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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."
The control freaks have won, again.
Don't be stupid. This wouldn't have been necessary if jackasses didn't constantly toss unsubstantiated crap onto peoples' pages.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
What's to stop them from doing it again with another class of articles? Maybe they'll decide that articles about healthcare are controversial next, and then they'll unilaterally restrict those too. And who is "trusted"? I've been editing Wikipedia casually for 6 years (originally actively, then more and more casually as I've been progressively locked out of the community), but an edit count "only" in the hundreds will probably place me in the class of users who can no longer freely edit this class of pages. I already couldn't vote in their elections for the same reason. Now I won't be able to freely contribute either.
It doesn't say you can't edit. It just legitimatizes the secrete editing squads who serve their own purposes. All this means is that if you edit and it says something they do not like, no one else will ever see 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.
And in other news, our glorious leader has raised the chocolate ration to 25 grams, from the already generous 30 grams of last month.
Uhh, isn't this the way things always work when there's a user-generated-content scenario?
1) "Hey, our site is Web 2.0 - everyone can contribute!"
2) Massive amount of content mysteriously accumulates
3) Oh wait, we need to put 'security' measures in place to prevent bad people doing bad things to our c.. (sorry, your) content.
I want to see Wikipedia grow and flourish. Rules like this will only help, as long as there are enough "trusted" editors to handle putting the edits into place.
Yes, but that's one heck of a qualification.
o Who is a "trusted" editor?
o What is the qualification process for earning "trust"?
o And the Big Question(tm) - Will the qualification process work quickly enough to match the growth in new biographic articles?
If the last one turns out to be "no" there will be a fairly sharp drop off in new articles. This strikes me as quickly becoming one of those "seemed like a good idea at the time" moments.
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.
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....