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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?
"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.
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.
Thanks Netcraft!
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......
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.
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.
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.
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.
Try mentioning Bill Ayers on Obama's page...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"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
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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. ;)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Well... Why wouldn't Wikipedia adopt slashdot-like moderation system? Could do good if implemented properly.
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 !
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.
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
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...)
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.
"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?