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A Look at the Editorial Changes on Wikipedia
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sat Jun 17, 2006 08:34 PM
from the troll-combat dept.
from the troll-combat dept.
prostoalex writes "New York Times Technology section this weekend is running an extensive article on Wikipedia and recent changes to the editorial policy. Due to high level of partisan involvement some political topics like George Bush, Tony Blair and Opus Dei are currently either protected (editorials are allowed only to a selected group of Wikipedia members) or semi-protected (anyone who has had an account for more than four days can edit the article). From the article: 'Protection is a tool for quality control, but it hardly defines Wikipedia,' Mr. Wales said. 'What does define Wikipedia is the volunteer community and the open participation.'"
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No such thing..... (Score:5, Insightful)
If outfits like Britannica and other professionally edited sources of information are subject to the slings and arrows of political agenda and false facts, then there's no reason to expect Wikipeia to be somehow immune to this stuff as well.
Strive to improve, but realize that it's impossible to hit it right every last time.
Re:No such thing..... (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as the user's experience... looking up an article would bring the user to the normal-branch version (as is done now) and a link would be present if an editor version exists (with 1 million plus articles most won't have an editor version for a while). Maybe the user can specify the branch type when searching.
The main idea here is that good stable copies of an article would be archived seperately from the normal(editable) version.
Re:No such thing..... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly what needs to happen at some point. Commentators like to refer to Wikipedia as the "open source encyclopedia", but open source projects don't just let anyone contribute. They evaluate patches, and after contributors have a proven track record, they're allowed to commit patches directly.
With that said, people need to stop comparing Wikipedia to Brittanica as if it's some sort of holy grail of quality to reach. Wikipedia is already better than Brittanica. There are two main uses people have for encyclopedias: as a casual source of information and as a starting point for research. Wikipedia is a better casual source of information because it provides far more information about more topics than Britannica does. The articles are also longer and more in depth. I have never looked up something in Wikipedia and not found an article for it, while that has happened several times with traditional encyclopedias. It's only natural that a digital reference will be able to cover more topics than a printed one due to the lack of space limitations. As a starting point for research, many Wikipedia articles list references, which gives you primary sources to go to if you need to dig deeper than what is in the articles.
So why exactly should Wikipedia be striving to be like Britannica? It can do better.
Re:No such thing..... (Score:5, Insightful)
"The Cindy Sheehan article attracted so many opposing POV peddlers that the article itself was protected and thus out of date for most of the time it was relevant."
I'm trying to figure out why this is bad. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not an online news magazine or online newspaper. Encyclopedias are not and should not be considered current event news sources, as it frequently takes months or even years for all necessary information about a subject or event to surface.
Re:No such thing..... (Score:4, Interesting)
seriously though, that is not a bad idea. I would be very happy to see some sort of 'weighted confidence level' associated with whats contributed to wikipedia, with a lower rating for contribution from most people, which would be the default viewing threshold. Then in your preferences, or at the top of all articles, have a link to allow you to filter to higher level contributions.
Of course this may have problems with lower level contributors trying to update higher level content and such, but 2-3 levels of depth could prove useful.. if slashdot comments have proven anything over the years its that not all contibutions are created equal..
Re:No such thing..... (Score:4, Insightful)
See for example, most any complaint against a variant of Linux. They are modded offtopic, redundant or most commonly as trolls if they show the truth and not the ideal as decided by the mob.
Kevin
Re:No such thing..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides Boeing and other professional aerospace companies also have a motto of
"Strive to improve, but realise that it's impossible to hit it right every last time"
Just in case you think I'm being facetious, Jimbo Wales has recently cheerfully admitted [theregister.co.uk] that he get 10 e-mails a week from students who complain that they got an F because they cited Wikipedia and the citation turned out to be wrong. And Jimbo says "For God sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia"
The other remarkable thing about Slashdot is that this army of nerds who will mark down this post, would never accept a wikipedia model for writing software where anyone anywhere can write, edit, delete code at any time.
Re:No such thing..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Encyclopedias are NOT references. They are research tools.
Also, Wikipedia's vast repository of popular TV show plots makes it an ideal tool to avoid having to actually watch the shows to feign interest in your cow orker's small talk.
Re:No such thing..... (Score:5, Insightful)
"This is a terrible hammer! It does an awful job installing screws!"
And--I hate to break it to you--he was right to say so. I know of professors who will fail a student for citing any encyclopedia article in a reference, even if the information cited is factually correct. Encyclopedias are never (or should never be) primary sources. Anyone doing any sort of research should be going right to the original source documents. College students should know better than to try to get away with citing an encyclopedia article, and they should be learning how to properly dig up primary source material.By the time a student reaches the postsecondary level, that student should be able to find sources that aren't on the first page of Google hits. They should never trust a tertiary source. (Incidentally, Wikipedia articles tend to be better about providing citations to primary sources; Britannica seldom does so.)
Re:No such thing..... (Score:3, Informative)
"Verifiability" is one of Wikipedia's three content-governing policies: "The threshold for inclusion in Wi
Re:No such thing..... (Score:5, Funny)
Where is your reference for this claim?
Re:No such thing..... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:wikipedia!=encyclopedia (Score:5, Interesting)
n.
A comprehensive reference work containing articles on a wide range of subjects or on numerous aspects of a particular field, usually arranged alphabetically
Is there any mention in any definition of encyclopedia that it cannot have the word "fuck" in it, or that it can only be compiled by certain people (or a certain kind of people)? There are as many different kinds of encyclopedias as there are subjects, and they are all compiled, managed, and written differently.
Of course it's an encyclopedia, just as much as Britannica, or World Book. It is just managed differently, and I myself use it regularly just as I would any other encyclopedia, using other sources of information to cross reference and back up information that I find.
Re:wikipedia!=encyclopedia (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:wikipedia!=encyclopedia (Score:5, Insightful)
Words have power. Arguing about the meaning of words, and how concepts are represented by words, is a natural part of the development of language. When we fight over words, we are helping to shape the language of the future.
I don't claim to have thought of this - I just finished listening to Bruce Sterling's excellent address on The Internet of Things [itconversations.com], where he makes an interesting argument about early computers. They were described by many people as "thinking machines", and much of the effort expended in researching and building them was shaped by this idea of their nature. Sterling makes the point that a "thinking machine" is probably not as useful as a machine that is good at ranking, sorting, tagging, etc. - in other words, Google. What if we had thought of computers as something other than thinking machines? Would their development have been different? Would we be further along now if we had done so?
Maybe the statement "Wikipedia is not an encylopedia" is saying something really important about Wikipedia.
Re:wikipedia!=encyclopedia (Score:5, Insightful)
Historical accuracy is always in debate. The point of an encyclopedia or any record isn't to be absolutely right the first time, it's to be as right as possible and then easily fixed in light of new information. Sure there are those on Wikipedia that don't try in the first place, but no one has ever been immune to stupid or lazy writers/fact checkers. The great thing about Wikipedia though is that it can easily be fixed, without having to go find all the old copies and destroy them, or wait until it's economical to produce a new edition.
Re:wikipedia!=encyclopedia (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. People don't check things worth a damn on Wikipedia unless it's on something controversial or something that has some editor who gives a damn. And in particular, people don't check up on cited references, which is the latest trend in trying to lend legitimacy.
For instance, the article on "Voter turnout". The numbers given in the sidebar are wrong. The source given is not the primary source (which is unacceptable. Statistics for several countries are given which aren't even given in the cited source. But not only that: A lot of the numbers given are not the same numbers as in the source given. And on top of that, the numbers in the source don't even match the official statistics or Wikipedia's other pages on the subject.
Now look at the Talk page for that article. It's a Featured Article. Despite the fact that these flaws are pointed out there. Not only that, they were pointed out before the article was featured on the main Wikipedia page. Did any of that prompt that stuff to be fixed? Apparently not. The flaws pointed out still seem to be there, AFAICT.
Talk about shady referencing!
A recent study in nature demonstrated that wikipedia had only a few more errors than Britannica on average.
Bullshit. It wasn't a "study in Nature", it was a rather cursory examination that Nature did on their News/Editorial pages, not a peer-reviewed study. (And a lot of the 'flaws' in Britannica were not in the Encyclopedia Britannica itself, but in other Britannica publications on their website.)
What's the fuss? (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember what happens when a page gets linked to slashdot, it takes all of 3 seconds for the picture to change to penes.
Re:What's the fuss? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What's the fuss? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What's the fuss? (Score:5, Funny)
YRO? (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, it seems like sound policy.
Re:YRO? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:YRO? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:YRO? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:YRO? (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot, circa 1925...
"Why is this YRO? The MPAA isn't a government organization. If they don't like what Joe Random does, they can't kick the door down & send him to the gulag."
Vandals (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a shame, but Wikipedia is at fault for trusting human nature to be good, when it isn't. We are a destructive species and Wikipedia is on the tipping point of being a big enough target for utter destruction.
Re:Vandals (Score:5, Insightful)
We may be a destructive species, but we are also very constructive; if Wikipedia is such a great target for destruction, wouldn't the core community of trolls and generally disruptive persons have had more victories by now? You imply that the encyclopedia is teetering on the brink; with a growing team of dedicated persons and articles improving rapidly it is a struggle to see a logical basis for that particular assertion.
Re:Vandals (Score:4, Insightful)
When someone wanting to add information to an article comes in and edits a completely unprotected George W. Bush article in this example, in the time it takes them to add that information, five more edits have happened. The first vandalized it. The second reverted to a previous version. The third added information in a biased way, the fourth neutralized the information and added a source, while the fifth again vandalized it. When that user clicks "submit," they get a notice that there has been an "edit conflict."
Their previous version that they tried to submit might be saved on the previous page, if they're using a good enough browser, but if they did something like correct a typo, they have to correct those typos all over again while ensuring the newly added information stays there. Semi-protecting the page is an alternative to fully protecting the page that deters vandals that are too lazy to fill out the registration form, thus ensuring not only that less time is spent on reverting, but that people willing with registered 4 day old accounts willing to add information will be able to do so without an "edit conflict" notice.
Re:Vandals (Score:5, Informative)
Also, some of the anonymous/new-editor edits come from determined vandals, who will edit with multiple IP's, or will create multiple new accounts. That also increases the proportion of vandalism that comes from new/anon edits.
Re:Vandals (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, high-volume pages tend to have a relatively high number of newcommers. And, there's a at least a perception that if a page is left to newcommers, that it won't be maintained as well as if it had a more even mix of newcommers and established editors. (eg. it may not be 100% obvious to new users how to revert vandalism if they do spot it... new users may not know about NPOV, and may not be sure whether they should remove blantant POV statements... high-traffic pages may have edit conflicts, and that may frustrate well-meaning users attempting to fix vandalism...)
Another thing is that for articles like George W. Bush... it kind of sucks if 80% of history is vandal-revert-vandal-revert-vandal-revert... it makes it harder to review legitimate edits.
Re:Vandals (Score:3, Insightful)
Recent editorial changes? (Score:5, Informative)
In January, semi-protection was introduced, allowing only registered users with accounts older than 4 days to edit these highly vandalized articles. The registration form is what deters the vandals from vandalizing; they're too lazy to make such an effort. Current protection policy is used when there are edit wars between registered users. Having the page temporarily protected, as the article describes, allows a cooling off period and a mediation of the dispute for those parties until they come to an agreement.
The first time a page was protected, I heard, was in the project's first year, when even the main page was editable. They stopped that when popularity grew enough for there to be a penis on the main page during revert wars on it with vandals. The article is accurate, but the headline isn't.
George W. Bush will always be protected (Score:5, Insightful)
wikipedia ideas? (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Reminding users to cite sources every time they make an edit (perhaps require it for non-grammatical edits)
2) Being able to ban IP addresses and ranges from editing wikipedia
3) Allowing banned users, or users under certain IP ranges to request unbans for their accounts
4) Have two versions of articles: 'newest' and an 'approved'
* Active contributers who have been peer-reviewed with quality changes (i.e., changes in which they cite sources, conform to the wikipedia NPOV policy, etc.) should be able to fact-check an article and check it off as 'approved'
* Edits should affect the 'newest' version, and should go into a queue for approved contributers to be able to confirm the changes to the 'approved' version of the article
You could establish a karma score for users as well as editors, a la slashdot (moderating, meta-moderating ideas come into play). If a user makes an approved contribution to an article, +1 point. If a user makes an error, he gets +1 error point. If he reaches 5 error points, he must stop editin garticles. If he reaches +10 points, he may start approving articles. Of course this would need to be tweaked & tested but these are just some ideas...
Re:wikipedia ideas? (Score:5, Informative)
It used to say that, but some foolish admin decided to remove that notice. I've put it back.
"2) Being able to ban IP addresses and ranges from editing wikipedia"
That's already possible. What's your IP address? You can see for yourself.
"3) Allowing banned users, or users under certain IP ranges to request unbans for their accounts"
Also currently possible.
"4) Have two versions of articles: 'newest' and an 'approved'"
This, of course, is where the gold is at. This idea has been in the works for months now. I'm not sure when the developers will actually release it, but it should definitely improve the site, and bring us closer to stable content and civil discussions among editors.
Re:wikipedia ideas? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is Wikipedia's biggest problem IMHO, far more so than the vandalization trolls. With the latter, you can fix it, but if an expert writes an article and then has it "corrected" by someone who understands the topic at a much lower level, how does this get fixed? Does the expert have to keep going through and removing "helpful" changes? How long will someone like this want to keep going before they just give up and go back to something more rewarding?
Under a /. type mod system for Wikipedia, dozens of idiot mods could effectively ban experts- the experts in a field are always outnumbered by the less well informed.
Moderation, factual errors (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia by their own policies... (Score:4, Insightful)
Wikipedia is by no means "official" and its policies insure that in effort to keep the threat of lawsuits for wrong information, to a minimum. To put a stamp of "official" on information that is wrong for such an open collective of unpaid articles writers and editors would quickly open a very big can of lawyer worms.
So long as this is understood, wikipedia has some value but it must be understood that the value you get out of using it may not be as good as "official/professional" researched information but more likely better than individual opinions, comments or individual works found elsewhere on the internet.
With all this in mind, it really should be no supprise of the evolving use of wikipedia to build up and/or trash a politician or other public figure. It's the manifestd proof of the "hear-say" only policies of wikipedia.
Re:Wikipedia by their own policies... (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed, professional research is by no means any more credible than the wikipedia. Its all a matter of sources and the credibility of the organization. With Wikipedia I would not trust an artical that doesn't have good sources. Of course there are few organizations I'd trust if they couldn't provide proper sources.
Oh, the irony! (Score:5, Funny)
Semi-protection != Protection (Score:5, Interesting)
Vandals are almost exclusively unregistered editors using only their IP addresses for identification. The semi-protection will block them from editing or moving (renaming) a page. However, vandalism must be VERY persistent in order for any kind of protection to be applied; typically, administrators will refuse most protection and semi-protection requests and reply, "Not enough vandalism, just revert instead."
People are making a big deal of this because they view Wikipedia, being as it is a completely new and unheard-of-before kind of information libre, as hypocritical when they block people or pages from editing. I guess they've never thought of the fact that they're only protecting ~200 articles at any given time. How many articles have Britannica and World Book opened up for editing and review?
Font page; damned if they do (Score:3, Interesting)
First, it wasn't just the "technology" section, it was on the front page of the National Edition.
Second, Wikipedia is damned in both directions by the media: They are either too open and so all sorts of loonies can post whatever they want. Or, when the close up a bit, they are abandoning their own principles.
Anyone who hasn't read it needs to read DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism by Jaron Lanier [edge.org] and the spirited reply [edge.org] by Douglas Rushkoff, Quentin Hardy, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Larry Sanger, Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold.
Semi-protection looks good enough to me (Score:3, Insightful)
- Any article not being heavily vanadalized can be edited by anyone.
- Any article being heavily vanadalized may be semi-protected against newly registered users, i.e. anyone having been registered for a while.
The semi-protection was deliberately designed so not even that will lock out anyone particular, since even new registrations become old enough soon enough. That's the intelligent part about it; being open (as long as you accept a delay after registration among a few select pages) while protecting against vandals.
Although Wikipedia is "open", I think that doesn't mean there can't be controls. The right controls just make something that's open work more efficiently. We have police forces in open societies, and put traffic lights on crossings there may have been overly many accidents at in the past, and when there's these, you're obliged by law to follow rules according to those. You usually don't just check in code in an OSS project without approval. Things simply don't work like there can't be any rules anywhere. Well, it does, if you accept a much heavier repair and maintenance work due to all the problems caused by a complete lack of regulations, but I have to wonder if the people complaining about Wikipedia protection feel like doubling or tripling their efforts in that case.
As long as Wikipedia implements sensible regulations I have no problems with it, especially if these regulations still mean that e.g semi-protected pages can be edited by anyone within time. That doesn't make it elitist or anything either, because no one needs to be granted access to edit or something like that and everyone is treated equally without discriminations.
Wikipedia is really an ancient curse of some sort. (Score:3, Interesting)
A few years ago, quite unbeknowest to me, a grateful visitor created a Wiki entry for the amateur observatory I and a small group of friends own in New Zealand. It was a mostly innocuous entry, if a little less NPOV than it could have been, but certainly shouldn't have been a cause for concern.
All well-and-good, except that amateur astronomy is riven with the same petty and insane power politics as anything else which involves humans, and one unfortunate astronomical community member with a bipolar disorder, and a long history of causing strife, chose "our" Wiki article as his latest target of opportunity.
And so it began.
The first I knew of any of it was when complete strangers began contacting me, asking what the hell was going on. That's when I discovered we even had a Wiki article. By then of course the article essentially suggested that we were in fact members of the Mafia, and worse.
Being Wiki, it appears that "our" article had become a major first-referrer to our website, mostly via Google and all the Wiki ad-spam clones, so a lot of traffic was moving back and forth, as well as a lot of comments.
In the end it all got so bad that we asked - then begged - the Wiki rulers to delete the article and ban anybody from recreating it, or even mentioning us in other articles. Oh and we shut off access to not only our website but our physical site also, as the whole thing had turned into an extremely unpleasant bunfight involving not just much of the amateur and professional astronomy community within our own country but beyond as well.
With our Wikiprescence history, and after switching to a webhost capable of blocking the DDoS attacks (yes, you read that right...), things began to settle down for us. But never again will we have any involvement with Wikipedia in any shape or form. It's just not worth it.
Wikipedia is a wonderful concept, but I suspect it's mostly unworkable.
That article is horrible (Score:5, Informative)
You shouldn't trust these kinds of articles about wikipedia, they almost always get things wrong.
"Fork it" is part of the right answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia is essentially open source content. It tries to draw on the strengths of open processes to produce "better" content.
Even in areas like software, reasonable people can disagree on "which way is better". When that happens with FOSS, we get a fork, or at least an alternative project.
With topics like George Bush, Bill Clinton and other lightning rods, I doubt that a large majority could even agree on who the reasonable people are, much less what the "right" content is. So, forking seems inevitably necessary.
That still leaves the problem of vandalism, but might make it a little bit less persistent, since some highly motivated "vandals" would have alternatives. I'm not sure why anyone would object to the basic idea of protection. After all, I can't go to some distro of Linux and overwrite it with my 'version' of the kernel, can I? I hope not, because my version of the kernel comes with biscuits and a soda and doesn't really help a cpu. The point is, people like me should be prevented from making changes to some things, absent strong evidence that we won't muck it up.
Examples Of Modern Society (Score:5, Insightful)