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Wikipedia Announces Tighter Editorial Control
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Aug 05, 2005 03:31 PM
from the cracking-down-on-the-idea dept.
from the cracking-down-on-the-idea dept.
Daedalus_ wrote to mention a Reuters article reporting from Wikimania. "Wikipedia, the Web encyclopaedia written and edited by Internet users from all over the world, plans to impose stricter editorial rules to prevent vandalism of its content, founder Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying Friday." (Update: 08/06 23:45 GMT by J : But see his response here!) Meanwhile, kyelewis writes "WikiMania, the First International WikiMedia Conference is open in Germany, but if you couldn't gather the money or the courage to fly over, you can listen online in Ogg Vorbis format, or if you miss the talks, you can download them later. The WikiMania Broadcast page has more information, and the WikiMania Programme is also available, so jump in and learn more about the mysterious technology that is the wiki."
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Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade? 286 comments
swestcott writes to mention an article at the Chronicle of Higher Education site, wondering if Wikipedia will ever 'make the grade'? Academics are split, and feuding, about how to handle the popular collaborative project. Due to the ease of editing correct information into nonsense, many professors are ignoring it. Others want to start contributing. From the article: "As the encyclopedia's popularity continues to grow, some professors are calling on scholars to contribute articles to Wikipedia, or at least to hone less-than-inspiring entries in the site's vast and growing collection. Those scholars' take is simple: If you can't beat the Wikipedians, join 'em. Proponents of that strategy showed up in force at Wikimania, the annual meeting for Wikipedia contributors, a three-day event held in August at Harvard University. Leaders of Wikipedia said there that they had turned their attention to increasing the accuracy of information on the Web site, announcing several policies intended to prevent editorial vandalism and to improve or erase Wikipedia's least-trusted entries."
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Isn't that an oxymoron? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Isn't that an oxymoron? (Score:5, Insightful)
I like Wikipedia because I can look up almost anything and find an entry. They're trying to curb the problem of malicious users before it gets out of hand, which is good, IMO.
Parent
Re:Isn't that an oxymoron? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Isn't that an oxymoron? (Score:5, Informative)
Certainly, you don't want to put too much of a damper on people's ability to modify the text in good faith, but some people are just vandals. In one case, somebody thought his version of history was the correct one, and whenever anybody edited the article, he would always just put his own version back. The thing is, he wouldn't discuss the issues, so there was no way to come to any kind of consensus about how to say something in a factual and neutral way, he would simply replace the current version with his own version. What little discussion he did actually get involved in was mostly him calling all the other editors extremely rude and racist names, and saying they should all go to the gas chambers. This is not a disagreement about the facts or the point of view, this is simply vandalism.
I've also seen the text of articles replaced in whole or in part by obscenities. Not controversial articles, not appropriate or funny obscenities, just obscenities. Again, simply vandalism.
As is replacing the Pope's picture, I suppose, but I would think that that was just a joke, which I suppose may have been offensive to some people, etc, etc, but that's the type of mistake I myself have made more times than I care to remember.
Parent
Re:Isn't that an oxymoron? (Score:3, Insightful)
(In other words, I think that just about any topic can and will
Re:Isn't that an oxymoron? (Score:3, Funny)
they both have this evil look
I'd say that was a mistake (Score:3, Insightful)
(Yes, I know this is ironic in context.)
Re:I'd say that was a mistake (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Isn't that an oxymoron? (Score:5, Interesting)
But it *always* gets fixed, very quickly. It's easy to imagine vandalism sitting undetected until it's "found", but that isn't the way it works. As soon as changes are submitted to an article, all the information (# of bytes changes, user or anonymous, article name, and a link to the last diff) is output on an IRC channel anyone can join. Using CryptoDerk's Vandal Fighter [wikipedia.org], a handy java program, makes it even better. Trolls are blacklisted, shared between peers on the network, and shown in bright red. All you have to so is watch it for a while, wait for an anonymous user to make a big change (always to the same articles, Bush, Homosexuality, Anus, etc.) and...you click the link and roll it back. That simple. People do this all the time, which is why there is so little vandalism that survives.
At any rate, this article is totally 100% bogus. This is off the Wikipedia Announcements page [wikipedia.org]:
Makes me feel better. ; )
To all the doubters, Wikipedia works, and millions of people love it. If vandalism bothers you, download Cryptoderk's program and get to work.
Parent
Re: Isn't that an oxymoron? (Score:5, Insightful)
> That's my main worry, what I liked was the kind of controlled chaos of the idea
Yeah, I like that too. Unfortunately, on the internet, once your site reaches a high enough profile every dickhead in the universe feels obligated to do whatever they can to screw it up.
Like Slashdot, for example.
Parent
Re: Isn't that an oxymoron? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Wondering the same... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's say you are doing research on a two-seater variant of the f-16 foghter aircraft, and the "paper encyclopedia" puts the range at 2400km, and wikipedia puts the range at 2550km, who would you trust?
Now, if you came to the knowledge that the article on the trainer variant in question was edited by Captain John Miller, USAF, at the Point Ueneme Air Force base, the only base in the United States using this particular variant, and that he was the man in charge of all pilot training, who would you believe then, the "paper encyclopedia" printed in Taiwan in 2003, or Wikipedia?
Now, let's say that John Miller posted as JonM at 3 am, you might not know that he's the USAF trainer, but you might ask him how he knows, and he might tell you to call him at the base during his office hours. Then you might know. Try calling the Encyclopedia.
Assuming that information is correct is always asking for trouble, regardless of where the infomration comes from. What wikipedia allows you to do is more easily contact the authors to validate or invalidate, as the case may be, the factual nature of the information.
Parent
You don't understand how wikipedia works (Score:3, Insightful)
The value of Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia provides overviews of things.
The problem is that when I want information about, say, USB 2.0, the Web *does* provide just about everything I might want (an improvement over writing letters to people requesting documents, for certain). However, I may have no idea what to request.
A Wikipedia article gives me a brief overview that is useful to a human, and provides me with enough information that I know where to go for further, detailed information.
It might take a long time to obtain this information normally, but Wikipedia allows me to get ahold of it almost instantly.
And one other point -- while I agree that to a security theorist, Wikipedia is horribly insecure, and can suffer many attacks, it is also inarguably *not* falling apart. So, clearly there are some important factors that we have not taken into consideration, like the fact that people may just like Wikipedia a lot.
I've mused many a time on whether a Wiki might be a good way to bootstrap an encyclopedia, but not the best once there is valuable information finished and present that one must simply keep from being vandalized. So an unmodified wiki approach might make sense for the early days of Wikipedia, but some sort of trust system might make more sense later on.
Also, for people who disagree with this policy change, remember that you can always "fork" Wikipedia.
If we can live with a bit more time to update things, there might be an "unstable Wikipedia" and a "stable Wikipedia", where editors have approved changes and dropped them into the stable release. [shrug] lots of possibilities. All I know is that Wikipedia is a great sign of the same fundamental value that drives open source -- that it is so phenomenally inexpensive to produce something that can then provide good for so many people that traditional market economics may not do a good job of serving us any more in an information age.
Parent
Re:Wondering the same... (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is, of course, the point of an encyclopedia.
Parent
Re:Wondering the same... (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly! This holds true for normal encyclopedias as well though. You should never use tertiary sources for any sort of good research.
Parent
Re:Idealism meets reality (Score:3, Insightful)
The purpose of Wikipedia is not to be a repository of tremendously correct facts. That's not the purpose of a regular encyclopedia, either. The purpose of an encyclopedia is to provide a competent general introduction to a wide variety of topics, and pointers to further information. At this Wikipedia excels.
Many people find Wikipedia a useful
That still doesn't change some things. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:That still doesn't change some things. (Score:3, Funny)
B-A-N-A-N-A-S
Re:That still doesn't change some things. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well that article [wikipedia.org] told me everything I needed to know, except where to get one.
Hint hint (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hint hint (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Interesting, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Interesting, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
While there are a fairly small number of hotly contested pages, the vast bulk of the Wikipedia is comprised of short entries about fairly unremarkible subjects. These also tend to be the best pages to vandalize (especially in nonobvious ways) because they generally don't get looked at all that much.
So while, say, the Robert Novak page is going to see a lot of dispute between now and whenever someone finally drives a stake through his heart, the page on the Byzantine Emperor Basil I (811-886 AD) probably isn't going to see a great number of worthwhile changes anytime soon.
Parent
Re:Interesting, but... (Score:3, Funny)
Freezing these would stop the totally ramdom vandals who pick rarely visited pages and insert incorrect information.
Good Idea. (Score:4, Insightful)
But I wonder what it will mean for people like me who post edits to maybe 4 or 5 articles a year, when we find an error?
I think the biggest problem is edits to 'contraversial' posts, like "Intelegent Design" or "Joseph McCarthy".
Of course the "real" trolls will simply poison the well by inserting subtle errors.
Heh - "Intelegent Design" (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
What is the best way to implement this? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no idea how they plan on implementing this, but if it was up to me, I'd have a "stable" and "draft" version of each high-profile page. Anyone should be able to edit the draft. Periodically, the draft version could replace the stable version (perhaps a voting system could be in place, not unlike the kuro5hin submission queue).
The importance of a page (to decide if a locked "stable" page is necessary) could be determined automatically either by number of hits, or computing the pagerank of each page given the link graph of the whole wiki.
Parent
Re:What is the best way to implement this? (Score:5, Insightful)
You HAVE to have a way of getting new data into Wikipedia pages. Even long-ago historical events need to be updated when new evidence or new analysis brings new facts to light. History is never cemented. And Wikipedia has proven remarkably capable of keeping up-to-date with new events.
But yes, Wikipedia editing is sometimes like making sausage. No matter how good it tastes in the end, the intermediate steps aren't always good looking. You need to simultaneously hide this sausage-making from the casual user (by making the "stable" page be the default one to appear), while also making it not too difficult for people to contribute to the sausage-making process (by making the "draft" page only a single click away).
Parent
Then base stable on a time period (Score:5, Interesting)
That way wikipedians can always view the draft version, but it's highly unlikely that vandalism will stay around long enough to be stablized.
People coming in from google or such like will automatically get the stable version unless they deliberately choose draft.
Parent
Re:Then base stable on a time period (Score:3, Insightful)
Not a bad idea, but maybe it could be based on page views instead of time. If a draft has been read a certain number of times without a modification, it could be moved to stable. Four hours may be too short in the early morning, or too long for current events.
Either way, there's a significant danger of a troll getting their edit into the stable version, then editing the draft frequently enough to prevent it from stablizing
Re: Good Idea. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, not exactly "no interest". Someone had to be interested enough to create the article, yes?
Do you mean "No interest to me, and to other right-thinking people like me?" Do you mean "No interest to the overwhelming majority of the reader base?"
Yeah, generally, i vote "delete" in the inevitable "Vote for Deletion" calls on vanity pages and the like. But it bugs me that minority opinions are getting quashed because they aren't widely held. There's a fine line between "maintaining quality for the sake of credibility" and "maintaining conformity for the sake of the groupthink." Sometimes the voices of the crackpot are useful and, even occaisionally, right [wikipedia.org].
Parent
Some suggestions... (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe for the "frozen" entries, updates should be allowed to be submitted, but then there'd be a voting, where the update would only be applied if enough people accepted it.
Maybe they could even impliment a reputation system, where the votes of people with higher reputations count more, and/or where people with higher reputations can make changes without needing a vote...
Re:Some suggestions... (Score:3, Insightful)
So in order to vandalize, the changes would have to survive a 'burn in' period where those people watching the article have a chance to cancel it before everybody sees it on the main page. This takes away the primary motivation for vandalism since nobody sees the change except to revert
No Surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I prefer the former solution. Good luck, Wikipedia!
About time (Score:3, Insightful)
From their own definition... (Score:3, Insightful)
A wiki is a web application that allows users to add content, as on an Internet forum, but also allows anyone to edit the content.
So this definitely goes against the spirit of a Wiki. That said, I think a little editorial control is probably justified, especially with mature/stable articles, which have reached a high level of quality and experience only infrequent updates.
Rather than having such articles targeted by vandals, it wouldn't be a bad idea to have an occasional valid update go through an editorial vote. Wikipedia already does this currently with "Controversial" articles which are likely to experience Edit-wars.
Extending the control a little probably would do Wikipedia good. The emphasis there being on "little", since overextending editorial content is likely to cause the same problems that regular encyclopedias do - biased content, inaccuracies due to limited knowledge of editors, outdated content, etc.
Reminds me of Slashdot changes (Score:4, Informative)
The question I have with Wikipedia is how they will go about imposing stricter editorial control. Discipline is often a good thing, but almost as often it can be a very bad thing. I'll be watching what they come up with, commenting on it when possible, and trying to keep the site as one of the most useful on the web.
Two ideas I was very wrong about... (Score:3, Interesting)
I was wrong about both of them. Of the two, Wiki is an actual valuable contribution to mankind. The Wiki project, like the Gutenberg project, is about the proliferation of knowledge. It needs creative input from the whole net community in order to thrive, but as it gains status it becomes a bigger target for systematic abuse. I think this move is sound, Encyclopedia Brittanica and the World Book are bereft after the Internet. What Wiki needs is some sort of incentive system. If Gates wanted to buy some good will, he should give a billion or so to the WIki crew (despite the relationship with Google) and have the editors pay net citizens with Paypal for especially valuable work, or really excellent photos, etc. That is the next step in the evolution of the online knowledge center.
It's an interesting idea (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, news require low karma to post (since by their nature they are fast, and you want information now). Other items, such as definitions, etc, would require higher karma, and you could even tie voting into how high karma on a specific article can be. This way, during presidential elections the community could have voted to have the definitions of "John Kerry" and "George W Bush" very high, so up to a 10.
A person with a karma of 5 would need only 5 more "points" for the article to become accepted, while someone with a 3 would need even more. Unregistered users would be 0, so anonymous people could still register - but they'd just need more "votes".
Granted, this is just a brainstorm, and I'm sure people smarter than myself can find holes, but it's just something I've been considering as I work on my own wiki project.
Well, so much for Wikipedia (Score:3)
Oh, thanks a lot! (Score:4, Funny)
Sigh. I fully expect to walk into work on Monday and see "One-button page locking" as the next feature to implement.
Don't worry, guys (Score:5, Funny)
delay mechanism (Score:3, Insightful)
What I think of Wikipedia and the future of wikis (Score:4, Interesting)
Wikipedia is based on the old 18th century encyclopedia concept, but this isn't effective in the digital era of the Internet. Many Wikipedia articles are intentionally written for the common people, not containing specialist scientific or rare information you can find in specialist books. For example, Wikipedia's article on quadratic classifiers [wikipedia.org] is a stub written in April (after I raised this issue on their mailing list in February), and their article on software agents [wikipedia.org], although much improved since I pointed that it was as short as a kid's poem some months before, is still inadequate if you consider that some people study agents for years in universities. Now, what will happen if we go there and improve these articles so much that they contain all the relevant information you can find in computer science and mathematics books, including detailed examples and HOW-TOs, to the extent that these articles become 300-page books? They will remove that extra "unencyclopedic" and "specialist" knowledge, since they believe it should not be part of an encyclopedia. They may move the information to their other wikiprojects, such as Wikibooks. That's bad, because some information will inevitably be duplicated, and duplication leads to ommisions and errors (someone may fix something in Wikibooks, but the fix won't show up in a Wikipedia article which may contain the same information). They believe in old monolithic ideas and they still think in terms of "books", "articles", "pages", something they write and the reader reads in the same monolithic form. They must proceed and understand what the future holds for wikis and the Web, and they must adapt to that future.
The future lies in personalised information. You can see that it's coming if you notice the rise of RSS and you understand why it's so trendy now: People want to control the information they consume. The don't want to read an HTML page which may contain markup and CSS errors, be incompatible with their browser, full of flashy f*cking irrelevant advertisements and whatnot. They prefer RSS which provides an easy-to-parse XML representation of the information they want. Similarily, people use free/libre open-source software because they want to have control over their PCs and their lives, they don't want their software to spy on them nor to control what they can do with their computer with evil technologies like Trusted Computing [againsttcpa.com] and stupid DRM. People want freedom and choice. Books and articles are like closed-source software: You cannot control with fine granularity what you want to read. You have a choice between different authors, but that's all, and this isn't true freedom. What if we had a magic piece of paper which could erase the words and phrases we dislike? We could then read exactly what we want to read, from any author. How many times have you bought a 500-page book only to find out later than 75% of its text is unnecessary pseudo-literary decoration? Some people have lots of time and like to read anything they can, others want to invest their time in reading only the absolutely necessary text which contains the information they urgently need. We need a way to have total control over the information that enters our brain, or else we are at the mercy of the author.
In wikis, we need a wiki that can build personalised wiki-articles based on our preferences, getting data and information from a flexible database. This is a multi-step process. We must first create a wiki database which contains all the data we can document, if possible a perfect copy of our brains I would say, then we must develop software to tag its contents and let the user to retrieve the information in any way they like, and if we use a good design there is no need to duplicate any data.
Special software needs to be developed in order to materialise my vision. This software should be based on the concepts of "co
Wikipedia announces... (Score:5, Informative)
I spoke in English to many journalists yesterday and the day before (90 journalists registered to cover Wikimania). I spoke to one journalist about our longstanding discussions of how to create a "stable version" or "Wikipedia 1.0". This would not involve substantial changes to how we do our usual work, but rather a new process for identifying our best work.
I spoke in English, and this was translate to German. Then the German was translated back to English, and then translated again into the Slashdot story.
There was no "announcement". We are constantly reviewing our policies and looking for ways to improve, but we have not "announced" anything. We don't even really work that way... if you know how Wikipedia works, it's through a long process of community discussion and consensus building, not through a process of top-down announcements.
No, but asshats have (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia is one of the most awesome things ever to come out of the depths of the internet. It provides up to date, accurate content from a variety of different sources and view points that is subject to the collective scrutiny of the community that maintains it.
It's something like democracy in that everyone has an active hand in it which inspires people to do their best because the wikipedia is as much theirs as anyone else's.
Of course there are always going to be asshats, internet trolls, and other fuckwads who spoil a good thing be being dicks. As with any society, organization, or project that is open and free in nature, there exists the possibility that someone can easily ruin it for everyone.
When this happens the common reaction is to take away some of that freedom in order to maintain what has been created. This is very similar to the US Patriot Act which is theoretically designed to protect the United States be limiting individual freedoms for the greater good. Whether you agree with the approach or not is moot.
Perhaps the best way to handle something so democratic as wikipedia is to have changed content be reviewed by several people who can reject or approve the changes before they go through. Another system akin to the /. moderation system would to give editors who do a good job at wikipedia more control over what they can change and how much they can change it. This means that the best editors will be able to quickly change content if necessary and provide new entries as necessary while preventing some jerk with too much time on his/her hands from doing a lot of damage.
Parent
Re:No, but asshats have (Score:3, Insightful)
And what's to stop groups like "Focus on the Family" from staging an Astroturf campaign to slant certain articles their way.
For example, FoF routinely sends out form-emails to people on their email list (members, freinds of members, etc.) - and instructs the members to email them back to Newspaper editorial pages nationwide. One result of this type of situation was that the FCC was innundated with tens of millions of emails after the Janet Jackson Wardrobe Malfunction, when in
My freedoms end where another's begins. (Score:3, Interesting)
We want to be protected from malicious actions of both others and ourselves!
Defacing of informative wiki content by trolls is a form of censorship [webster.com], where the troll objects to clear, informative content.
P.S. To anyone about to reply "only guvments censor!1!": I linked to a dictionary, go read it.
Re:Wikipedia Needs Fakipedia (Score:4, Informative)
Parent