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A Look at the Editorial Changes on Wikipedia
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sat Jun 17, 2006 09:34 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.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:No such thing..... (Score:5, Funny)
Where is your reference for this claim?
Parent
Re:No such thing..... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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.
Parent
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:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:What's the fuss? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
Moderation, factual errors (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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?
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.
Re:YRO? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:YRO? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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."
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent