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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.
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/
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.
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.
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Has Wikipedia's success killed it? We report, you decide......
This only works when the people who are in control don't have a bias on the subject.
Using your example, somehow a scientologist gets editor rank and start disallowing any edits against it.
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.
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
...or right-wing zealots from removing negative aspects of their favorite political candidate.
...or left-wing zealots from removing negative aspects of their favorite candidate.
...or centrist zealots from removing negative aspects of their favorite candidate.
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 more wrong way is to start a brand new article about your company. Not only will you have trouble with policy, but imagine if you succeed! Then you'll have a page that you have to constantly monitor against vandalism, and you could lose control of it to some disgruntled former employee who can dig up true unflattering information and keep it in place permanently. Besides, how many people would read the article anyway?"
That's terrible reasoning. Even if you don't start a new article some disgruntled former employee could. At least creating a decent article about your company makes it more likely for a random wikipedia user/admin to revert the page back to your original if there's some clear vandalism- this means less work for you. Whereas if the disgruntled person started the page first, you'd be at a disadvantage - there's nothing to revert to.
For example, a random person might easily revert a page that just says "Assholes" to your original. In contrast if someone creates a page about your company that just says "Assholes", a random person is far less likely to replace it with an entire page of content about your company.
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.
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.
"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
Why not. Competition is a good thing. Frankly I find it a bit scary that such an enormous amount of work by so many people is apparently at the mercy of so few. So a "trusted editor" or two with a political agenda can control the major source of information on a particular subject which is apparently referenced by journalists and academics (although of course it shouldn't be), probably comes up as the first result on google etc. If anything, this makes me less inclined to trust the information in wikipedia than when it was free for all and errors could be easily added and just as easily removed. I hope this is just an experiment rather than the first step to implementing this process on the whole thing but I doubt it.
Agree in whole.
To put it into perspective, though, this limitation pretty much defines the editorial constraints of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, which survived for years as a printed work before the advent of Wikipedia.
I would be slightly less worried (the difference in sheer scope between the two encyclopedias is a stunner) if the "trusted editors" weren't quite so agressive in their reversions. I find this aromatically equivalent to "untrustworthy".
Inability to handle the volume of submissions shouldn't be the reason for reversions.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
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.
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?
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
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.
Well... Why wouldn't Wikipedia adopt slashdot-like moderation system? Could do good if implemented properly.
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...)
Indeed. If those things don't work, people can:
* Raise the issue on the talk page to see if other editors are watching.
* Raise the issue on related talk pages, or a related WikiProject page.
* Raise the issue on general pages specifically for this issue - e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Third_opinion , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment
(Yes it takes effort. Who said writing an encyclopedia was easy?)
"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?