Not As Wiki As It Used To Be

jonney02 writes "The BBC NEWS is running a story about how Wikipedia plans to take back control due to the recent onslaught of malformed articles." It's always been a scary balance between allowing total anonymous participation in a web forum, and preventing yourself from being overrun. I don't envy the Wikipedia designers one bit.

Sources

[HoosierPeschke]

Wiki is a nice, centered information solution. The biggest problem I see for articles that aren't instructional is a lack of references. Some writers to a good job, but it seems that articles of fact should cite where those facts come from. After all, it's not Slashdot...

Approved by administrators before publishing ?

[unity100]

So who will guarantee that the administrators will have a high culture rating and knowledge to discern truth from fiction ?

And who is going to guarantee that they will not prevent anything from publication if it does not fit administrators' political, religious views or outlook on life ?

Huh ?

Has dmoz been successful ?

NO.

Corruption

[tygerstripes]

Power corrupts, some being more susceptible than others - give everyone the power to make changes, and you can guarantee they will not all be entirely scrupulous or responsible.

So you need some form of regulation to curb corruption. You introduce editors, moderators, whatever.

And then you have to ask: who watches the watchmen (quis custodiet custard or summat)

(Cue the usual /. Wikipedia flame-war)

Re:Approved by administrators before publishing ?

[saboola]

This goes back to "and who is policing the police?". If there is human involvement, then all things human will naturally be involved (emotions, agendas, etc..). There is nothing that you can do about it except to just trust that the system "works", at least most of the time.

Re:Approved by administrators before publishing ?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

And who is going to guarantee that they will not prevent anything from publication if it does not fit administrators' political, religious views or outlook on life ?

Noone's going to guarantee that. It's wikipedia, there are no guarantees.

The question is whether ngoing vandalism outweighs the potential for abuse by the administrators. German wikipedia appears to think it is. We shall see.

Re:Sources

[log2.0]

I agree! Its a great source of info. However, I think we should not allow anonymous edits! I think it would help a lot. An account IS free after all.

Ya dance with who brung ya

[SlappyBastard]

Wikipedia is making a mistake. The wiki model brought Wikipedia to the dance, and Wikipedia is now running off with another guy. This usually ends in gun play.

Re:4 months...

[0123456]

"The wikipedia page about Luxembourgish language has been containing libelous statements about the former Luxembourgish Minister of Pubs^H^H^H^HEconsomy since January..."

Here's an idea: maybe you could, like, remove it?

Who watches the watchers?

[Billosaur]

Under the new approach, page edits will no longer be immediately applied to pages but will instead have to be approved by an administrator before they become visible. Vandalism or changes which are not approved will not appear.

This is a major shift, from a "publish and fix" policy to one of prior restraint, where a cadre of privileged users will supervise what appears.

It is still only a proposal, so it is not yet clear if the new checks would be applied to every page, but this is obviously being considered seriously by Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales, and the site's Wikimedia Foundation.

And who decides who will be part of the cadre? Jimmy? I think we can see from his past actions, that he may not be the best judge of who would make the best administrator. I think they need to take a vote within the ranks, and let the editing community decide, then give Jimmy a limited number of vetoes to remove people he doesn't want.

Backlog

[Wellington Grey]

Under the new approach, page edits will no longer be immediately applied to pages but will instead have to be approved by an administrator before they become visible. Vandalism or changes which are not approved will not appear.

With the thousands of edits that happen on wikipedia per second, I don't see how this change will do anything but create an impossible backlog.

-Grey [wellingtongrey.net]

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Approved by administrators before publishing ?

[Eivind]

There is a however a common-sense limit to this.

Wikipedia (nor any other encyclopedia that I know of) doesn't give any sources for its claim that, for example, Norway borders on Sweden, that it has a "very elongated shape" or that it is "generally perceived as clean and modern".

Giving sources for *every* claim you make quickly degrades into nonsense. It should be sufficient to give sources for any claim that isn't patently obviously true. (to anyone with a knowledge of the field anyway) One could actually well argue that the last claim I mention, what Norway is "generally perceived as" doesn't really belong in an encyclopedia, it's very subjective anyway, certainly it's not an undisputable fact.

Re:Approved by administrators before publishing ?

[GundamFan]

There is one thing that can be done; peer review. I am not talking about college proffesors in tweed jackets (but I am sure they would be welcome). The problem I see in Wikipedia is that the "rules" the comunity has developed seem more important to the registered users than presenting nutral, correct and well referenced content.

Experiment in human nature

[hernyo]

Wikipedia could be called an experiment in human nature: assuming that everybody does their best (and no evil) is just like one of the principles of communism (everybody should do their best at work, despite their motivation, salary, etc). I did never believe it could possible work as well as it did.

I did not research this but I assume that in the beginning mostly more educated people used it and they tend not to abuse it too much. As it became widely adopted and used, everybody started to use it, meaning a higher percentage of people who would like to abuse it.

Unfortunately I don't believe that a [global] experiment in human nature can survive... Check out Winterbottom's movie, "24 hour party people [imdb.com]".

Keep it as it is!!

[tritonman]

I say keep wikipedia as it currently is, you can add a disclaimer to the top of every page saying that the information is freely edited and may be false, but if I wanted an encyclopedia that was completely written by a bunch of elitist self-important ivy-league PhDs, then I would just dust off my encyclopedia brittanica books.

They have my sympathy.

[porkchop_d_clown]

I had tried to create a user id for myself on wikipedia, in order to update an article I was reading, and was immediately banned, along with my IP. I was quite angry because there was no warning - and I complained. A response came quite quickly, politely informing me that the name I chose violated some pattern matcher for inappropriate names. I was still annoyed, but after they released the IP block I created an appropriate account and put a "watch" on the article I had wanted to update.

Over the following weeks, this relatively low-profile article was vandalized several times; each time it was corrected but also represented a vulnerability to people reading the page. One attack, in particular, deliberately reversed the sense of several health and safety tips, making cautions into recommendations and recommendations into cautions.

Re:Sources

[zakezuke]

Some writers to a good job, but it seems that articles of fact should cite where those facts come from

I could not agree more. One issue is the fact that wiki is not a citable source at many accidemic institutions, but having clear sited sources. At times even when people are corrected, they don't bother updating wiki.

Case in point [wikipedia.org]

Here is a case where a man seems to remember an Episode of Urusei Yatsura, an odd ball 80s Japanese animation series, which seemed to pay hommage to Bruce Lee in the form of a yellow tracksuit. At least in the Animigo dvd edtion, the tracksuit seems to be most orange. Now I'm all for sighting pop cultural references, and given my experence with this series it would not shock me if this is a Bruce Lee reference... but after asking wiser authorities on the subject... like those who actually had a copy of the episode... and after seeing a screenshot where it was clearly orange... the gent didn't take the time to correct it. While this trivial even for trivia, it seems to me that without a more authorative source such as the person who wrote the manga or scripted the anime, it seems that one shouldn't say with absolute certainty this is a bruce lee reference. I've not corrected it my self as I can't say with any honesty that this orange jumpsuit is or is not a Bruce Lee reference.

Re:Let me demonstrate something for you

[Arancaytar]

Good example, but vandalism is pretty well covered by the system already. It is easy to detect and easy to repair. The biggest danger to Wikipedia's quality are claims that aren't easy to verify, usually concerned with specialized fields that few people are familiar with. The best argument for account registration is not to keep out deliberate troublemakers, but to make it easier to trace factual statements to the one who made them and ask followup questions for references or credentials.

If a scientific article is amended with a certain statement, it would be useful to have a user name attached to that edit, so the user can be asked to clarify where the information is from and what credibility the source has. An IP address is not so easy to contact.

Re:Sources

[Zenaku]

Accounts are free, and people should be required to get one (so they can easily be banned once they start causing trouble).

I hope you were joking. Don't you mean, "Accounts are free, and people should be required to get one (so they can easily be forced to JUST OPEN ANOTHER ONE when they start causing trouble)?" Requiring a freely obtained login will not strip user's of their anonymity, and as you pointed out, Wikipedia already tracks the ip address for each edit.

Simple fact of the matter is that even though tracking ip address doesn't uniquely identify a user, it is the very best that any site can do without resorting to requiring credit card information to confirm your identity. And personally, I won't enter my credit card info into any site that isn't selling me something.

Why Digg will never surpass Slashdot

[h2oliu]

I have seen arguments [wired.com] that Digg will take over slashdot. But when a site grows, it always faces these types of issues, and editorial oversight is the only defense.

Re:Approved by administrators before publishing ?

[RobotRunAmok]

How does Encyclopedia Britannica do it? Or the NYT?

They FIRE people. People LOSE THEIR JOBS. If someone abuses or games or otherwise plays loose with the facts they risk MAKING LESS MONEY.

Money. You want capital 'T' Truth? Make it about the money.

The wikipedia "model" as it stands now is all reward (big ego boos, "Look Ma, I edited Luxembourg!") and very little risk (Dood1: "Yo, I just got banned from posting in wikipedia!" Dood2: "Like, D00d, you are so-o-o-- cool! That rawks, man! And screw them!"). The day a writer of a wikipedia article loses his source of income for doing a bad job is the day wikipedia begins to be credible.

You want "community"? Go to a parade or fireworks display. You want an encyclopedia of facts? Pay people.

Meta-moderation of wikipedia

[daranz]

I think a better decision would be setting up something akin to the meta-moderation system here on slashdot. Instead of designating users to do the reviewing, why not let all users (or at least those that had an account for a while) review random edits from wikipedia. You could then assign higher weights to edits of users whose edits are often marked as incorrect/vandalizing in the moderation system, and make them come up more frequently on the not-so-random list of edits to review. That way, you'd keep control in hands of the contributors, and vandalizing edits of obscure pages would have better chances of being caught. Of course, such a system would not be perfect, but on the other hand, peer-review by a smaller group of people that you trust wouldn't be that perfect either.

Re:Sources

[HoosierPeschke]

That's a great after thought but if it was a prerequisite, it would filter out most of the bogus information in the first place. Wiki is a great tool but it is not accepted as a resource (personal experience) because there is no trail of resources therefore defeating it as the great Internet encyclopedia it should be.

Re:4 months...

[RobotRunAmok]

Here's an idea: maybe you could, like, remove it?

Here's an even crazier notion: Maybe, if he wanted to interact with content on the Internet, he'd be playing friggin' EVE Online? Maybe -- and this is a stretch, stay with me on this one -- he just wants to consult an encyclopedia and get some geo-political information without the risk that it has somehow been altered by a twelve year-old on a dare made in the back of a school bus?

Re:subuse level 2

[1u3hr]

But when a forum is completely anonymous, and completely without an intent on what the content should be, you have something that never needs "control taken back".

Until it gets found by the porn link spammers who have destroyed many unregulated wikis elsewhere.

Re:FOSS approach probably better

[beaverfever]

"In the beginning, of course, it benefited greatly from its openness, but now it's time for editors to start provided more focused guidance.

And lo, hopefully the deathknell of web 2.0 has been rung. I have been predicting that it won't be long until the overload of simply way too much unfocused content on sites like digg or myspace will quickly wear people out and remind everyone of the benefits of having professionals provide editing and focusing of information. Having someone provide oversight and separate the wheat from the chaff is a service, a value-add. Maybe somebody brilliant at some dot-com will think of it and believe it's a new idea, patent it and call it web 3.0.

Web 2.0 tried to sell the lack of editing and focus as a value-add, but I think it goes against what people really want (as opposed to what they say they want - the phenomenon recognised in marketing). Wiki leads the way again.

*sigh*

[WWWWolf]

From relatively early in its existence it has been possible to ensure only administrators edit a page, but recent changes make it harder for ordinary users to create and update pages on the site.

For reference, this is supposed to be about the semi-protection. Which just happens to involve registering an user account and showing, just for a few passing moments, that you are capable of appropriate conduct.

That is, if you want to edit the couple of popular articles that happen to be semi-protected at the time.

There's 196 semi-portected articles at the moment in English Wikipedia. There's 1,355,706 articles. There's 70 articles at the moment that are full-protected, as well as handful of articles that show up in article count but are actually protected against recreation.

It still leaves you (...calculations, calculations, I'm a bit bad at math...) over 1.3 million articles for you to completely vandalise if you don't bother to spend a whole two minutes registering an user account.

You don't even need to confirm your email address.

And the separation of approved / unreviewed edits has not yet, as far as I know, even been implemented in MediaWiki.

Sorry if I sound a bit tired. I just find it a little bit vexing that people get stuck on small things like "hey, it says 'anyone can edit', and I get this error message that says that I can't". This is what happens when someone realises that you need some control. Regrettably, utopias where everyone can do anything don't work - human nature being what it is, you need some control. It's almost like saying "Oh, sure, everyone can come in our country!... except for people who don't have a passport and visa... and people who try to cross the border at a funny place... and armed, hostile soldiers of another country... obviously... But apart of that, everyone can come!"

So read "a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" just like you would read "a city where everyone can perform on the streets." (don't be surprised if, in such city, the police asks you to get the hell away from the way of the traffic and move to the sidewalk like everyone else.)

Secondly, what the heck is wrong with the concept of reviewed versions? It doesn't prevent anyone from editing the stuff or even seeing the unreviewed edits, it just prevents people from seeing stuff we don't know to be good. It's a quality control measure, not a barrier to contributing.

Re:Society?

[porkchop_d_clown]

only half believe that. While it is impossible to deny that our species is polluted with short-sighted agressors I believe that they are the minority. Most of the people I know are loving and caring who would go out of their way to avoid deceiving or hurting people for personal gain.

And yet, the history of all societies is driven by such people.

It's banal to remark that even monsters love their children - banal, but true. I'm pretty sure the people who trash wikipedia wouldn't treat their own homes or families that way.

Re:Who watches the watchers?

[Kuciwalker]

We could call that "Slashdot", a paragon of neutrality, free of any bias.

Wiki Truthiness

[gelfling]

Wiki is a wonderful example of people shaping information to reflect what they want it to represent instead of what it actually represents. It's really a self referential reference to the internet in general. Things mean what you want them to mean, fact is whatever you're willing to assert loud enough and people are experts if they say they are.

Re:Amazing?

[Pantero Blanco]

I don't see the problem. Even if they only use information from it that is supported by other sources, shouldn't they list it as a source? Aren't they supposed to find more than one supporting source for claims, anyway, which would alert them to inaccuracies?

Re:Corruption

[Anonymous Coward]

The correct principle you're looking for is "tragedy of the commons", more typically streamlined as "people are fucking morons". You only need spend twenty minutes perusing the IMDB reviews for movies with contentious political content (start with 'V for Vendetta') to become depressed at how many can't see the world in any sense larger than their own person little causes. Even a strongly self-correcting mechanism like Wikipedia can't, as it's reach and popularity increases, withstand forever the coordinated onlsaught fanatics, astro-turfers, nitwits on a lark and just plain headcases trying to enforce their particular world views.

The biggest threat?

[blueZ3]

Actually, IMO the biggest threat to Wikipedia's "quality" claim is that, contrary to the disclaimer at the bottom of pages on en.wikipedia.org, "This Wikipedia isn't English." Vandalism has nothing to do with the problem -- un-vandalized articles are just as bad as the vandalized ones.

Until someone comes up with a way to sort out the crap writing, Wikipedia is still going to have the appearance of something that's poor quality. Some of the articles read like they were written by a random spam generator.

Some examples:

From the article on the the Kuomintang [wikipedia.org] party in Taiwan (ROC)

Current party leader Ma Ying-jeou advocates signing a 30-50 year peace treaty with China and forming a common market as well as Chinese culture.

Nice. How do you parse that? The ROC wants a treaty to form Chinese culture?

From the Wiki article on Ratco Mladic [wikipedia.org]

Although he is not in custody, his arrest is proving to be a major factor in Serbia and Montenegro's integrations towards the EU.

Yikes! "...integrations towards the EU"?

Or how about: The city was bombarded with shells, snipers randomly shooting.

Yeah, right. Could you tell me how hard it is to bombard a town with snipers randomly shooting? How difficult is it to get the snipers into the cannons? And how do they manage to shoot during their ballistic flight toward the city? If the barrels of the artillery are rifled, I guess any sniper fire would be pretty random.

Here's another one from the article on the V2 Rocket:

It was the progenitor of the rocket race that developed during the Cold War, and ultimately put men on the moon and probes that have left our solar system.

Parse that sentence and you wind up wondering how the V2 helped put men on the probes that have left our solar system. And if any of those men knew that they were on a one-way journey...

Whatever else you may get from Wikipedia (I read it for the laughs), the articles (both writing and factual content) don't say "quality." More like "any idiet cun edit hour artikles, and we du!"

Just click the "Random article" link. Within two or three clicks, you're bound to land on an article that contains spelling, grammar, logical, or factual errors. Not only are some of these articles the worst form of "committee-write," they're chock full of errata, as well as contradictory and even downright wrong information.

Of course, the Wiki-boosters mantra "anyone can fix it" is ridiculous, as there's no value proposition in correcting sloppily written articles when you know that some "administrator" with a fifth-grade reading level is going to revert the article as soon as you've cleaned it up. Of course, this is the same group (Wiki-boosters) who sincerely believe that giving every child in Africa a laptop with the Wikipedia on it is the sure cure of all that continent's ills.

Until Jimbo's Big Bag of Trivia gets some real editorial staff, "quality" will continue to be job 237,345,861.

Re:The biggest threat?

[KillerDeathRobot]

I'm kind of wondering if this was meant as a troll or what. Yes, plenty of articles have grammatical flubs and/or factual errors, but it's simply not true that any fixes you make to these will be immediately reverted. It's not even kind of true. I think what I would call it is "completely false."

Nope

[Sycraft-fu]

You don't cite encyclopedias, because you don't use them as sources in scholarly works. Encyclopedias are starting points. You use them to get an overview of the information you want, and references to more primary sources. You then go to those sources read and use them. This is even true in sources themselves. If you are reading a paper by Dr. A, and he talks about the results of Dr. B's experiment, you don't quote him on that, you go get Dr. B's paper and quote that instead.

So even when you are talking about Britanica, it's improper form to cite a reference book. When you are talking Wikipedia, it's downright stupid. Especially since it's changeable. I mean the student can always change it to say what they want. It'll get revered, of course, but they can just claim "That's what it said when I looked at the page, so I figured it was right."

You always want to go to the most primary source available. Don't read a paper about a paper about an experiment, read the paper about the experiment by the experimenters themselves. Don't read a newspaper article about a speech, read the transcript of the actual speech. While all the sources that are more levels removed can be useful starting points, and have useful commentary and analysis for you to think about, they aren't what you should cite. Don't believe their version of things, get the original and check for yourself.

Yes, but

[eepok]

Mo' money, Mo' problems.

You add money to the picture and you will get lawsuits claiming defamation etc.

Keep it free. No one worth their salt does real "research" at Wiki anyway. We go their to find +5 Informative or +5 insightful -- Not +5 Guaranteed Fact.

Re:Approved by administrators before publishing ?

[lokiomega]

Sure and when some company pays you a little money to leave out that tiny fact about some harm their product does that affects millions of people... Money solves everything right? Forget about integrity.

POV

[Archangel Michael]

Why not have subsection/articles related to the NPOV parts that are difinitively bias POV, for perspective sake. Let's look at how this relates to your stalking example.

Give generally accepted and nominal usage of what cyberstalking is, give related pages to "cyberstalking - cases" which gives backgrounds and such on cases, examples of, etc. and then have a "cyberstalking - false accusation" which gives examples such as you have pointed out.

Better usage would be for highly charged political topics like GWB, the main article can give generally accepted facts (date of birth, schools, service records etc) and two pages, GWB - pro (I heart bush), and GWB - con (evil dictator) facts can be presented.

Quite frankly, the truth lies (no pun or oxymoron intended) probably somewhere in between, and some of us grownups realize that bush isn't 100% good or 100% evil as the political poles would like to paint.

Re:Nope

[Sycraft-fu]

No, the rule is "Cite the source of all your information." Basically anything that's not your orignal thought, you need to cite. If you quote something, directly or indirectly, it needs to be cited. If you reference something, it needs to be cited. However what you should be citing is the most primary source available. So let's say I'm doing an article on cognition. I look up some info in an encyclopedia, it is relevant to what I want. I do not cite that, I check their source. Turns out to be a paper by Dr. Robert Harnish. So I get his paper. In reading it, I find out that the relevant section isn't actually his work, but actually work done by Dr. Kent Bach. Again, I don't cite Harnish's paper, I get Bach's. I then read that, and it is the original paper on what I want. THAT'S what I cite.

Does it take more time? Of course, but it makes sure I'm getting the accurate original story. The encyclopedia version is what Britannica thinks about what HArnish thinks about what Bach wrote about. I want to remove the abstraction and get down to what Bach thought. I might also cite Harnish's paper if I am referencing his comments or criticisms of Bach, but I won't cite Harnish's paper when I am taking a section that is talking about Bach's paper.

Re:Not trolling. This reflects my actual experienc

[MaelstromX]

Hang on -- are you out of your fucking mind? People are THANKED when they make grammatical corrections. What in the world would anybody revert a grammatical correction for? I DARE you to show me your accounts where you've done that and had it reverted soon after. Chances are if that happened you weren't just fixing grammar, you were inserting other garbage that didn't deserve to be there.

The nice thing about Wikis is that they keep track of each individual change. No vague or mysterious claims permitted; every edit is well documented. I hereby call you on your bullshit and ask you to produce the "diffs".

Re:Open Edit vs. Professional

[DragonWriter]

Not true. Nature cooked the books [theregister.co.uk].

An opinion piece repeating uncritically the claims in Britannica's response and ignoring Nature's counter to Britannica's response. Proves...someone at the Register has an opinion, and not much else.

I've lost count of the number of times this canard has been repeated on Slashdot.

Soon, I'll lose track of the times this false rebuttal has been posted in this thread on Slashdot.