A Look at the Editorial Changes on Wikipedia

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.'"

No such thing.....

[DoraLives (622001)]

as a perfect system.

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.....

[slashdotnickname (882178)]

What Wikipedia should do is have an editor branch for each article. All editing would occur on the normal branch of an article by everyone (as is done now with non-locked articles). Whenever the article reaches a good stable point, as agreed on by community discussions, then an editor would be invited (if not participating already) to merge a requested version of the normal branch onto the editor branch. Editors would consist of "trusted" users, picked by some sensible criteria.

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.....

[natrius (642724)]

Whenever the article reaches a good stable point, as agreed on by community discussions, then an editor would be invited (if not participating already) to merge a requested version of the normal branch onto the editor branch.

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.....

[mdwh2 (535323)]

Until Wikipedia adopts basic high-school level academic standards of requiring a reference for all factual claims, it will remain a sea of vomit.

Where is your reference for this claim?

Re:No such thing.....

[Eccles (932)]

Give me a moment... Ok, it's from an article on wikipedia. Look up "sea of vomit."

Re:wikipedia!=encyclopedia

[yoder (178161)]

encyclopedia Pronunciation (n-skl-pd-)
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.

What's the fuss?

[Poromenos1 (830658)]

Why are people so upset about this? I think that protection is good for controversial pages, if a majority of the Wikipedia community (the people who edit/take care of it actively) agrees that it's mostly balanced and true. It's not like they are banning changes on all of wikipedia, they just want people to wait a bit before editing or not being able to edit controversial pages.

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?

[CRCulver (715279)]

It is the plural in Latin. Standard English, however, has adapted the word to its own morphology, "penises".

Re:What's the fuss?

[Opportunist (166417)]

You know you're a geek when you know the correct plural in latin of a tool you never use. :)

Recent editorial changes?

[by Anonymous Coward]

These changes are hardly recent. Protection policy was introduced in or before at least 2003. Semi-protection policy was introduced around January 2006. Several years ago the George Bush article kept being reverted back and forth between vandalized versions and unvandalized versions so much that they had just decided to lock the whole thing down, as was standard procedure, which would temporarily have the vandals leave until they came back seeing it was unprotected again.

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

[brian0918 (638904)]

Bush's article has been pretty much semi-protected since semi-protection was created, and it is unlikely to change until after he's out of office--probably longer. That article has more edits than any others, and most of those were vandalism/reversions. Sometimes it seems like every single newbie who comes along and discovers "OMG I H4X WIKIPEDIA" tests their abilities by blanking the article or adding some random obscenity. What the public and John Siegenthaler don't understand is that it's not the current state of an article that is important to Wikipedia's editors--only the future state, and what it has the potential to become... well, except for all the editors hung up on reverting vandals and temporarily blocking one of the billions of IP addresses that exist.

wikipedia ideas?

[ZaBu911 (520503)]

What would be cool is this.

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?

[brian0918 (638904)]

"1) Reminding users to cite sources every time they make an edit (perhaps require it for non-grammatical edits)"

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?

[edremy (36408)]

Slashdot's mod system works well with trolls, but not with factual info. I can't count the number of posts I've seen marked +3 to +5 insightful with simply wrong information in them. I tend to notice these most often in science threads, especially global warming and evolution ones. Often, the worst offenders are folks trying to defend warming or evolution against the (badly informed) naysayers, but they simpy don't understand the topic well enough and thus end up claiming something that either isn't correct in the context or vastly overstates the confidence we have in a conclusion.

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

[Beryllium Sphere(tm) (193358)]

Already happening, according to some reports. Every now and then there's a post here on Slashdot with words to the effect "I'm a PhD in nonlinear squirgeamatics, I wrote a Wikipedia article about it, and it got 'corrected' by a pack of morons making errors that should embarrass an undergraduate in nonlinear squirgeamatics. I gave up in disguest and the article has probably gone downhill since".

Oh, the irony!

[Hikaru79 (832891)]

New York Times is complaining that Wikipedia requires users to register in order to be able to edit the content? Heck, I usually have to register just to READ NYT's content.

Semi-protection != Protection

[MostAwesomeDude (980382)]

The semi-protection policy discourages vandalism by requiring editors to be registered with accounts at least four days old. Obviously, anyone who really wants to contribute to the encyclopedia will register and then wait four days (or, in theory, they are already contributors who have registered usernames).

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?

That article is horrible

[gkhan1 (886823)]

We've been having a discussion about it on the wikipedia mailing list and Jimbo himself wrote about it on his blog. [jimmywales.com]

You shouldn't trust these kinds of articles about wikipedia, they almost always get things wrong.

"Fork it" is part of the right answer

[carpeweb (949895)]

Even if the first comment was flamebait, forking presents an intereseting partial solution.

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.

Re:YRO?

[Alkivar (25833)]

It is a sound policy, the debate [wikipedia.org] over semi-protection policy [wikipedia.org] lasted for several weeks and covered many arguments both for and against. I think in the end we came up with a rather well balanced and effective policy.

Re:YRO?

[CastrTroy (595695)]

The problem is, is that this seems like a few bad apples ruining it for everyone else. This happens all the time in real life. DVDs are encrypted because they figured people would copy them unfairly. And some people do. The problem is that it makes them harder for everyone else to use in the process. The question then becomes how much protection is too much? If they blocked out editing of all wikipedia content then it would kind of defeat the purpose of the entire website. If however they only choose to block editing of certain articles that get a lot of false information in them to get a political agenda across (either way) then, it's probably a good thing that articles are not wide open for everyone to edit.

Re:YRO?

[NoMaster (142776)]

Why is this YRO? Wiki 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.

Yet... ;-)

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."

Re:Vandals

[Robotron23 (832528)]

To add to this, as an editor of Wikipedia for well over a year now it is always a pleasent surprise how many non-registered users simply commence to fix typos, improve grammar or language wording and so forth.

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

[interiot (50685)]

High-volume pages are sometimes a person's first impression of Wikipedia, and Wikipedia doesn't want their first impression to be a giant picture of a penis or other vandalism (eg. same reason the main page is locked from editing).

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

[interiot (50685)]

No, new users on the whole tend to vandalize much more often than editors who have been editing for several days. New/anonymous users have nothing to lose, whereas established editors want to improve their reputation a bit, and therefore do have something to lose, and therefore they rarely vandalize or intentionally disrupt articles. (a decent reputation may let you run for admin eventually, but more importantly, it lets you make well-intentioned edits that are controversial (eg. "hey! so and so wasn't born in 1711, they were born in 1712!"... if that was a person's first edit, that was very likely to be a vandal edit... if that was a person's 150th good edit with no prior history of vandalism, it was probably fixing a mistake)

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.