Wikipedia Announces Tighter Editorial Control 407
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."
Wondering the same... (Score:1, Interesting)
I wonder if this means that various Wikipedia forks will be gaining a lot of contributors?
Re:Isn't that an oxymoron? (Score:1, Interesting)
my 2cs
Grammar checking, too? Please?? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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.
Sad that people would deface the site (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Rate of vandalism is up (Score:2, Interesting)
Moreover, and to me more serious, are the deletionists, whose agenta is to cull all they can on a darwinian principle. This annoys me in particular since they succeeded in wiping one of my articles. First attempt that it was "fan work" I managed to hold off, anohter attempt was made and I stopped that too. Then someone said it should be merged. So they agreed (quickly voted on), set up a redirect and did not merge. In effect the deletionists won the day, the article gone and I lost.
The issue is process. There is no good process (what passes for process has too many holes to qualify, as I illustrated above) and therefore no QA is possible.
Baselining is not available, so what once was a featured article can be hacked apart and lowered in quality, unless the deletionists get there first. Locating the once featured article is hard.
I believe the increased visibility and popularity has made the vandals creep out and attack.
Rated history menu (Score:1, Interesting)
- visitors
- members
- recognized dedicated scientists
Then have each page contain a history tree menu which shows you the ratings for all entries over a month old. Now just pick a revision of the article which has high ratings. Read it and learn.
Optionally check recent changes to see if anything worthwhile has been added, but remain highly skeptical.
Dennis_p
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.
I could prefer stable to frozen (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sad that people would deface the site (Score:2, Interesting)
Slashdot's amusing position on Wikipedia (Score:0, Interesting)
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.
Re:Interesting, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Good point, but we make new discoveries about ancient "historical" data all the time.
For example, wasn't Galileo declared innocent of heresy only this century?
However, peer review of substantial pages is probably a good idea, especially for those which "should" be static by default.
You can have permissive peer review - where people are notified of a change in a subject area they "watch" and have a window of time to either deny or approve it - when more than a threshold denies it, it goes to the official review committee - or you could have active peer review - where changes must be actively approved before they see the light of day.
Dilemma? What dilemma?! (Score:2, Interesting)
In the past year, the growth of English language articles has been approximately exponential, the user (and especially administrator) growth will soon be outstripped. Over 50,000 new articles have been created in the past two months - and you can bet these new articles will be of obscurer and obscurer content. However an introduction of "stable" fixed pages will counter this - a single person accomplished in study of the Dark Ages could single-handedly create a couple of articles and request a stablization of said pages.
Wikipedia is self advertised free encyclopedia. This is evidenced by the extensive arguments on the talk pages. How can one prevent trolls and malicious users from screwing up wikis while allowing them to be constantly improved upon? Its a tough problem that only a complex system could fix.
If one looks at all the major articles, they seem pretty much complete. Eg. The article on marijuana is practically perfect and all encompassing. It could be rendered "stable". But what of its legality? Thoughtful editors have even created a "legal issues" page that can be edited once marijuana is legalized (while only a very minor mention is required on the stable page - easily obtained upon request to an admin). This sort of catagorizing could help more and more pages become "stable", thus preventing any trolls.
As somebody who has created about 10 articles, I've only once ran into a troll. A grammar troll specifically, who took a joy in subtly entering some typos in the article for "Earth 2160" a soon-to-be-released Polish game. I corrected his edit and all was well after that. Controversial topics (Ie. George W. Bush, War in Iraq, Michael Moore) will have a greatly increased amount of trolls, but reversals occur within minutes, even seconds, the editors have all this under control.
Stable pages are a fine idea, while sacrificing a minimal amount of freedom. Most minor, obscure pages should be rendered stable immediately, and some major pages too.
The idea of trolls overrunning wikipedia is invalid. I'd wager that the majority of trolls have already impacted the site (a lot of trolls are quite net savvy, and would be aware of wikipedia by now), though wikipedia's popularity is skyrocketing, the vast majority of new users will be there to help/use rather than to hinder - in the long run it seems.
Wikipedia is very close to becoming the finest encyclopedia in the world. Its much better than a lot of its counterparts already, and as time passes, the amount of new articles will inevitably stabilize. By 2008 the encyclopedia should have attained near-perfect status in all but the current events (which is a constant process obviously), and should be renowned everywhere for its content.
Re:What is the best way to implement this? (Score:2, Interesting)
Keep the current system, but give each article an "update waiting period", based on the article's recent volatility. An article that never gets changed might be 24 hours. An active one might be 30 minutes. A very active one might be 5 minutes.
Whenever an article is modified, the new version doesn't become the "current" version until the waiting period has passed. The article police will have a window in which to fix things, and the vandalism incentive (instant gratification) will go way down.
A simple version of this idea (all articles have the same update waiting period) could be implemented very quickly. A more complex version (period based on volatility) might not even add any value. Either way, no additional processes or people or work would be required, and the problem would be largely solved.
Re:all men shouting and killing and revelling in j (Score:2, Interesting)
I live in Canada which is in the Americas.
I see no reason a fifth-grader should find an article on bondage/sado-masochism when enquiring about sex or reproduction. While adults may play whatever games they wish without hurting anyone, we attempt to teach youngsters to respect each other and bondage is likely contrary to our criminal code so is way beyond community standards here. If it were just for high-school and there was no legal issue, I might have left such stuff in. Youngsters need information, but just the basics. That is what I meant by "too open-minded". I am pretty open-minded, but I work in small communities in publicly funded schools and have to consider paedagogical value and community standards. Any teacher or student who needs such material can find it on their own without me providing it.
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.
Re:No, but asshats have (Score:3, Interesting)
That's actually a good idea. An editor with a high rating could roll back an entry to erase vandalism, then lock that entry for, say, a week. Most trolls don't have much of an attention span, so after a week (or several weeks of the same thing running) they'd probably wander off to find new people to make miserable.
Others who wanted to modify the page could be informed that editor X locked it until date Y due to vandalism. The rational among us would approve of the lock and come back in a week to try again; no harm done.
Max
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
Re:Wondering the same... (Score:3, Interesting)
There are plenty of historical examples of ridiculous content, especially in Britannica which was originally written to glorify the British monarch and all his dominons...
The main problem with wiki is that there are contentious issues where the system does break down. But even there the content tends to be rather more useful than you would get in Britannica where articles are much more likely to only give one side of the argument.
I don't like the idea of freezing contentious content. Earlier today I was reading the Robert Novak page and found that someone had already updated it to describe the hissy-fit walkout he threw. That is good and something you cannot get from any other source. Some pages are locked for obviously partisan reasons.
I think that what they need to do is to introduce time delays for pages that are mega-contenious. So graffiti can be removed before it makes it to the main display page.
Wikipedia is a cabal (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikipedia's is owned by a millionaire who is a big fan of Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises and so forth. This should begin to give you an idea of where it's head is at. He has appointed people to positions of power like admin, bureaucrat, arbitrator, and mediator, more often of a like mind then not. One of these people is part of the far-right Moonie cult.
Then we have the natural bias of an English-speaking audience of people mostly from England and its former and current colonies (the US, Canada, Ireland, Australia etc.) On top of this, the editors tend to be male, white, professional and whatnot. That this bias exists is recognized at a high level. But what is done about it? Most editors who are of more of a say world-view than US/UK-centric view, left than right and so forth are persecuted. Most left-wing admins have been persecuted - Secretlondon (sent a nasty e-mail by Jimbo Wales), 172, and Everyking. There are a few more who are more moderate, some have privately told me more recently that Wikipedia is going bonkers in this respect, that the inmates are taking over the asylum.
I believe wikis can survive only with cooperation. A wiki, like Slashdot, can survive mostly good users and a few vandals. But when say 30% of Wikipedia is left-wing, with 70% being right-wing or what in the US would be called centrist, you have a problem that is not going away. It just gets worse, really.
My prediction is that since wikis need cooperation, the controversial categories (history, society, life) will break off into separate wikis - right-leaning ones like Wikinfo [wikinfo.org] and left-leaning ones like Dkosopedia [dkosopedia.com] or the even further left Red Wiki [redapollo.org].
This is inevitable. The edit wars over the Israel/Palestine pages mimics the actual war going on. The arbitrators are just becoming more and more overburdened over time, and these sections are becoming more and more chaotic and sectarian. On the other hand, articles about scientific and mathematic concepts like quantum mechanics [wikipedia.org] are doing just fine. I think eventually, Wikipedia itself will see the wisdom of the Kahanists and jihadis leaving for their own respective wikis. It will be better for everyone.