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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.
Big Jimbo speaks and it isn't about something that isn't feeding his wallet AND IT'S SOMETHING REASONABLE!
I'll support this. This will provide so much more (negative) publicity to SOPA than anything any other group has done to date. GO JIMBO!
Shut wikipedia down for 24 hours (yes, that long, it should really hurt) with some placeholder site saying that this is to protest against SOPA!
Excellent! This would affect me heaps as I use wikipedia many times each day. Given it affects me, I know it would affect many others, and so hopefully it would raise the profile of what's happening.
Hopefully other companies which are against it, such as Google, can do something similar.
Either way, if they start doing stuff like this, that SOPA bill will get a lot more publicity about how bad it is, and it will be dead in the water.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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).
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.
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.
The difference is that Wikipedia is just one on many outlets of information, while SOPA tries to control the flow of information in itself.
If you feel that you cannot trust Wikipedia you can always chose another place to voice your opinion or obtain information from. If SOPA becomes reality then that might not even be an option.
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?
While it may not apply in this specific context, there is a substantive reason.
The old guys in suits you are referring to are US legislators, the RIAA, and the MPAA. There are two significant reasons why you can trust average stoned basement dwellers to be less corruptible (assuming they are average people):
1. There have been a number of instances of members of the suspect set of old guys in suits demonstrating that they are significantly more susceptible to corruption than average people. This provides a measure which can be used to estimate the probability of a randomly selected member of the set being corruptible.
2. The process of becoming a member of the legislature or a senior executive of the **AA includes an iterative filter which (perhaps unintentionally) preferentially selects for those who are willing and capable of playing dirty. This implies that from a set of individuals who begin the process of ascending, the individuals who reach the top of the systems in question will show a biased distribution -- they will have a higher probability of being corruptible than the overall set of people who began the selection process.
Pretty straightforward, I think. Average people are less prone to corruption than average legislators or average executives of the **AA -- both according to observed results and by analyzing the selection process.
Although, I guess, it could be the case that stoned basement dwellers are also a biased set with respect to corruptibility, so I could be wrong.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Sure do: here (notice who actually posted it, vs. who signed it). grub's "oh dear" self-response was pretty priceless.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton