Wikipedia 2.0, Now With Trust?

USB EVDO writes "The online encyclopedia is set to trial two systems aimed at boosting readers' confidence in its accuracy. Over the past few years, a series of measures aimed at reducing the threat of vandalism and boosting public confidence in Wikipedia have been developed. Last month a project designed independently of Wikipedia, called WikiScanner, allowed people to work out what the motivations behind certain entries might be by revealing which people or organizations the contributions were made by. Meanwhile the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that oversees the online encyclopedia, now says it is poised to trial a host of new trust-based capabilities."

An interesting experiment

Wikipedia is good enough for personal information or simply a quick look, i.e. unimportant information, however I doubt it will ever become the encyclopaedia it supposedly hopes of becoming. However having said that, it is certainly an interesting experiment and look into human nature (or at least American nature) with this trust-based scheme simply making the experiment more interesting.

Re:An interesting experiment

The problem is that many other reference sites on various topics, developed privately by informed and qualified individuals, have now folded since the maintainers thought Wikipedia superseded hosting such information on one's own website. And now, such information on Wikipedia can be vandalized at any moment right before someone would go look at the page, and kooks can twist the page to their own ends.

Re:An interesting experiment

I don't know. Personally, I have found exactly what I have wanted from wikipedia every time I have looked into it - on articles ranging from people, geography or technology. Every time I wanted somebody to know something, wikipedia has never failed me. Granted, you may see traces/evidences of vandalism, but give me a system without any amount of noise in it. While you jump up and down shouting 'because anybody can edit it, it can not be trusted', I can simply not think any other website/reference/system capable of replacing wikipedia. And what I find funny is that you - the doubters - end up using it nonetheless.

Give me an alternative to wikipedia with less noise in it, or shut the fuck up.

Re:An interesting experiment

Wikipedia, if you'll allow me to use emotional buzzwords for a minute as if I were a politician in a debate, is a great example of democracy and freedom of speech. The truth is, we'd like all signal and no noise, but to try and rid yourself of all noise, you're going to lose some signal. By forbidding a certain action/author/etc. on Wikipedia, you may ban 100 vandals, but you also ban 1 extremely useful editor. To let the truly insightful speak, you need to let the truly braindead have their say, too.

The best way to deal with this is our old favorite saying, "citation needed." Like any information source, you need to ask "where did this information come from?" Using Wikipedia for serious work is a bad idea... directly... but it is a good place to find links to other places with more direct credibility.

Not to mention one should always check the "recent edits" pages for signs of vandals.

Wikipedia is imperfect, but so are the creatures that make it, so it's to be expected. It has a vast array of information that is hard to find anywhere else, and one of the best ways to look up "Amazon Wildlife" without running into horrible fetish porn sites along the way. So as long as people are willing to read and think and have a grain of salt ready, it will remain a valuable and interesting source of information.

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Personally, I have found exactly what I have wanted from wikipedia every time I have looked

How do you know? You found something, you read something, it passed the sniff test ... now, what is the truth value of what you found?

Personally, I love Wikip

Re:An interesting experiment

Unlike many encyclopedias, Wikipedia actually requires editors cite sources. All added information is required to have a source, otherwise someone else will come by and add a [citation needed] notice. You can check out all the articles that don't have sources cited. [wikipedia.org]

Try clicking on the numbers next to each sentence next time you stop by.

Re:An interesting experiment

Actually to be sure you'd also have to check those references[1]. Because otherwise you still might fall for fake information[2] or original research pulled out of one's ass[3], as is proven by Murphy[4]. And by the way, one plus one is three[5].

[1] April Fool: What you can do with references. Journal of Applied Fake 26 (1987), 424
[2] Joe Sixpack: Resources I trust. Yellow Press Magazine 25 (2001), 321
[3] A. S. Smith: Pulling and pushing. Yesterday's Research 42 (2010), 1876
[4] Jack Murphy: What can go wrong. Oops Conference Procedings 7 (1991), 112
[5] Frank Fake: New Arithmetics, Page 42. Stupid Press, New York 1976, ISBN 0-123-45678-9

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I commonly visit Wikipedia to learn details of a specific algorithm. Sometimes (actually, rather often) I'll read the article and I'll see at least one statement that seems to contradict the rest of the paragraph it's in simply by having or lacking an extr

Re:An interesting experiment

Give me an alternative to wikipedia with less noise in it, or shut the fuck up.

Just because you don't have an answer, doesn't mean that there isn't a problem.

Re:An interesting experiment

Every time this issue comes up, I make the same suggestion: the Wikipedia should branch into something like "stable" and "unstable" versions. Let the kooks vandalize the unstable version, but try to get trusted editors and fact-checkers to check-in changes to the stable branch.

First, this keeps the kooks out. Second, if you limit trust strictly enough, then you limit the number of people who can do damage to the stable branch. You set up a review process for those people, which should be easier since there are fewer of them and they're somehow in your "trust" system. Give them instructions that all information that's presented as fact needs to be cited to a reliable source, and have someone watching the watchmen. If any of your fact checkers or experts violate their trust, revoke their trust.

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Stable and unstable versions exist on the German wikipedia, but the English (main) Wikipedia users and admins have been very resistant to the idea.

Re:An interesting experiment

This is incorrect. Stable versions do not yet exist on the German Wikipedia.

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ather than merging changes from one branch to the other, like in software development, however, I think WP would be better off tagging a version of an article as stable, and keeping the latest version as unstable....[snip]... An automated trust network (l

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The main problem I see here is that it doesn't lend itself to creating coherent articles. If you start dropping out particular edits because they don't match some set criteria, then I think many articles would end up more nonsensical and less coherent. R

Wikipedia: Pop Culture Resource

If you want a quick -- nay, exhaustive -- overview of the 5th season of "Buffy," or come across a reference to "Boba Fett" in an online forum and want to learn more, Wikipedia is the site to hit. It's value as a font of pop culture knowledge is augmented

Re:Wikipedia: Pop Culture Resource

I dunno. Out of the 30 articles featured and to-be-featured on the main page in September, 7 are popular culture articles. (An article on D&D, the "Bus Uncle" video clip, the pilot episode of Smallville, OutKast's "Hey Ya," Alison Bechdel's graphic novel "Fun Home, the Indian film Lage Raho Munna Bhai, and tomorrow's featured article on Blood Sugar Sex Magik) Yes, that list skews a bit geek (Though the Bechdel graphic novel is about as far from a geek comic as one can get), but there's still 23 featured articles this month on such geeky topics as meteorology, European rugby, Soviet history, and American industrial disasters.

It's more accurate to say that we, compared to similar reference works, have a disproportionately good coverage of geeky topics. That does not appear to have come at the cost of our coverage of other topics.

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Except for the notability crackdown. Unless the 5th season of Buffy is notable in some way, articles about it will probably be deleted with prejudice. I used to go to wikipedia to read trivia about every single episode of Futurama, but they've started cr

Re:An interesting experiment

Except, generally speaking, we do OK. Yes, there will still be vandalized/spammed entries. But, as someone who uses Wikipedia frequently both as a reader and as an editor, I can tell you, I rarely run into an article with transparently serious problems. Thus far, as many new techniques and workarounds as trolls, pranksters, and scammers have figured out, none have been able to overcome the one technique we've figured out - having a shitload of well-intentioned volunteers who are broadly empowered to fix things.

Re:An interesting experiment

Actually I think alot of you miss a vitally important part of wikipedia when used to serious research: The references at the bottom of the page.

I would never actually quote wikipedia as a source in serious documents, but you don't have as a lot of the best pages have a bibliography at the bottom which quite often refers to thoroughly respected publications.

Re:An interesting experiment

Yes, kids use Brittannica as a primary source, along with other Encyclopedias. People don't start citing research papers or hard data until college (and even then, only in Grad School for a lot of colleges - sad huh?). The reason it's acceptable, is because the Encyclopedia companies try to ensure all the information is accurate, and then print it. It can't be vandalized later, so it's generally more trustworthy than wikipedia is assuming it's not a really old edition.

Re:An interesting experiment

Yes, kids use Brittannica as a primary source, along with other Encyclopedias. People don't start citing research papers or hard data until college (and even then, only in Grad School for a lot of colleges - sad huh?). The reason it's acceptable, is because the Encyclopedia companies try to ensure all the information is accurate, and then print it. It can't be vandalized later, so it's generally more trustworthy than wikipedia is assuming it's not a really old edition.

You say this as if it's a fact carved in stone, that can't be changed. If Wikipedia replaced Britannica for initial research, but teachers stick to their guns about not accepting it as an actual source (which they should not), perhaps it will force more students to start doing real research at a younger age. Using Britannica as a source seems just as inherently lazy as using Wikipedia, and I don't think that should be acceptable even at the high-school level.

It's not like it's especially hard to drill down to real sources from most WP articles. Most controversial ones have citations, or at least a list of suggested reading, near the bottom. (And some articles, like ones on particular recent events, have direct links to primary source material, which you don't typically get in a traditional encyclopedia entry.) In some ways, it's a lot easier to begin doing real research from WP than it is from Britannica, and I think WP does a better job of encouraging skepticism and fact-checking skills.

Re:An interesting experiment

I actually know someone who is a lecturer, and when he sets papers, goes on the relevant Wikipedia entries and inserts misinformation. Then, when this nonsense crops up in papers, marks them down in a "haha pwnt" sort of way. He says it's a way of teaching people not to rely on such sources.

Of course, this raises questions of ethics. He's sabotaging a source of information in order to "teach a lesson" to his students. Wouldn't his time be better spent improving said source of information? isn't that his job, after all?

fundamental flaw

Er, won't wikiscanner just move the corporate/political vandals to home? This is leaving out the fact that wikipedia will never be seriously trusted due to it's open nature, to be taken seriously requires it to close off public access and to change to specialised, academic authorship - something that would corrupt it's mission.

Irony:

Seeing a 'Is Fox News fair and balanced?' poll as the ad for this story makes me amused.

Won't change a thing

I stopped editing wikipedia due to some extremely biased, shrill, and bludgeon-you-with-the-rules (claim you were violating the rules when you weren't) editors.

One of these editors was an admin, another was on ArbCom. It was basically a group of people who would camp one specific subject and keep it edited to support the cultural status quo/their religion's position on the article. They did it through keeping information out of the article that would cast the subject in the disfavorable light it should have, and does in most of the non-english speaking world, and some of the english speaking world.

These individuals would probably pass whatever trust-checking mechanism.

The truth is not reached via consensus.

Same thing here

I tried adding something once to an article but they kept bludgeoning me and removing it due to that it wasn't referenced. I did reference it to a reliable source but I put it in a "External Links" as I couldn't add it to the citations/sources without bei

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And I got bludgeoned for adding and improving references. By people who refused to state what the case was about and why they were voting, although the rules require them to.

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You're right, truth is not reached via consensus. But then, truth is not reached via authority either. In fact, I can't think of any set path which will always arrive and truth and never falsehood. If you have, please share, since it would lead to a hug

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I wholeheartedly agree. And am in exactly the same position, I'm sure there are many of us.

The issue of trust is not one of sock puppetry, viral marketing, vandalism nor shill behavior of contributors. That is only to be expected -- and is of course abs

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I stopped editing Wikipedia BECAUSE of their obsession with "being legit". It got really tiresome to look through pages with nearly every sentence marked "citation needed". Or to come back and find that whole paragraphs have been stricken from pages beca

Re:Won't change a thing

The whole 'notability' requirement was one that really irritated me. I would have thought 'usefulness' was a much better standard for an encyclopaedia with no real size constraints. If a page is getting hits from people reading it, then it should count as sufficiently notable to remain, and not be deleted because it doesn't meet someone's standards for important. It's not like it's wasting shelf space...

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I stopped editing wikipedia due to some extremely biased, shrill, and bludgeon-you-with-the-rules (claim you were violating the rules when you weren't) editors.

Recently, there was an anonymous editor on the Mousepad [wikipedia.org] article that was accusing regular editors under similar reasoning - in particular, making claims of pushing conjecture and plagiarism. When that editor was asked to provide a citation behind those c

Re:Truth vs consensus

Truth by consensus? That's not how the scientific world works. There's the whole experimental model and reproducibility of experiments that leads to consensus.

Re:Truth vs consensus

Well, anyone who reads self-help books has a problem with understanding reality, let alone truth. Let's examine this wishy-washy new age idea that truth is a consensus consisting of a lot of compromises. I think that this idea is completely flawed on every level. You obviously do not. What consensus do we reach; that it's only partly a bunch of shit?

To back your point up you mention that things like "history" work less well than things like "thermodynamics". Do you really believe this is because people understand each other's views on science subjects more than arts subjects? That a consensus position can more easily be reached?

The basic problem with this theory of truth by consensus is that it assumes that truth is not discrete, and it can be reached by majority voting. In many subjects truth is discrete, and the voting model is closer to winner-takes-all. The reason that the truth crystallizes in this manner is because it is objectively testable. This is why we refer to the set of things that behaves in this manner - science. That which can be studied by the scientific method.

Furthermore, I think that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what wikipedia's purpose is. It has very explicit design goals, using your terms, it attempts to construct articles that have all of the known facts. That it, is ignores "understanding" as you put it, or POV as wiki puts it. If a fact can be attributed to a respectable source then it goes in. Understanding is left as an exercise for the reader.

You miss the point that wiki is better for science, because in terms of establishing what the facts are, science subjects are the low hanging fruit. History (for example) is harder because the facts are not always in an objectively testable form, and usually have to pried from subjective observation. An ideal wikipedia article is not a "compromise" between all of the opinions that went into it - it is a collection of all of the facts that could be verified regardless of whether or not the contributors agreed upon them.

Better Living Through Benjamins

1. Pay contributors, i.e., give them revenue. Even micro-payments will do, pennies. (The added side-benefit of this is that it means contributors will most likely need paypal accounts, which most likely means they will be "of age:" No more changing entries as result of bets made in the back of the school bus.)

2. Fire contributors who screw up, depriving them of that revenue.

3. Problem solved.

Anything else is a hippy-dippy feel-good buzz-word Web-X-point-something-or-other that begins with the letter "cluster."

Re:Better Living Through Benjamins

Wikipedia gets hundreds of edits per minute. I don't think even micropayments are going to be cost-effective.

Re:Better Living Through Benjamins

Plus, any kind of payment system would have people trying to game it, to the detriment of quality - if Wikipedia paid by the edit, they'd have people dragging out trivial changes through as many separate edits as possible, making the history tab practically unusable.

Whereas on the other hand, if Wikipedia were to pay by amount of content added, this would be likely to lead to the rather undesirable consequence that editors of the aforementioned Internet-based encyclopedia might pad out their edits through the utilization of wholly unnecessary verbiage, guided by the realization that this practice would vastly increase their character count and therefore result in a larger payment to be made to the editors in question, granting to them a larger share of their economy's purchasing power - considered by many to be a desirable state of affairs, and certain to in some cases override any aesthetic misgivings that they might otherwise have had regarding the practice of composing overly long sentences such as this one.

Wikipedia is fine how it is..

There is nothing wrong with Wikipedia as it is. I have never trusted traditional encylopedias more than Wikipedia. There is often much more information available in Wikipedia than in a traditional encyclopedia. Furthermore the this comment is just plain dumb "Last month a project designed independently of Wikipedia, called WikiScanner, allowed people to work out what the motivations behind certain entries might be by revealing which people or organisations the contributions were made by." Who gives a crap who made the edit I'm only concerned with the accuracy or value of the information present; if you believe everything you read no amount of academic authorship is going to help anyone. I for one like to listen to whatever anyone has to say on any subject be they retarded or wearing a tin foil hat or if they are teaching at university.

Flagged revisions on Wikipedia / mediawiki.org

Here is Wikipedia's page on Flagged revisions [wikipedia.org]
Extension:FlaggedRevs on mediawiki.org [mediawiki.org]

rfta

And yet the simplest and most effective quality control, requiring registration, is still considered sacrilege to the Wikipedia overlords...

Link to the actual New Scientist article

Instead of using a link to a sub-optimal blog site, how about a link to the actual New Scientist article. [newscientist.com]

Interesting article

I like De Alfaro's statistical approach of ranking both blocks of text and editors.

I also like the approach of checking IP addresses, although I was caught in that: earlier this year I added an article on machine learning, but someone from my ISP had done vandalism; I was blocked for a few days until I went through their system; no problem, just a delay.

The whole topic of trust is a very interesting problem, one that also occurs on web sites, the semantic web, etc. (Imagine trying to perform reasoning with RDF on the web when some contains fake information).

I (slightly) embarrassed myself last night by sending a link to a parody article to a few friends and family, not realizing that it was a parody - I had to send out a "never mind" email this morning.

I have mixed feelings about private anonymous use of the web vs. the benefits to knowing who people are. I very recently turned off anonymous posting on my web blog - too many anonymous posts offered opinion that I doubt the posters would express if they represented themselves.

As an open platform (hopefully forever), the Internet will evolve in interesting ways :-)

Note

Trust is reliability. The problem is that (as others mention below) trust, truth, and fact are not subject to deviation or consensus. No matter HOW much some want it to be. The problem with Wikipedia is everything is subject to groupthink review and approval.

Science isn't. Facts aren't. The sky is blue, the planet is billiions of years old, two airplanes flown by terrorists brought down the World Trade Center, intellegient design is myth.

If enough people say otherwise aggressively enough, though, Wikipedia--even if they don't outright say otherwise--will leave it gray enough to be contested.

No longer everyone's knowledge, now just citations

I now find contributing to Wikipedia unbearable. At one time, everyone was supposed to contribute what they knew. It was a place for the world to create a new form of reference based on everyone's knowledge. Now, I find that if I contribute about things I know, I am told to find a citation. Thus, incorrect information with citations is allowed on, and good information without citations is removed. The goal is to look academic (like tradition resources) and not to let everyone share (like it originally was). It was incredibly frustrating to have people who had no idea what they were talking about start telling me that I was in the wrong for changing things.

I can understand people wanting to make sure that the right stuff is put on the wikipedia. But shouldn't it be people with experience in the subject matter of the topic who go through and find what is wrong? Instead it seems like people attach themselves to articles and feel like rules changes in the wikipedia give them the power to control articles and show their academic formatting superiority, even when they know nothing about the topic. I still use the wikipedia some, but this change has actually made me lose some of my trust in it. Whereas before the wikipedia more openly admitted that it was imperfect and I took it for what it was, now it pretends to be perfect and in order to do so is reducing its validity and I distrust it for that pretension.

Re:No longer everyone's knowledge, now just citati

It is true that cited information that happens to be incorrect or misguided will often be difficult or impossible to remove due to the existence of a citation — this is clearly a problem. However, I do not see the other direction as being an issue.

The fact is, nearly everything that is correct and accurate can indeed be cited. Wikipedia has, for very good reasons, a policy of not allowing original research — so anything you determine yourself is not admissible. But everything else is.

I'm the sort of person that "knows" a lot of stuff. I have a lot of trivia and information stored in my brain; I'd wager many Slashdotters are similarly of the "know-it-all" variety. But I cannot tell you how many times I have sworn that some factoid or other was true only to discover in the course of research that I was either mistaken, or that the knowledge was somehow so obscure that no one else made any references to it whatsoever (which, let's face it, probably means I was mistaken).

Unlike you, apparently, when this happens I thank my lucky stars that WP encourages citation of sources. When something is correct, finding a cite is a trivial endeavor, as it only amounts to telling them where you read what you're saying. When something is incorrect, your inability to find a cite will prevent you from looking like a daft fool by insisting something is true when it's not.

Many people who think they are experts tend to assume that the "cite everything" policy that WP has adopted does not apply to them — but more often than not, these people are not actually experts. Real experts, who do research and read on their subject of expertise in an academic setting pretty much full time, are accustomed to citing their sources (although they are often not accustomed to WP's prohibition against original research — but that's something else entirely).

As a rule of thumb, if you can't find a citation for what you know to be true, it's probably not true, and so I cannot empathize with your distaste for the citation requirement. However, I think you are right in your assessment of the problem in the other direction: citations can be of poor quality and be incorrect themselves, and people can be very unreceptive (read: belligerent) when you suggest that citation or no, their statement is either incorrect or POV or whatever.

Re:No longer everyone's knowledge, now just citati

At one time, everyone was supposed to contribute what they knew.

In practice, many editors of Wikipedia believe they know things that aren't true. Since everybody's anonymous, there's no way to separate the real experts from the kooks. When you get right down to it, material just isn't useful unless it can be verified [wikipedia.org]

Cache citations

One thing I wish Wikipedia would do is cache the citations; if the citations are made to a website. I've noticed a slightly out-of-date wiki entry would usually have a good majority of their citations lead to pages that no longer exist. I'm sure there are legal and technical issues that make it difficult, however, transparency of works cited is crucial.

Trust misplaced?

The article says that "trusted editor" status will be based on number and frequency of Wikipedia edits. I don't know about others, but I think that in many situations I would place considerably less trust in people who are constantly editing Wikipedia as opposed to occasional contributors- as a group they represent a very biased selection of the public at large*, and as individuals they often have agendas they're pushing which represent a major (if not the major) motivation for their continual editing.

*I was about to submit and realized this statement could be misread to mean that they're more biased people than average. That's not what is meant, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_bias [wikipedia.org].

No, It Doesn't

WikiScanner does NOT allow people to tell the "motivations" of those who make changes... it simply identifies those parties (in some cases), and other people draw their own conclusions. Those are not the same things.

Further, WikiScanner is probably going to work itself out of a job, because now savvy people will not use Corporate sources for making their self-serving changes. Of course, WikiScanner will still continue to uncover the clueless... but if anybody in business is smart at all, its popularity is already making it less useful.

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also, wikimedia does already have OpenID support.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OpenID [mediawiki.org]