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Wikipedia Debates Strike Over SOPA
An anonymous reader writes "Jimbo Wales has suggested that English Wikipedia restrict its services for a period to protest against the anti-piracy SOPA bill in the United States. This follows a similar action by the Italian Wikipedia last month."
Reader fiannaFailMan points out another bit of Wikipedia news: they've taken the wraps off a prototype for a new visual editor. A sandbox is available to try out. The Wikimedia Foundation hopes easier, more intuitive editing will shore up waning contributor numbers.
Get Google to go offline for day and you might wake people up. I work in a shop with a lot of techies and it has never ceased to amaze me how many never used wikipedia nor care too. As in, they don't need it. So get someone who truly matters to people, get Google to do a day of it.
As for getting for edits, get rid of the sanctimonious editors who revert everything that doesn't fit their political leaning or doesn't fit in their universe where every song by glam bands is important and characters who appeared in some obscure anime get full page treatment.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I know this comes up every time regarding Wikipedia, but Wikipedia simply gotten more hostile towards new contributors with it's bureaucracy and "territorial editors" (seen way too many revert-happy editors who rather revert than fix minor errors), to the point that I simple start to wonder if Wikipedia is taking itself way too seriously. Making it simpler to edit is not the only answer (though might make it simpler for the few layman who can handle bureaucracy but not the markup).
That this coincides with Wikipedia's annual beg-a-thon for funds is entirely accidental, I'm sure.
Wikipedia after all seems to be have been a Google project to keep search results relevant by incentivizing college students to plagiarize their textbooks into an online encyclopedia with the standards of a blog.
It's a great place to find information about popular culture items. But for anything else, it has a chilling effect. It dominates search results to the degree that people treat it as an absolute source, probably while quoting "1984" about the dangers of absolute, centralized power.
If SOPA reminds us not to trust governments and its manipulations, we should probably ask ourselves: what really is the difference between a democratic government and a democratic group blog like Wikipedia? If they have the same weakness, won't they fail in the same ways, but in different areas?
For example, SOPA takes down sites. Wikipedia however allows us to categorize people as criminals, hackers, anti-social, etc. and allows an "official" opinion to predominate as to the legitimacy of their points of view. How many valid viewpoints have been squelched by Wikipedians refusing to recognize them?
Put another way, if you can't trust a bunch of old guys in suits not to become corrupt, why can you trust a bunch of stoned basement dwellers to avoid corruption? It becomes important when you realize that Wikipedia has a greater cultural influence than even government does.
Futurist Traditionalism
I've never struggled with markup and the editor wasn't a problem. Lowering the barrier to entry just means there'll be more vandalised entries and badly formatted text.
But the real reason nobody contributes is because of the perceived hierarchy and complete lack of human input at times. If I upload a photo, I get 10 or 20 robots written by random people crawl all over it demanding copyright tags etc. and spamming my personal page with their demands.
Every time someone writes a bot that believes my previous tags to be inadequate, I get spammed again and I get my images forcibly removed. There's no human control over it, and the bots are basically allowed to run riot, so even if it was perfectly acceptable when it was first uploaded, and you commented on the exact origins / rights assignment in order to prevent future problems, the next bot that doesn't spot newly-introduced-tag-X on it will just spam you and delete it.
Every time you edit an article, someone who thinks they own the article will just stomp all over it, even if your changes are minor and cosmetic and doing things like removing broken links, changing incorrect spelling, etc. God forbid you add to an article that was all but void of content with some personal knowledge and don't back it up. Surely *something* without citations in an article that's already been created and allowed to remain and even linked to is better than a page that has zero information at all, the citations can come later when people flesh out the article.
And, just occasionally, you'll write an article that will be wiped out as "non-notable", even if it's about a TV program, or a book that's selling millions of copies, or a computer game from the 80's where all its peers are already have their own articles (and the publishing house was famous and their article still sits with a broken link because it mentions that game and there's no article for it).
The problem of Wikipedia is *not* the interface. You *want* people to actually have a deal of experience with editing before they start changing prominent articles. The problem with Wikipedia is that people are allowed to discourage other contributors FAR TOO EASILY, even if their "corrections" are rolled back later.
What's needed is the same kind of system as the Project Gutenberg proofreading site has. Everyone has a login. You have to proofread the text. As you are doing so, your changes are also double-proofread by someone else in another round (there's usually 3-4 rounds). As you gain experience and your edits are "confirmed" (or at least not changed) by other people, you rise through the ranks and it's HARD to get to the point where you have prominent control over the article in question. There are no bots. There are no humans with zero experience of the wiki changing your perfectly-spelled text to junk in the process. There are no vandals that go unpunished. And it works on the same mass scale.
Wikipedia was a brilliant idea and I put a lot of work into contributing. A year later, every careful change I had made was deleted or removed, and that information never found its way back on - those articles are just empty shells now and some were deleted for not having any content after some rogue editor's culling! I haven't contributed since. Show me that the system works and people's hard work is wiped out by a bot written by a schoolkid, and I'll come back. Until then, fancy text editors mean nothing.
never mind that the editor won't resolve the problem with dwindling contributors, because that's not the reason they're leaving.
most leave because editing war had escalated until wikipedia became a dictatorial bureaucracy, where support from internal groups overcome field expertise. that's why expert are upset, because they aren't willing nor ave the commitment to prostrate for the local page dictator benevolence.
and you're lucky to be on the en.* one, smaller wikis are even worse in that regard. Italy bureaucrats have come to be a restricted elite that works by favor and allegiance, not unlike our beloved mafia.
That's it? Only 24 hours? I doubt most people visit wikipedia more than once a week. I probably hit up an article on it a couple times a week. One day will only reach the attention of a handful of visitors. Make it a full week. The world will survive if they have to get their wikipedia article from the google cache for a few days.
Well, folks might notice that their newspaper is about 50% thinner than usual...
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Can you imagine if Google, Bing, and Yahoo shut down together even for a few hours? The internet would basically grind to a halt!
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
IANAL, but I think the fear is that if SOPA passes, Wikipedia itself could be shut down. Or worse, parts of it censored to limit information, say on methods to get around DRM, or maybe websites that search for torrents. Or whatever new and creative uses the government can come up with (recipes for creating drugs or explosives, for example, or maybe even basic chemistry information on the same grounds). This is worse because people won't notice that they're missing information; a site shutdown would be obvious. I don't know how much of that is actually possible under SOPA, but if it's allowed, it probably will be done at some point. Those in charge always push the boundaries of the law.
A quick voluntary protest now would probably get a lot more attention, especially in the main stream media, which would dearly love to ignore the entire SOPA bill, especially any criticism of it, until it becomes law.
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
Imagine if google shut down even for 1hr in protest against SOPA ... Maybe even 10minutes would have quite a crucifying effect!
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