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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."
(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.
It's not hypocrisy if the rules or "ideals" are open and clear. Their "ideal" is an honest attempt at a neutral point-of-view. If that offends you, then perhaps Wikipedia isn't the site for you.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yeah, "ideology" is why the page on electrolytes gets replaced with the words "what plants crave" every damn week.
Who gets to define neutral though? One man's fact is another man's propaganda.
The "locked" articles are guarded by ideologues whose views differ from the "mischief makers and ideologues" Wikipedia hates.
Such as the ideals of truth?
There is a list on the following page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pending_changes/Queue
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
One can only make an honest attempt. For most topics, it should be possible to find an impartial editor. There may be some fringe topics where an impartial POV is impossible, but those topics aren't terribly important in the grand scheme of things.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Neutral is identifying the men (or newspapers or whatever) who are stating the "facts", and stating that they are stating those facts, without stating that they're right. (The fight then becomes "whose opinions do we bother to list here, and whose are irrelevant?" and that's usually quite a bit less controversial. not controversy-free, but less controversial.)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
This is great! Everybody will now know that Obama was born to a prostitute in Kenya, and that Bush personally parachuted from the planes just before they crashed into the towers!
There's an alarmingly high number of World of Warcraft pages on that list. I think I've finally lost all faith in humanity.
Yeah, but they aren't "open and clear" they change depending on the editor and which page.
Not to mention that even simple edits like updates or the like get reverted randomly.
In the end Wikipedia manages to scare away potential editors rather than attract them.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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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I think this idea that there are two-sides to everything is actually a significant problem in politics, and especially in media. "Balanced" should not mean getting a frothing-at-the-mouth liberal shouting at a born-again-conservative... it should mean getting some people who can see multiple sides of an issue and trying to be honest about the relative merits of both sides.
Let's use your example of abortion. Setting someone who is "pro-choice" against someone who is "pro-life" does not really capture the issue very well - only the extreme edges. I'd wager that most people would lie somewhere in the middle... most people would probably not object to abortion when the fetus is deformed or the mother's life is at stake, or in the case of rape. On the other hand, most rational people seemed to find partial birth abortions pretty horrifying, and I don't seem to have much trouble finding people who dislike abortion as a form of birth control.
This muddy middle is rarely captured by polarized discussions.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Wikipedia's neutrality policy and its style isn't really just to have two sides on a matter write a paragraph of propaganda and hope it balances out. It's to write an article whose accuracy is impeccably true by discussing the opponents and proponents in the controversy in a factual way. ("Planned Parenthood says this. The Catholic Church says that. Criticisms of the Catholic Church's position include X, Y, and Z, from organization J, K, and Q; for more information see the sub-article on this particular controversy so we don't detain the main article any further.") No one ever doubted that the one is a supporter and the other a detractor.
To take a page from Indiana Jones, it's about facts, not truth. If it's truth you're after, go study philosophy.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
If you can't define 'Neutral', just look it up.
Duh.
Even leaving aside the obvious entries on religion, abortion, evolution, etc... We also have to deal with viral marketing firms who, for example, kept editing the entry for the faux-dokumentary "The Fourth Kind" trying to make it seem real.
There are simply more people willing to discredit Wikipedia, not just the small percentage of the population who indulge in trolling behaviour for shits and giggles.
The WikiProject model has a peer-review process. Just create a WikiProject for frequently-vandalized pages.
ironically, I just made a joke post to that effect, but now I realize it's the best course of action.
There are a -lot- of problem page editors on the weirdest articles. If you are an anonymous contributor, chances are that your edits will be reverted without someone even looking at them. Heck, even citations are reverted because they "look suspicious". I used to contribute some to Wikipedia whenever I saw an error, however, there has been too many times that my edits have been reverted without anyone looking at them or reading them. Even simple things like correcting spelling mistakes all too often get reverted.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Wikipedia strives to provide a reference for every fact:
The President ran in the cornfield naked - bullshit.
On July 1 2010 New York Times reported that the President ran in the cornfield naked - fact, easily checked.
Of course, there are gray areas, but to claim that the distinction between fact and fiction is too vague to achieve a decently neutral point of view in most cases is just pure sophistry.
I'll save you a click: For Neutral Point of View on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:NPOV.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
They don't have a neutral point-of-view. They are promulgating their point of view and squashing any dissenting opinions.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
And I'll save you another click. The text on that page has been changed fifteen times by six different people over the last twenty-four hours.
...which is the correct "neutral fact" regarding the recent Taliban act which took the life of a 7 year old boy for spying? They say they "punished" him, we say they "murdered" him. Who is correct?
For some topics, it's difficult to find an impartial-but-competent editor. Take politics: if the editor understands the topic, they will very likely have a personal position on it. If they don't understand it, they probably won't be able to figure out what's worth including, and how much coverage to give different points of view. (Articles that simply list every possible point of view -- like "Some people believe this; other people believe that..." -- are rather useless.) At some point, someone needs to make a judgement over which points of view are fringe and which are mainstream, if only to convey that to their readers, and that is a judgement that someone will always contest.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
Wikipedia's approach isn't even close to an "honest attempt", however. The methods by which their administrator clique treats outsiders are ridiculously jackbooted; organized groups have been able to get a few admins in place and then simply use them to run roughshod over anyone who comes in in good faith to try to repair the damage done by partisans taking over articles.
There was a kerfluffle a few years ago when an organized Arab group went nuts trying to remove the Hebrew translations of certain regional (common to both Israel, Syria, Lebanon, etc) dishes like Za'atar and Felafel. The end result was the bannings of anyone who tried to defend it, on behest of the organized crew. Just one example, but a common theme. When the various organized groups (the "Shi'a Guild", etc) who were organizing to POV various articles on wikipedia were told "not in public", they didn't vanish, they just moved to outside forums like soundvision.com and started organizing from there.
And who can forget the various scandals like the Durova's Hit-List Scandal?
Or the time they altered the rules so that an administrator can call someone a "sockpuppet" at any time, and NO amount of proof - not even a "checkuser", because they changed the rules so that "checkuser" can ONLY establish guilt, not innnocence - can ever clear their name?
The phrase "honest attempt" should not be used in conjunction with Wikipedia. The whole way the system's set up is just corrupt, top to bottom.
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.
Agreed that listing every possible point of view (including nut case ones) in detail is not very useful. However, listing main points of view and giving the primary arguments for each is quite useful.
Picking the first hot topic that came to mind led me to the Wikipedia article on gun politics in the USA. While this article has a lot of warnings (including neutrality) at the head of it, it seems like a fairly balanced coverage. Nuts on either side won't like it, but I think knowledgeable and open minded people, even those who lean strongly one way or the other, will find it tolerably neutral.
People who can do this exist for most topics or, at a minimum, a couple people who are open minded and knowledgeable but are on opposite 'sides' of the issue exist and could work together to make the judgment.
The problem is, most of these people have real jobs (often in academia or in think tanks) and probably unlikely to spend their time on Wikipedia when they could be publishing their insight and research either for creds or for money. They are also likely to be unwilling to spend the necessary time to defend their contributions from editing by people who know little about the topic or are unable to accept that any position but their own could be useful.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
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]
Wikipedia's neutrality policy and its style isn't really just to have two sides on a matter write a paragraph of propaganda and hope it balances out. It's to write an article whose accuracy is impeccably true by discussing the opponents and proponents in the controversy in a factual way.
If you want the two sides thing, go to Everything2, which is generally happy not to delete any article that isn't too rude and doesn't seem to be total bullshit. Some topics (titles, really) are locked and you can't add anything to them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Also, what makes a Wikipedia editor go neutral? Is it lust for gold? Power? Or were they just born with a heart full of neutrality?
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
I'm not convinced that you need someone who doesn't have a personal position on a topic. It's true that some people have a problem putting their bias aside to write an impartial article, but this is not true of everyone. The people most likely to abuse that situation by suppressing the opposing view, are the ones who fear the opposing view because when you get right down to it they aren't so secure in their own view.
I'm also not convinced that you need an expert on a topic to evaluate which perspectives are worthy of inclusion. An encyclopeida is a secondary source; you always have to know who's claiming this-or-that before you can include it. So all you need is someone who can rate the significance of the source. Do I have to be an expert on American politics to know that the official Republican and Democratic positions on an issue are more significant than a view that I can only find cited by Bob at the corner bar? Not really.
As a historian once told me, a statement of pure facts would render everything meaningless. It would reduce history to mere chronicle. It's all "what" and no "why." Nothing can have an effect, things just follow one another in a rote manner with no real connection of cause.
It is possible to state opinions as facts in this context, if you can cite them from an outside source. E.g. "So-and-so said this[#], while Other-party disputed it thusly[#]"
So you could remain neutral without deciding whose statements are credible, and you'd still get your "why".
The "hypocrites" are the ones who complain about the problems of a community-edited site while actively contributing to the problem so they can complain more. Of course a community site isn't going to work if a significant portion of its members are actively subverting it. Banning repeat offenders isn't such a bad idea.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
Everybody knows Wikipedia is often very helpful, but occasionally can't be trusted. The problem is, Wikipedia doesn't seem to give feedback about *when* vandalism, non-neutrality, and other problems are likely. Of course it can happen anywhere, but for some pages, vandalism is an epidemic.
How about if the Wikipedia engine automatically identified pages with very high rates of reverted page edits, "vandalism" and other similar terms appearing in the history, rapidly growing Talk:: sections, and other signs of trouble, and came right out and said in a top-of-page banner: this page is rapidly changing, and may be unreliable.
This can be done mechanically, without having possibly biased editors to flag or protect pages, or to approve or disapprove changes. As a reader, if I know that the page I'm reading has been modified 20 times in the past week, with edits affecting 50% of the total text, most of which were reverted, I can form my own conclusion about its current reliability.
Which they patently aren't. The whole idea of a wiki is that people contribute what they know, and others enhance it. It's how wikipedia grew from a few small articles to a wealth of information in many languages. Yet they now have bots going around and automatically deleting anything that the nothing-better-to-do, always-there gatekeeper-zealots decide is (currently) too short or isn't (yet) worded in a uniform way.
Frankly, at this point I'm hoping someone will come along with a better, more open semantic knowledge base, import the wikipedia content, and that we can all move on to a better future.
People have been blacklisted from using Twinkle after misusing it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AzaToth/morebits.js ("twinkleBlacklistedUsers" near end of page)
Talk to an OB sometime. People are all talk - when presented with an abnormal fetus, it's an odd few who will opt not to abort.
And I have absolutely no data, but a strong suspicion that a typical pro-lifer would have a really strong temptation to take that morning after pill offered by rape counselors.
I file it all under the human tendency to tell others what to do, while exempting oneself from said edict. Reality is one cold mo-fo.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.