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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.
...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/
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.
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 heard that a few years ago, the page for George W Bush was vandalized on average every 30 seconds or so. It's definitely that people have proven themselves unequal when it comes to editing.
(I'm no fan of Bush, that isn't bias)
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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.
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.
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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.
For that matter, it can also prevent left-wing nutjobs from removing favorable aspects from the pages of their political opponents. In fact, it will slow down and possibly prevent the vandalism of pages by fruitcakes from all parts of the political spectrum.
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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!
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.
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.
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.
"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.
"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.
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?
About 4 or 5 years ago I was teaching a class and demonstrating Wikipedia was part of the class. There was a projector in the room and this was all on a large screen in front of everyone. I showed the Bush page and several others, then for some reason went back to the Bush page. In the 5 minutes we were looking at it someone had replaced the entire page with the word "WANKER". The students went into hysterics.
I have no doubts that every student in that class since understood why professors told them that they shouldn't cite Wikipedia as a source.
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.
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....
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 !
Correct. A clique of editors has taken power, and now is solidifying their power. This move is a critical step though is establishing their complete control; I would liken it to Lenin abolishing free elections in the Soviets after the Russian Revolution. Its the step that removes any doubt in peoples minds about where things are heading.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
The claim "it's just a website" is often trotted out, but it's untrue.
It's a website set up to function deliberately as a linkfarm, which has search engine rankings far above what it should have if it were treated like every other linkfarm out there. It's full of inaccurate, possibly libelous, or outright harmful (in the case of many articles regarding drugs/herbs/"homeopathic remedies") statements in most of the articles. As a "first stop" for "information" for many searchers, it has an amazing ability to influence thought processes, and as such is a breeding ground for fights and control-freak behavior from people trying to bias a topic their way.
The regulations have already gotten too arduous. Most of the good administrators jumped ship long ago. Some have turned around and exposed the ongoing problems. Most simply gave up in disgust. The result? A biased, horribly squished encyclopedia. Well-written entries, such as one on PSP homebrew software, were nuked to oblivion because of admins and cliques with an agenda against the topic. Articles that at one time were well balanced have been completely destroyed when counterbalancing interests saw only one side run off the encyclopedia, and the other side now rules the articles with an iron fist. Look back into what happened to the Falafel article when a bunch of organized arabs decided to try to eliminate any mention of Jewish influence (or of Jews or Israel in general) on the dish.
Wikipedia exists, but does not function anymore. And the only way to fix it involves getting rid of the entrenched assholes, whereas the proposed change gives entrenched assholes even more power.