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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.
Indeed, and in fact, this is a step forward: currently the only method at the moment is to protect articles, locking anonymous and new editors out completely. With this system, they'll now be allowed to edit again.
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.
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.
What Wikipedia needs is a moderation system. This will ensure that only the best informed, most intelligent, and highest quality material makes it through. Just like Slashdot. Oh wait.
My SIG is a P226
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
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.
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....
What is the qualification process for earning "trust"?
Oh, that's easy. I know, I give away trade secrets here, but hey, you don't know what's my handle on Wikipedia, so I can enjoy the anonymity of the internet on this one.
1) Edit. Edit, edit, edit, edit. It's not what you edit, it's how often you do it. Being anal retentive and insistant in British spelling (or American, if it's spelled in BE) helps a lot here. Start with the pages of actors, you'll get heaps of "theater/theatre" edits for cheap.
2) Learn who is important and who is not. Having a good memory for names helps, but so does a good list. Do not skip this step, it can be devastating later when you...
3) Undo edits from nobodies. No matter if they were contributing or vandalizing, what matters is that your edit-counter moves up. Make certain, though, that you don't do it to anyone who might be important enough to stink up a storm. People don't like being reverted, well, that's no problem if they don't count, but reverting a change from someone you're trying to suck up to is kinda a career killer.
4) Suck up to someone important. The discussion pages are for that. Join every topic that could be remotely controversal and butt in. You learned in Step 2 who is important and who isn't. Use it.
Ok, cynicism aside. But it seems that a lot of people do just that. They see Wikipedia as some sort of game they want to "win". There are of course a few (often rather "old") contributors that earned their status with important, insightful and accurate information, but more and more people climb that "ladder" only by gaming the system. That these people then will have the power to dictate what becomes canon and what doesn't is a bit of a chill up my spine.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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 !