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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."
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!
Wrong, only the media, public figures, and other entities that don't understand the internet, web 2.0, the FOSS movement, and the spirit of the internet have been criticizing wikipedia's credibility standards. The whole [citation needed] thing was a reaction to criticism by main-stream press and political figures who can't understand that facts are NOT handed down from 'on high' and that sometimes, the mob can be right if they leave the knowledge to the experts in the field that swoop down and make critical edits to a fleshed out piece, transforming an OK article into a good one.
This is a Bad Move because it has been forced onto wikipedia by external forces and it's own internal cadre of esteemed editors with too much free time such that they protect their article from edits.
If anything, the people here have been criticizing wikipedia for turning away from it's motto of "the free encyclopedia that anybody can edit" towards a more closed model, both from internal and external forces.
Mostly we lament the loss of What Could Have Been and complain when wikipedia bows to traditional media's conform-to-our-paid-for-views mentality.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Try mentioning Bill Ayers on Obama's page...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
The control freaks have won, again.
The control freaks have been in charge for years. Pages on straightforward subjects are fairly accurate, but if it is at all controversial, WikiNazis are camped out on it. It doesn't matter if your facts are stated clearly, documented, and presented in an unbiased manner. If they don't like them your changes are gone in an hour or two.
I've tried adding facts to their Passive Smoking page, to no avail. The very name of the page is loaded with bias. The correct term is Environmental Tobacco Smoke. The common term is Second Hand Smoke, and the page used to be called that. But they've deliberately used the most loaded term possible for the page, and it's packed with inaccurate and biased statements. I've added facts, complete with references, and they've never lasted more than two hours. Even tiny edits to make a statement more neutral were quickly removed.
If there's any controversy about a subject you can be sure Wikipedia will only highlight the POV of the resident WikiNazis. This has made the site useless for all but the most basic subjects for years. Now they're just making it even more impossible for facts they don't like to be displayed.
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 !