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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.
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.
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If you can't define 'Neutral', just look it up.
Duh.
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.
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.
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.
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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?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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.
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
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?
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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.