic. So, put your information about the British in the discussion part of the article.
It amazes me when I read the Wikipedia how articles always have the 'is he of a particular ethnicity group, or is he not of that group' as if some ancestor reflects badly on the modern group. As if no one of that group could have ever, at times, done things that harmed others.
For some groups anti-group haters are a big problem. And so I understand the motivation behind the white washing of information concerning alledged ancestors of that group. But even articles about things from 2000 years ago are rewritten with the pro-group agenda in mind. Or things are taken in history as if all of group were good and all not of group, if not in support of group, were bad.
The real story in these cases is how driven people are to whitewash the lives of who they imagine are their ancestors. Or, in other cases, how people want to demonize whole groups, like the British. The idea that all of a group are virtuous is really a very juvinile point of view. But, there it is, in plain view. People expose their own narrow mindedness by doing the whitewashing. And anyone can do an edit, so a less ecumenical person, a juvinile mind, can white wash stories thinking they are helping the cause, when really it just angers those who have a different narritive on the same topic. And if people are driven or obsessed, thus starts a flame and edit war.
It is easy to demonize a group like the British given how ridiculously unrepentive they are concerning their colonialism. But it isn't fair to make them all villains.
Maybe you should go to the discussion of that article that you edit and talk about how people are always editing your entries to reflect what you feel is untrue?
In any case, I go to the discussion section when things seem too one-sided.
In the case of living people, really, it is better that entries are reviewed before being put on the front page.
You have to realize that there are folks out there who want to tongue tie the rest of us. They create a new vernacular that they then require everyone to use. These are usually left-leaning and very socialist with a tendency towards totalitarianism. They demand adherence to a vocabulary of their own creation. They do this because they want to illegitimize anyone who opposes their agenda. And they don't care about facts, but only their bubble of lies. They will fill up an article with their propaganda and then troll it to make sure that their 'facts' are not altered. They espouse left-leaning 'training methods'. Even in seemingly benign articles you see this. It is like you are reading through dictator era training material from and ex-dictatorship.
For an example read the article on 'sustainability'.
The real story is that these people exist and are active and highly funded to do these things.
Wikipedia is a problem in this respect. Anyone who reads it ought to read both the article and the discussion section. It is only in the discussion section that you get to see what the
You want to see why myself or anyone else that is...uhh I don't know...SANE, would not respect that argument? Here you go...What if I sat you down in your room, brought in your two kids, say age 3 and 5, and started playing Russian Roulette with them? After all, I'm not touching so much as a single hair on your head. Hell I may not even be in the same room with you! And of course if the gun don't go off there isn't so much as a fucking scratch on the kids either. But i don't VERY seriously that watching someone play Russian Roulette with your kids would NOT be considered torture by anyone other than the "Those muzzies are subhuman so fuck them" types, which I personally discount immediately, because you can replace the word muzzie with nigger or kike and it works just as well.
What to me is the most sad part is we have devolved to the point that we are even having this discussion at all. remember when we at least TRIED to be the good guys? I know, that was before the military industrial complex was born and made constant war a way of life, but once upon a time we didn't spend our days looking for someone to seriously fuck up. And the worst part is nowadays to many times we get our marching orders from some damned corporations whose profits get threatened. Just up at how much shit the CIA stirred up in South America on behalf of fucking banana companies.
Maybe it was inevitable. Power corrupts and greed always wins. I personally hope not and that one day we can actually elect leaders that will give more of a shit about this country and its people than stirring up shit so a defense contractor can make his profits for the quarter. With the legalized bribery that is so blatant today, who knows? But I like to think we can at least TRY not to be the assholes of the planet.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
A: The "Yanks" are a baseball team, so I have no idea what you're referring to here.
Wow you must be pretty fucking stupid if you don't even know about the usage of Yankee or Yank to refer to an American. It's been used that way for over 250 years.
So if my "bias" is that I believe the North did not win the American Civil War, I can rank southern propoganda higher than the "fact" of the Union prevailing? I find your definition of "knowledge" disturbingly lacking if fact holds as much veracity as a "choose-your-own-ending" book. The signal to noise ratio will be catastrophic, when every 3rd entry is some 14-year-old going "FAIL!"
I find if anything other than fact based articles are ok, if they concern people, ideas, or beliefs, its too liberal to be fair, and too feminist to be accurate.
This is getting a bit off-topic, but what do you mean when you call Wikipedia "too feminist"?
Property is theft.
Maybe the Wikipedia founders should put up a torrent or something of the whole Wikipedia database (if I remember correctly, something to this effect already exists) and someone can pick it up and host the new (old) Wikipedia with completely open policies (or at least the current ones). Sort of like forking. It'd be messy, but you never know...it just might work.
Time to move on to something better (and less biased) than Wikipedia. When someone can arbitrarily allow or block my edit, it's not really "the encyclopedia that everyone can edit".
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
If your view is that an Encyclopedia is compendium of all human knowledge... then Wikipedia is a dead failure.
No encyclopedia can be a compendium of all human knowledge, because not all human knowledge is readily available and the scope is ever expanding. The best it can be is a compendium of reliable and readily available knowledge.
If your view is that an Encyclopedia is a summary of somehow blessed, purified and sanctified knowledge... Yup. It works sorta for a remarkable and, umm, curious set of values for "blessed", "purified", "sanctified" and "knowledge".
If by "curious" you mean scholarly, then yes that sort of works.
There was an exciting and all too brief a period in the history of the Wikipedia when it wasn't spammed with ugly tags disputing the relevance, citation, neutrality, copyright, and importance.
Yes and what a sweaty turd that is to clean up. If you can't demonstrate the validity of the information, how do you separate the meaningful data from the biased rubbish, practical jokes, and just plain misinformed contributions?
And that was the joy of it. It was the compendium of things someone, somewhere, anybody, anywhere thought exciting and interesting and important.
See above. What do you do when it is too difficult to separate the signal from the noise on a communications channel?
Then they took all the fun out of it.
I disagree, but then I have different interests. It is true that the trend in wikipedia editing standards will not appeal to everybody. But I don't believe that should be the goal of an encyclopedia.
As I mentioned, the decision (which I assume will not be limited to "living persons' articles only, in the future) is a good decision that will increase the quality, and a bad one that brings in some strong borders. If I was an optimist, I would say "If they keep it balanced..." but I do not think it is possible to keep it balanced...
Are you thinking what I am thinking?
That people will be murdered just so a wikipedia article can be written about them?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
If your view is that an Encyclopedia is compendium of all human knowledge... then Wikipedia is a dead failure.
Uh, that's not an encyclopedia. It never was. Your inventing that definition doesn't make it valid.
So, once again... what's your criticism?
Do you not respect the opinion that some people have, mainly that torture is something physically damaging to an individual, and not simply mentally damaging?
That's an awfully strange definition. For example, if we were to follow your rule, we could stick electrodes in a person's brain to stimulate their pain sensors. Sure, it *feels* like they're on fire, but they're not, so it's not torture, right?
Please.
And, for the record, yes, I would contend that, in some cases, solitary confinement *is* torture. The movie "Murder in the First" depicts an excellent example.
Incidentally, the answer to your question "where do we stop" is simple: Would you be outraged if you found out a foreign nation was using the technique on your soldiers? Like, say, the way the Japanese waterboarded US soldiers, resulting in massive outcry and retaliation? Well, then odds are you really think it's torture, and are just trying to convince yourself it's not because, frankly, you're a pussy who's letting fear trump your sense of right and wrong.
If WP allowed original research it would become a haven for every idiot conspiracy theorist, birther, flat earther moron out there. It would also lower the quality of the information on wikipedia because it would mean that the information is not independantly verifiable.
Its not rocket surgery. Just because wikipedia removed your article on Sailor Moon power items does not mean the policies are wrong.
This is really just formalising what people have been saying for years, that those experienced Wikipedia veterans have the true control over the Wiki. Previously experienced users would re-revise or revert articles they did not personally agree with sources or balanced opinions meaning nothing since if you've been their longer your always right. Now they can efficiently reject changes before they are made (likely without an appeals system for rejection).
So itâ(TM)s now the encyclopaedia that anyone can edit*.
*as long as your personal views match those of the person approving your edits
Why is there no page for Pedobear on Wikipedia?
Can you stop moaning already? Flagged revisions are working on german and polish wikipedias for almost a year now... And know what? Quality improved; flagged revisions are not way to censor anonymous wikipedians, but to ensure that vandalising edits are not shows to ordinary readers. No more "Bush is wanker" edits shown to non-editors. And yes, still, anyone can edit. History of edits is saved and everyone can browse it. And if you are honest wikipedian then it's pretty easy to get editor's right. They are (almost) automatically granted.
If you want GARBAGE DATA you go to Wikipedia If you want actual FACTS you go to Encyclopedia Britannica.
It's your definition that goes against common sense. Applying electricity within certain paremeters is painful but not physically damaging so no torture. Or spinning a drill bit within millimiters of your eye - again not torture.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
You could start with defining the "-" operation. Usually as + (-something) with -something being the opposite of something. Then prove that the neutral element "0" exists such as for any member Fuckwad + (-Fuckwad) = 0. Don't forget to prove uniqueness of "0".
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
It will divide Wikipedia's contributors into two classes - experienced, trusted editors, and everyone else - altering Wikipedia's implicit notion that everyone has an equal right to edit entries
The right to edit an entry still holds for all users. They just cannot publish the edited article anymore.
I know this is a very long article to read, but it explains that letting everyone have the same powers is generally not beneficial to the group as a whole. It argues that there does need to be different classes of different powers:
"A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy"
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html