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Wikipedia To Unlock Frequently Vandalized Pages
netbuzz writes "In an effort to encourage greater participation, Wikipedia, the self-described 'online encyclopedia that anyone can edit,' is turning to tighter editorial control as a substitute for simply 'locking' those entries that frequently attract mischief makers and ideologues. The new system, which will apply to a maximum of 2,000 most-vulnerable pages, is sure to create controversies of its own."
The "locked" articles are guarded by ideologues whose views differ from the "mischief makers and ideologues" Wikipedia hates.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
(I try to volunteer a bit of my time on Huggle, a .NET application that allows for Wikipedia users with rollback permission to quickly patrol, revert vandalism, warn, and report users)
Vandalism has been down a lot from what I've seen in the past, and more and more I get beaten to the punch reverting it.
The biggest problem I see with this "pending changes" is that there will be so many edits that intentional subtle trolling (deliberately inserting incorrect facts/statistics) is more likely to get through just by the nature of the fact that experienced editors will have to read thousands of edits.
However, it does make Wikipedia more accessible to a wider variety of users and should stop scaring away new contributors. Most anonymously made edits are actually not vandalism, so it's good to see Wikipedia trying to take an approach that allows these people to contribute to "bigger" (in the sense of # of visitors) articles.
This is supposed to open up participation by anonymous and new editors so that they can work on a small number of highly controversial articles. It might work, for those articles. But there is a broader problem that it won't address, which is that when a newbie edits *any* article on WP, they are extremely likely to get slapped in the face by having their edits immediately reverted without any explanation. I started working on WP articles in 2002, did a lot of editing until 2006, and finally gave up and munged the password to my account so I wouldn't be tempted to get heavily into it again. Somewhere between 2002 and 2006, the whole experience changed. These days, WP belongs to people who keep watch-lists of articles that they want to defend. The type of person who is successful at this game is totally obsessed with making sure that a particular paragraph in the article on shoe polish remains the way it is. Since I only edit anonymously now, I see the same experience as a newbie, and it ain't pretty. If you add a citation to a source, people will revert you because they assume the link is spam. If you clean up redundant text in an article, people revert you because they were in love with the sentence they wrote, and want it to stay in the article. Recently I added a couple of sentences to a WWII-era biographical article in which I referred to the Nazi party, and someone's bot reverted it because "Nazi" was a keyword that it was programmed to assume indicated vandalism.
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The Taleban put a 7 year old to death for spying. That's as neutral and baldly factual as it gets. Neither of your statements are correct, they are emotion-filled words meant to evoke a response and not state facts.
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See? Not hard. Perhaps it's not as good at galvanizing people into righteous outrage as the phrase "brutally murdered" but that's just the price you pay sometimes. It's an encyclopedia. I don't think Britannica would use language quite so loaded either, you know?
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What makes you think you have to choose one of those two? Or, to put it differently, what part of "neutral" don't you understand?
If I take your account at face value (not being familiar with the incident; would perhaps be nice of you to provide a link, but I know that's asking a lot around here), then here would be some neutral facts:
- The Taliban did (something), killing a 7-year-old boy
- The Taliban say the boy was spying and that they punished him
- Critics of the Taliban say that the punishment was unjust and constitutes an act of murder
Perhaps there are some other facts, such as evidence supporting or refuting each side's claims. Perhaps there aren't. But frankly, if that's your example of a "hard" problem for being neutral, then I'd have to conclude there's no problem and you just don't know what neutral sounds like.
So let's change it to
...'tis easier to blame than to improve.
I wouldn't agree with this - for the main reason that (AFAIK) anti-vandalism currently relies a lot on automated processes that check for common vandalism patterns. This change will bring the changes under the scrutiny of real people (for example, if they'll add a tool to show a diff between the public version and latest unapproved version, it'll be plain obvious someone changed some numbers, etc.). There's also that "anti-vandalism patrol" involves people reading random articles in which they have no personal interest - I imagine that the task of reviewing and publishing changes with the new feature would fall to editors with some interest in the article in question.
Easy. "Neutral" means "agrees with the opinions of liberal white, upper-middle-class college-educated geeks living in a large coastal city in the United States." [citation needed]
Yes, that would be more appropriate.
However, I found it ironically illustrative of the fact that when someone claims something is “as neutral and baldly factual as it gets”, even if they’re honestly trying to make it neutral there’s still a very good chance that it isn’t. PitaBred still fell into a logical fallacy with making what he thought was a purely factual statement.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Inserting "allegedly" is redundant in this context since the original does not imply guilt or innocence.
There is a difference between "X is a spy" and "X is allegedly a spy" but there is no difference between "X was convicted of spying" and "X was convicted of allegedly spying."
Nobody said convicted of. Being “convicted of” something means a court decided you were guilty, and as courts have been known to make mistakes it is possible (though usually not likely) that being convicted of something does not mean that you were guilty of it.
We are talking about someone being put to death for something. Why was he put to death? Because he was a spy. ... well, allegedly a spy. However the literal reading of the sentence, “The Taliban put a 7 year old to death for spying”, explicitly states that a 7-year-old was spying, and the Taliban executed him for it. If you put that sentence forth as a fact, the fact that he was only allegedly a spy disappears: you’ve stated it as a fact.
Saying he was convicted of spying is one thing. Saying he was executed for spying is another thing. If I say he was executed for spying, I am implicitly endorsing the conviction (the opposite would be if I said that he was falsely accused of spying and then executed). That is an opinion, not a fact. The fact is, he was executed for allegedly spying.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Oh ok I see where we differ.
It doesn't seem to me that a conviction establishes the ultimate truth of guilt or innocence, but rather states a point of view. Saying that the Taliban convicted someone of spying doesn't, in my mind, determine whether or not that person actually did such a thing. Just that they convicted him of it. In an ideal world a conviction would always match a true determination of guilt, but as we've seen in America it's perfectly possible to convict and execute an innocent man.
We're saying the same thing, but approaching it from opposite viewpoints, imho.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.