What part of the "discretion" bit did you miss? If GPL v10 (and man, if you think it'll be up to v10 in 2010, you're being wildly optimistics... it hasn't even made it to v3 in more than a decade and a half) really imposes such restrictions, everyone would just exercise their discretion and use GPL v2.
Your first problem is not really a problem. What you're complaining about are false negatives (good sections not being approved), but if one were to ramp up the "sensitivity" of the section rating system to be less stringent and more generous, then one would start seeing far more false positives, where it tries to assess as positive stuff which should not have been so approved.
It's better to default to saying this section is not-reliable/you-have-to-assess-the-reliability-yo urself-like-you-always-did than to say it is reliable without being rather sure. Better safe than sorry?
Problem number two is similar: if a section isn't stable and is the subject of dispute (I'm excluding ye olde vandalism from consideration here), don't you want to know that it may not be trustworthy, that you've stumbled onto it while it might in one of several POV'd or uninformative states? I know I would.
Please. An encyclopedia is a form and genre, not a classification of quality. Your post is as silly as claiming "The Phantom Menace" was not a real movie because it sucked so much.
Encyclopedias are reference sources containing information on a variety of topics. (Don't believe me? Take a look at the many definitions Google pulls up for the query "Define:encyclopedia".) Wikipedia is a reference source which contains information on a variety of topics in an explicitly encyclopedic format. Case Closed. Issues of quality and reliability are entirely separate and unrelated.
Interestingly, back in July, the creator of the ESP Game gave a talk at Google on it and how such games could be used in stead of computer-based classification.... (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-82464639 80976635143&q=ESP+Game&hl=en)
All joking aside, it's just that the de Wikipedia just has more of a reputation and culture of being less free-wheeling and comprehensive and easy-going, I guess, than en Wikipedia; so this sort of thing seems more natural a progression to them.
No. It's an interesting idea though - in the same way that Warhol worms or global thermonuclear wars are interesting, that is, in horrible the effects could get. I can't even begin to explain why this system would kill Wikipedia dead but I'll adduce a few possibilities
#corruption and groupthink #Exodus of the substantial contingent of editors who believe in the openness ideals #massive bandwidth increases in that each edit needs to be approved which is at least 2 HTTP requests #the perfect conditions for bot-generated editting DDoS attacks (only an edit is needed? heck, the edit doesn't even need to be vandalism!) #Countless articles being neglected and "locked"; this is pretty much self-explanatory. Weren't we just discussing over on the NetBSD article about CVS locking of files was greatly impeding progress (and this is code, where the problem would be even less than for a project dependent on casual labor, since articles don't actually *do* anything and so aren't their own reward like programming can be)? #A massive restriction on the most prolific editors, who frequently edit a favorite or current-project article dozens or hundresd of time, to say nothing of all the other editors....etc.
Wikipedia is already versioned - what do you think the edit histories are? A non-branching project (if I understand the version controlling people's terminology aright).
If you want to cite an article reliably... you cite a particular version! Just like you would with software, ex. "GNU Emacs 21.3", not "Emacs". "Revision 72389600 of article Bloodlines", not "Bloodlines".
The cite button/linked-to-page on the toolbar already explicitly tells you that this is how Wikipedia is supposed to be cited.
"Because Wikipedia aspires to be a great encyclopedia, not Jimbo's Big Bag o' Trivia" is the short and blunt answer. The problems we've had with Runescape articles alone...
Well, the species name is "Gowachin", so "Gowachian" seems pretty reasonable to me. Incidentally, is that from Whipping Star or The Dosadi Experiment? I've only ever read the latter.
Re:It's like nothing we've seen .. since Linux
on
A New Kind of OS
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· Score: 1
There is nothing new under the sun...
Your idea of radically stripping the OS down to simply hardware access issues already exists under the name of "exokernels" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel). An interesting idea, but last I heard exokernels had difficulty with filesystem semantics, so YMMV.
"Providing support to complex devices in the field is already a huge pain. Having people contact you because the device doesn't work anymore and finding they have loaded some "custom" software on it would make support impossible. What good does an idealistically pure license do if it makes it impossible for companies to make a go at it?"
If they're tweaking and messing around with the embedded device *that* much, then presumably they are both technically adept and understand that they are voiding the warranty, so to speak. I don't call Microsoft about my embedded device (an Xbox) running Xebian...
The Mulefa (from what I remember of reading the trilogy and having me memory refreshed by the Wikipedia article) don't use a single ball or wheel; they use several wheels and stick their limbs through them. I don't think the Piers Anthony ones used a single ball either (didn't they use pillars as rollers?).
Well, you train it on a huge corpus of known vandal edits, and then set about testing it against new edits. Tawker boasts of a >98% correct reversion rate, which tallies with my experience (I've seen hundreds of its edits in my watchlist over the months, and the only times it made a mistake were freak instances of two vandalism edits in a row). You also add the safeguards that it will only revert back one version, and revert a user/IP only once. That's how you trust such a bot.
Amusingly, you could read this article as an endorsement of open source software and methods- as in, "Open source methods and tools are so awesome that crackers and blackhats have switched to using them and now run rings around the antivirus corporations who don't."
As I understand it, Wikipedia pages come with Javascript that modifies keybindings- M-e is for 'edit', M-d is another thing, and so on. Doesn't work for me at all, so I'm going by what others have told me; hope this helps explain that.
Re:How much editorial oversight is enough?
on
When Wikipedia Fails
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· Score: 2, Informative
It's kinda ironic, but almost everything you ask for is available.
"Highlighting fresh edits."
All the vandal fighting tools, like Lupin's Recent Changes, Vandalfighter (and its many derivatives and copycats) take this for granted. The neatest tool is probably Tawkerbot2, which is a custom bot that goes through recent changes and automatically reverts vandalism- it is remarkably accurate; I've only ever seen it make a mistake in cases where there were two vandalism edits which got right on top of each other before Tawkerbot2 could revert the first one.
"Detecting back and forth deletions and flagging them."
Ditto.
"Establishing a pool of problematic articles that volunteers could stay on top of."
We call such articles semi-protected; most Slashdotters see semi-protection as the problem, not the solution, though, judging from the comments in the articles dealing with semi-protection. There's also some less effective options, like the high-traffic templates.
"A day waiting period for new accounts to edit particularly problematic articles."
See above about semi-protection. More like 4 days though.
Do you agree with those who think that the demon's increase in entropy (by way of measuring) would counterbalance the work it does and so satisfy the Second law?
Slashdot Mirror
What part of the "discretion" bit did you miss? If GPL v10 (and man, if you think it'll be up to v10 in 2010, you're being wildly optimistics... it hasn't even made it to v3 in more than a decade and a half) really imposes such restrictions, everyone would just exercise their discretion and use GPL v2.
Oh, that's easy. You're searching for Daniel Waterhouse in normal English, when everyone knows that his name is recorded only in the Real characters!
Emacs: M-x flyspell-prog-mode
"Programmers can use flyspell-prog-mode to enable spell checking only within comments of source code."
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/FlySpell
He can't help it. Such jokes are hobbit-forming.
Your first problem is not really a problem. What you're complaining about are false negatives (good sections not being approved), but if one were to ramp up the "sensitivity" of the section rating system to be less stringent and more generous, then one would start seeing far more false positives, where it tries to assess as positive stuff which should not have been so approved.
o urself-like-you-always-did than to say it is reliable without being rather sure. Better safe than sorry?
It's better to default to saying this section is not-reliable/you-have-to-assess-the-reliability-y
Problem number two is similar: if a section isn't stable and is the subject of dispute (I'm excluding ye olde vandalism from consideration here), don't you want to know that it may not be trustworthy, that you've stumbled onto it while it might in one of several POV'd or uninformative states? I know I would.
Please. An encyclopedia is a form and genre, not a classification of quality. Your post is as silly as claiming "The Phantom Menace" was not a real movie because it sucked so much.
Encyclopedias are reference sources containing information on a variety of topics. (Don't believe me? Take a look at the many definitions Google pulls up for the query "Define:encyclopedia".) Wikipedia is a reference source which contains information on a variety of topics in an explicitly encyclopedic format. Case Closed. Issues of quality and reliability are entirely separate and unrelated.
Interestingly, back in July, the creator of the ESP Game gave a talk at Google on it and how such games could be used in stead of computer-based classification.... (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-82464639 80976635143&q=ESP+Game&hl=en)
Funny post.
n
All joking aside, it's just that the de Wikipedia just has more of a reputation and culture of being less free-wheeling and comprehensive and easy-going, I guess, than en Wikipedia; so this sort of thing seems more natural a progression to them.
For more on this general difference, see an informative little essay here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Elian/compariso
Isn't the disclaimer already there?
No. It's an interesting idea though - in the same way that Warhol worms or global thermonuclear wars are interesting, that is, in horrible the effects could get. I can't even begin to explain why this system would kill Wikipedia dead but I'll adduce a few possibilities
....etc.
#corruption and groupthink
#Exodus of the substantial contingent of editors who believe in the openness ideals
#massive bandwidth increases in that each edit needs to be approved which is at least 2 HTTP requests
#the perfect conditions for bot-generated editting DDoS attacks (only an edit is needed? heck, the edit doesn't even need to be vandalism!)
#Countless articles being neglected and "locked"; this is pretty much self-explanatory. Weren't we just discussing over on the NetBSD article about CVS locking of files was greatly impeding progress (and this is code, where the problem would be even less than for a project dependent on casual labor, since articles don't actually *do* anything and so aren't their own reward like programming can be)?
#A massive restriction on the most prolific editors, who frequently edit a favorite or current-project article dozens or hundresd of time, to say nothing of all the other editors
Wikipedia is already versioned - what do you think the edit histories are? A non-branching project (if I understand the version controlling people's terminology aright).
If you want to cite an article reliably... you cite a particular version! Just like you would with software, ex. "GNU Emacs 21.3", not "Emacs". "Revision 72389600 of article Bloodlines", not "Bloodlines".
The cite button/linked-to-page on the toolbar already explicitly tells you that this is how Wikipedia is supposed to be cited.
"Because Wikipedia aspires to be a great encyclopedia, not Jimbo's Big Bag o' Trivia" is the short and blunt answer. The problems we've had with Runescape articles alone...
Well, the species name is "Gowachin", so "Gowachian" seems pretty reasonable to me. Incidentally, is that from Whipping Star or The Dosadi Experiment? I've only ever read the latter.
There is nothing new under the sun...
Your idea of radically stripping the OS down to simply hardware access issues already exists under the name of "exokernels" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel). An interesting idea, but last I heard exokernels had difficulty with filesystem semantics, so YMMV.
"Providing support to complex devices in the field is already a huge pain. Having people contact you because the device doesn't work anymore and finding they have loaded some "custom" software on it would make support impossible. What good does an idealistically pure license do if it makes it impossible for companies to make a go at it?"
If they're tweaking and messing around with the embedded device *that* much, then presumably they are both technically adept and understand that they are voiding the warranty, so to speak. I don't call Microsoft about my embedded device (an Xbox) running Xebian...
Naw. After all, one could always concoct some theoretical solution involving virtual particles or pocket universes.
Now, if you had said Planck-space (for density) and Planck-time (seek times?), then you'd be onto something.
The Mulefa (from what I remember of reading the trilogy and having me memory refreshed by the Wikipedia article) don't use a single ball or wheel; they use several wheels and stick their limbs through them. I don't think the Piers Anthony ones used a single ball either (didn't they use pillars as rollers?).
And of course, "eval" (which precedes "so dark the con of man") is our old friend and command from various functional and not-so-functional languages.
Well, you train it on a huge corpus of known vandal edits, and then set about testing it against new edits. Tawker boasts of a >98% correct reversion rate, which tallies with my experience (I've seen hundreds of its edits in my watchlist over the months, and the only times it made a mistake were freak instances of two vandalism edits in a row). You also add the safeguards that it will only revert back one version, and revert a user/IP only once. That's how you trust such a bot.
Amusingly, you could read this article as an endorsement of open source software and methods- as in, "Open source methods and tools are so awesome that crackers and blackhats have switched to using them and now run rings around the antivirus corporations who don't."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seigenthaler_Sr. _Wikipedia_biography_controversy#Anonymous_editor_ identified
p edia-apology_x.htm
/. posts were editable!)
Much as I loathe admitting this, 'twas Daniel Brandt, not Seigenthaler who tracked Brian Chase down.
And incidentally, Chase resigned before Seigenthaler called his boss. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-12-11-wiki
(If only
There's a Greasemonkey script for that sort of thing: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/1418
Seems to be inspired by the really cool software tool from IBM: http://www.research.ibm.com/history/
As I understand it, Wikipedia pages come with Javascript that modifies keybindings- M-e is for 'edit', M-d is another thing, and so on. Doesn't work for me at all, so I'm going by what others have told me; hope this helps explain that.
It's kinda ironic, but almost everything you ask for is available.
"Highlighting fresh edits."
All the vandal fighting tools, like Lupin's Recent Changes, Vandalfighter (and its many derivatives and copycats) take this for granted. The neatest tool is probably Tawkerbot2, which is a custom bot that goes through recent changes and automatically reverts vandalism- it is remarkably accurate; I've only ever seen it make a mistake in cases where there were two vandalism edits which got right on top of each other before Tawkerbot2 could revert the first one.
"Detecting back and forth deletions and flagging them."
Ditto.
"Establishing a pool of problematic articles that volunteers could stay on top of."
We call such articles semi-protected; most Slashdotters see semi-protection as the problem, not the solution, though, judging from the comments in the articles dealing with semi-protection. There's also some less effective options, like the high-traffic templates.
"A day waiting period for new accounts to edit particularly problematic articles."
See above about semi-protection. More like 4 days though.
Do you agree with those who think that the demon's increase in entropy (by way of measuring) would counterbalance the work it does and so satisfy the Second law?