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Wikipedia Adopting Semi-Protection of Pages
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Dec 17, 2005 05:38 AM
from the countering-the-angry-jerk-effect dept.
from the countering-the-angry-jerk-effect dept.
kizzle (the other one) writes "A major policy change on Wikipedia was just passed 103-4-2 along with Jimbo Wales' endorsement to incorporate a process called 'Semi-protection' only on the most frequent targets of vandalism."
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Wikipedia Adopting Semi-Protection of Pages
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Now they should print Wiki! (Score:1, Funny)
Maybe he is annoyed... (Score:4, Funny)
The wiki (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday September 01 2003, @08:08PM)
Re:The wiki (Score:5, Informative)
The barrier should be low enough that editors who wish to contribute constructively need only wait a short time (on en.wikipedia, the newest 1% of accounts last about 4 days) to be fully active.
While I'm sure there'll be plenty of idiots screaming about how Wikipedia is becoming less 'Free', if anything it's becoming less restricted; up until now, the only possible course of action has been 'full protection', in which case only *admins* can edit the article.
mod parent up (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://brightbyte.de/ | Last Journal: Tuesday November 09 2004, @11:39AM)
I belive that together with the ability to mark "good" versions (which has been discussed a lot, but is still vaporware, AFAIK), the semi protection feature will help to make wikipedia more reliable, while remaining open and free. That's what everybody wants, no?
Re:The wiki (Score:5, Insightful)
There's such thing as knowledge crystallization, which changes the nature of the creation process. At the beginning Wikipedia didn't have mature content, so it didn't needed protection for it. Current immature content benefits from wiki default policy now as much as at the Wikipedia beginnings. But now Wikipedia is not homogeneus, so it doesn't makes sense treating all its content equally. So now it includes the best policy for immature content, and the best policy for mature content; it just happen not to be the same policy for both. Big deal.
This was probably pretty much necessary (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/ | Last Journal: Sunday February 05 2006, @01:51PM)
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]'s been under some pretty harsh pressure lately. Orlowski's articles [theregister.co.uk] in the Register have been referred to here already; when I replied to Orlowski [jasmine.org.uk] he responded with an unrelated allegation that Wikipedia had become a haven for pædophiles [perverted-justice.com].
Quite a lot of people evidently don't like Wikipedia; partly, of course, because its rapid growth is making waves and it promises to grow into an extremely influential (and consequently powerful) source of 'knowledge', but also, I suspect, because 'Jimbo' Wales simply gets up some people's noses.
Re:This was probably pretty much necessary (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/ | Last Journal: Sunday February 05 2006, @01:51PM)
Yup, as this thread shows. But when you look at some [theregister.co.uk] of [perverted-justice.com] the [wikipediaclassaction.org] kooks^Wpeople [216.92.85.60] who [wikipedia-watch.org] are doing it, is makes you think...
The truth is, though, that any good idea that is successful is going to get bashed by the spiteful, the petty, the self-obsessed, and the paranoid. Wikipedia has to show that it's doing something positive about the vandalism/sabotage issue, but apart from that it would be better to just ignore the idiots.
Re:This was probably pretty much necessary (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://brightbyte.de/ | Last Journal: Tuesday November 09 2004, @11:39AM)
Seems like Wikipedia has hit stage 3 in the last weeks.
contributor rating system? (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Saturday August 11, @10:40PM)
Require a login. Allow everyone to make changes initially, but track who makes changes. Allow any contributor with a positive rating over a certain threshold to score changes. If the contributor gets ratings below a certain threshold, they're not allowed to change certain "protected" entries. If the rating drops any lower, they're not allowed to contribute, period.
Anonymous ratings would not be allowed.
Thresholds of positive ratings could be used to determine if someone is allowed to make changes to long-established entries or entries otherwise classed as protected.
There would of course be the potential for moderator wars and as always a really persistant jerk could still corrupt the process, but detecting and correcting abuses might be a bit easier especially if ip addresses are logged to help detect abusers with multiple logins.
Yea, it won't stop the abuses but it would limit the number of people willing to take the effort.
Re:contributor rating system? (Score:5, Funny)
That would have the same effect as in slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
If there's two things Slash and Wiki have taught us, it's:
- collaborative creation is a success. Most people do good work. It's a positive-sum game.
- collaborative restriction is a failure. Most people wield their power to blindly advance their politics. It's a zero-sum game.
Re:That would have the same effect as in slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you misinterpret (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That would have the same effect as in slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Then why is slashdot one of the most popular discussion sites on the web ?
I can't remember reading many discussions where a few people make the same point, and then hundreds of others unanimously agree with them. This is why I think its ridiculous when people talk about the slashdot "groupthink". Think how many times here you've read the word "groupthink" here - that's a lot of people who aren't part of the "groupthinking".
The fact that you made the post to which I'm replying reinforces this. The fact you're (currently) at +5 reinforces it further. I don't agree with your comment. Personally, I think its an effort to use a personal gripe with the slashdot moderation system as a means of promoting a personal "political" belief in lack of restrictions on personal behaviour (which I personally think is a very valid and important principle in many areas).
I'm not complaining about your moderation - you've obviously hit some sort of chord somewhere - but I find it very interesting that the very fact you've been moderated to +5 invalidates the point you were making.
Penny arcade's got an awesome rant up about this (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.atomjax.com/)
When we were first considering making Epic Legends Of The Hierarchs available as a publically manageable satirical metanarrative, we dropped the basic timeline on Wikipedia because I liked the way their software went about things. Of course, a phalanx of pedants leapt into action almost immediately to scour - from the sacred corpus of their data - our revolting fancruft.
That's okay with me. I wasn't aware they thought they were making a real encyclopedia for big people at the time, and if I had, I'd have sought out one of the many other free solutions. I had seen the unbelievably detailed He-Man and Pokémon entries and assumed - like any rational person would - that Pokémaniacs were largely at the rudder of the institution.
I am almost certain that - while they prune their deep mine of trivia - they believe themselves to be engaged in the unfolding of humanity's Greatest Working.
Reponses to criticism of Wikipedia go something like this: the first is usually a paean to that pure democracy which is the project's noble fundament. If I don't like it, why don't I go edit it myself? To which I reply: because I don't have time to babysit the Internet. Hardly anyone does. If they do, it isn't exactly a compliment.
Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions. The fact of the matter is that all sources of information are not of equal value, and I don't know how or when it became impolitic to suggest it. In opposition to the spirit of Wikipedia, I believe there is such a thing as expertise.
The second response is: the collaborative nature of the apparatus means that the right data tends to emerge, ultimately, even if there is turmoil temporarily as dichotomous viewpoints violently intersect. To which I reply: that does not inspire confidence. In fact, it makes the whole effort even more ridiculous. What you've proposed is a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn't exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information.
(Penny Arcade [penny-arcade.com])
Re:Penny arcade's got an awesome rant up about thi (Score:4, Funny)
Holy crap, was that English? I've been out of the U.S. far too long.
Re:Tycho's writing (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://communistposters.com/)
Re:Penny arcade's got an awesome rant up about thi (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://f1-facts.com/)
These guys are so ignorant it's not funny anymore.
We are talking about Penny Arcade, a website for gamers. So they say it's a "waste of time" and only losers have time for something like that? Gamers say that? If Wikipedia-contributors have too much time, what is to be said about gamers? At least Wikipedia-contributors are getting themselves educated as a side-effect but what excuse do gamers have?
It's a hobby.
Some people collect stamps, others play computer games, others contribute to Wikipedia.
But it seems that a hobby is only OK when it's a complete waste of time, but if someone profits of it (like Wikipedia or free software) immediately someone starts namecalling.
Re:Penny arcade's got an awesome rant up about thi (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.haakonnilsen.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday April 06 2004, @06:59AM)
Move along ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Move along ... (Score:4, Interesting)
only minimal changes, which can be dramatic, are not changed due to nobody knows that the fact is false.
There is a blocking feature already and it makes sense to protect some of the pages which are changed to often (Like GW Bush, or 9-11 and similar). Even on that pages you can still contribute.
It is a open dictionary, but nobody claimed ever that there would be no control on it.
btw. even slashdot adpoted some stupid graphics to protect posts just as everybody discusses it on WP.
This actually helps on some pages (Score:5, Informative)
When the spammer hits again, this particular for of protection will stop the spammer cold. This does nothing to stop the kind of subtle vandalism where someone falsely states that someone helped assassinate Kennedy, for example. But it does help stem a particular problem some wikipedia pages encounter.
Excellent (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.crazysquirrel.com/index.jspx)
Perhaps now we can get on with writting a free encylopedia rather than arguing about who has the ability to edit pages. I'm surpuised it took them so long to get to this point. If parallels are drawn to software development it would be like letting any Tom, Dick or Harry submit a patch to the kernel, and have it included automatically, regardless of whether it even compiled.
While it would be nice to live in a world where people didn't abuse things like wikipedia that just isn't going to happen. The problem is that a very small number of people can do a lot of damage in a short space of time when it's completely open. I wouldn't be shocked if they moved to a completely moderated system before long.
This is a lower version of protection that exists (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Thursday May 05 2005, @03:31AM)
It's pretty much splitting the difference between the full protection (admins only) that already exists and just keeping more power away from anons and newer users. So now, to use a Windows comparison, there are pages that Administrators can change (full protection), Power Users (semi-protected, NEW!), and the overwhelming majority of the rest can be edited by guest users.
Now, they'll have to deal with the trolls who will register craploads of accounts for use in the future against the semi-protected pages. They're trying to make people/media happy on one end, yet ending up feeding the trolls on the other end.
I love wikipedia, even with the exploits available due to the anon & instant user editing ability. Considering the overwhelming amount non-trolled information, it's pretty incredible that it hasn't been abused quite a bit more.
I hope that they don't pursue this much farther. IMHO, anything more will trigger the trolls into being (even) more subtle and keep their bellies much more full.
Taking the heat off Wikipedia - Wiki.Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://itheresies.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday April 28 2004, @12:06AM)
wiki.slashdot.org : WikiSlashdot
Add a Wiki plugin [onlamp.com] to slashode [slashcode.com] and host it on slashdot. This it will attract the trolls away from Wikipedia and introduce a persistant layer to the debate that takes place on slashdot.
Individual changes could be moderated just like on slashdot and the user could elect to ignore changes with a low score.
wikipediaclassaction.org (Score:2)
They have some kind of axe to grind and I'd really like to know what it is. Apparently they have some sort of organizational affiliation.
Re:wikipediaclassaction.org (Score:4, Informative)
(http://edgeofvision.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday June 20, @08:07PM)
It looks like the article is up for a deletion vote at the moment (some consider it non-encyclopedic), but there's actually a pretty good Wikipedia article on the Wikipedia class action suit [wikipedia.org]. Here's the first few paragraphs:
WikipediaClassAction.org is a website that claims to represent people wishing to file a class action suit against the Wikimedia Foundation to hold the creators/founders of Wikipedia legally responsible for malicious postings made by contributors to Wikipedia that are claimed to have caused damages to other individuals and groups.
Allegedly started by the owners of QuakeAID, wikipediaclassaction.org (domain name registered on December 11, 2005 by Jennifer Monroe) refers to a 2005 incident involving John Seigenthaler Sr. who was identified by a Wikipedia article between May and September of 2005 as having been implicated in the John F. Kennedy assassination and the Robert F. Kennedy assassination.
The site claims to be "currently gathering complaints from the entire Internet community, including individuals, corporations, partnerships, etc., who believe that they have been defamed and or who have been or are the subject of anonymous and malicious postings to the popular online encyclopedia WikiPedia."
I should add that QuakeAID [wikipedia.org], the company behind the suit, is generally considered by many to be a fake/illegitimate charity. They seem to be upset that information about this illegitimacy is in their Wikipedia article, although people from the company have done quite a bit of editing on it.
Balance (Score:1)
It's probably a good idea after the public controversy over "whats his name". On one hand no matter what changes are endorsed their will always be vandalists. I don't like to imagine the kind of people that get their kicks changing wiki articles but they are and always will be "out there". On the other hand it being free and open allows it to grow much faster than traditional methods. I suppose the trick is to find a balance of protections to deter vandalists as much as possible while leaving the foundation of wiki alone.
Allowing only registered members to edit articles is a good policy. As is disallowing or requiring special considerations for editting pages that are common vandlist targets, like Michael Jackson.
Personally I think editting should take longer, even if all the information isn't required. I think if you had to fill out a form before making an edit it'd keep some vandal from swinging by and making abunch of changes across multiple articles. If they had to fill out abunch of crap they wouldn't bother. Those types tend to be lazy and not all of them are willing to fill out an extra page of info just to make a few potty humor changes. People that genuinely want to add an article or edit one probably won't mind filling out an extra page considering they just did some "work" editting the page.
Just my two wooden nickels.
Wikipedia's reliability (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's one idea: Separate articles into "reviewed" and "unreviewed" versions, much like the stable/unstable version proposed by some , but combine that with a reputation system almost like Slashdot karma. Like Slashdot, articles and users will never be outright censored or blocked, only *marked*. For example: Once enough people review and approve a proposed "stable" version of an article, that stable version will be made the default view of the article, with a note at the top saying something like "You're viewing a peer-reviewed version of this article. It has a reputation score of 644 and is likely to be accurate.
It has been reviewed and approved by 524 registered users, 4 certified users, and 1034 anonymous users. For your information, this version has also received 13 disapproval votes; you may view the voters' reasons on the article's Talk page.
For the latest non-reviewed version of this article (which may be more current but less accurate), click here."
On the other hand, new or otherwise unreviewed articles would stay unstable, with a note saying "This article has not been reviewed. Its accuracy has not been vouched for and it is suggested that you use the information contained here with discretion and caution."
Basically, this would mean that:
1. Most articles that visitors see at any given time would be a reviewed, vandalism-free version containing the relatively current consensus view of the majority of registered users and contributors.
2. Anybody can still make edits, and anybody can still see the latest unstable version if they want to.
3. Unreviewed articles will lose trustworthiness, so it will be important for people to examine and review new articles.
As for the reputation system itself: Users' reputations would start at 0 (anonymous/unregistered users) and then gradually increase both with time and with each new contribution they make. Certain individuals -- certified scientists, professors, etc -- could also be given field-specific bonuses in the fields they're knowledgeable in (but of course, the certification/bonuses would have to apply equally to people on either sides of any issue). The certification must be done in a professional yet fair way, such as requiring official diplomas from universities or proof of employment from organizations. I suspect this will be rather difficult but not impossible. Anyway, this optional certification is just to give experts more of a voice than the layperson -- but only in terms of reviews, not editing abiilty. And anybody can still gain a better reputation with time and effort; the experts just start out with a higher initial bonus.
Conversely, reputations will be decreased whenever an edit is completely reverted by another registered user. More serious incidents of vandalism or deliberate false information, when reported by multiple registered users with a minimum of X reputation each, will severely decrease the vandal's reputation. As a protection against abuse, reputation loss will be removed if the reverter/reporter who caused it loses a certain amount of reputation himself/herself within, say, 3 months. (So if somebody suddenly goes on a revert-spree or a reportfest, other users can report that person and once enough people do so, his abusive reports will be removed completely from other users' reputations.)
As for articles, their reputation would just be a score based on how many users voted for and against it, weighed by user status and reputation (anon votes would not count for much, registered users would count for some, certified users would count for some more, high-reputation users even more).
This syst
Another Wiki with qualification (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://defoam.net/ | Last Journal: Sunday September 28 2003, @10:18AM)
A group of medical practitioners are establishing the ganfyd (it is full of notes from/for your doctor(s)) medical reference wiki (URL:http://www.ganfyd.org).
We aimed from the start at an effect distinct from those of The Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/ [wikipedia.org]) and the medical encyclopedia at URL:http://www.wikimd.org/ in two ways:-
Other small differences include scope - ours is of and for doctors of the UK, Australia and Canada reflecting the membership of the forum in which the project was sparked (URL:http://www.doctors.netuk/ (closed forum)) and the licence required to enforce the restriction of qualification - I wrote a modification of one of the stock Creative Commons licences for this URL:http:/osborne.defoam.net/~akm/ - rather than the GFDL.
We hope, and expect, that these design differences will produce the effect desired, although we will undoubtedly modify them as time and events indicate.
Good News (Score:2)
Attackers will get smarter (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.ciphergoth.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday January 14 2007, @06:32AM)
In practice, on the other hand, there are probably two or three people worldwide who are prepared to put time, effort and forward planning into attacking Wikipedia, as opposed to the thousands of casual vandals who will be dissuaded by the loss of instant gratification. So despite its theoretical shortcomings this will probably work very well in practice.
voting? (Score:2, Interesting)
This will at least make vandalism much harder, while at the same time there is no barrier for proposing changes, as it should.
Entropy is a bigger problem than vandalism (Score:5, Insightful)
This happens alot with writing by committees, and isn't unique to Wikipedia. It just gets worse as it gets older. Wikipedia has collected more facts over time, but it reads worse.
There's no cure for this except getting experts and real editors with good language skills, and they're hard to find as anyone who's tried to staff a tech docs team knows. But this runs counter to the "anyone can do it" philosophy.
So no amount of tweaking the processes helps - you simply need skillful people. The ex-Britannica guy (McHenry?) had a good line, which is that Wikipedia can get better, or Wikipedia can keep the utopians - but it can't do both.
p2p Wikipedia (Score:1)
What Wikipedia is... (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday November 13, @10:52AM)
Frankly the whole discussion is pointless, because I don't think Wikipedia knows what it is, and until it has some firm direction and some logical guidance all it is, is a mob scene. A great deal of the data there is valid (I reference it a lot, after carefully reading the articles), but a system that allows anyone to edit it makes it ripe for abuse. Imagine if the Founding Fathers of the USA made the Constitution re-writable on-the-fly like Wikipedia: chaos! But they knew that the Constitution could not remain static if it was to keep up with change, so they wrote in a mechanism to allow for changes, but measured changes. This same sort of system needs to be applied to Wikipedia, a kind of group peer-review, to lower the GIGO factor.
Another more wiki-like Idea (Score:1)
There's an easier fix I've described before (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikipedia already tracks past revisions of an article. Each article has a revision history. What you get when use wikipedia is the latest version of the document. The most simplistic and obvious fix for vandalism is this: Whenever someone submits a revision to a document, that revision has to remain the latest version (with no more edits by that person or anyone else) for 24 hours before it becomes the version which is shown to visitors as the main version. If another edit happens before the 24 hours is up, the clock is reset and it's another 24 hours before that version can become the main one (and the one currently showing still hasn't changed). What this means is that "edit wars" flip-flopping content back and forth in periods of hours will be invisible to the wiki-browsing public (Whereas editors/contributors always have the option to view the "raw" most-recent version of course).
We already have plenty of "good guys" at wikipedia who go watch the list of recently-edited documents for vandalism or inappropriateness and correct it - the problem is just that they cannot get to them all in time. This gives them a 24-hour window to catch the problem and fight it back. Only when the doc "settles down" for 24+ hours will an updated revision be available to the world. And it requires no user ratings or moderation system beyond what has already been in place, or special priveleges, or anything of the sort.
THe only real problem with this is news / current events. But there's already a seperate wikinews for that kind of thing, and you could always categorically handle "current events" docs differently. This is a system for protection encyclopedic articles.
This story is extremely confused (Score:5, Informative)