Not As Wiki As It Used To Be 349
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.
FOSS approach probably better (Score:5, Interesting)
subuse level 2 (Score:3, Interesting)
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".
Besides, anarchy can be fun!
Re:Approved by administrators before publishing ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just my $0.02.
Everyone loves an analogy! (Score:4, Interesting)
But if we modify the analogy so that wiki IS the dance and that all the people meet at the dance and pair off and settle down, they don't need to go to the dance anymore.
What I'm saying is that after the initial wiki process is over for a given article you could say that - as long as people agree that it's a complete and up to date article - the wiki process could be closed since there is no more to be added at the present time.
I'm not saying that this would work but I can see on both sides of the line.
Re:Let me demonstrate something for you (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Sources (Score:3, Interesting)
That is official policy on Wikipedia: See Wikipedia:Verifiability.
Bwahaaha... oh yes. Good one. I'm a three year veteran of Wikipedia (with 4 featured articles behind me) who recently packed it in because I was sick of the bullshit and idiots swamping Wikipedia, and having to listen to people say things like "believe in the Wiki", as if a Wiki is some magical force that gravitates towards wonderfulness. I spent those years watching good editor after good editor get fed up and leave Wikipedia because they just got sick of seeing their long history of contributions being disregarded and see blatant vandals and sockpuppets getting away with murder. I spent a lot of time doing AFD, recent changes and newpages too. Let me tell you, there are no policies on Wikipedia. Get enough shitheads together and you can make anything stick -- policy be damned.
When my time came, I was editing a bio article... and saw yet another attempt to insert malicious nonsense into it. I looked ahead and saw the whole bullshit "process" playing out before my eyes over the next few weeks... and I just couldn't be bothered anymore. So I left -- three years work behind me that may as well have been flushed. One more good editor used up and thrown away in the name of ensuring that fuckwits and trolls can have a nice playground.
Re:The implosion begins (Score:4, Interesting)
In a purely credentials based system, I would likely not have been allowed to edit the work of a more experienced person in my own field. To allow otherwise would be to defeat the entire purpose of the credentials system, as an amateur hobbyist in any field would have to be allowed to edit the work of a seasoned professional, and that's essentially what already exists.
Probably a good move (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the Wiki concept is perfect for a niche application, such as documenting a software process, or a software project, or some other specific topic that has a focus. I use a number of corporate Wikis and hobby related wikis for these exact types of topics. However.. in Wikipedia's case, it is a whole different ballgame.
The problem with Wikipedia is that the folks that *now* are most inclined to contribute to Wikipedia are the ones that stand to benefit from their contribution, either by pushing an agenda, or disparaging another source. Granted, there are a number of contributors that are active with good intentions, but I suspect as Wikipeda continues down the path of letting *anyone* contribute immediately, that subsequent contributions will be more skewed towards revert wars and subtle edits to existing content vs. new content and contribtions.
The reality is, all the editing of existing content will become more of a platform to introduce opinnions and agendas vs usable content. Not to say that there aren't contributors that will continue to give good content, but what might have been 5% of agenda pushing 2 years ago is going to be 40% now with the critical mass of information.
Wikipedia is making a good move and the social dynamics will be interesting (i.e. Managing and Staffing this new model)
Re:The implosion begins (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Sources (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Approved by administrators before publishing ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Check out the history of cyberstalking, for one. See how repeatedly it morphs into a completely bland and useless article that makes no mention of the use of an false accusation of cyberstalking as a means to suppress dissent.
Try adding mentioning, with citations, that people can be falsely accused of cyberstalking. Watch how that is reverted away. That has happened repeatedly on this article. On July 11th, a section containing the DOJ description of cyberstalking and how it compares to physical stalking was added, along with a section containing a link concerning the problem of false accusations, and the use of the accusation of cyberstalking itself as a means of well, stalking. Note how in the span of 15 days, Aine63 repeatedly attacks the article, until by July 21st, there is no indication that the DOJ itself say that cyberstalking has no universal definition but that stalking laws generally require a credible threat of violence. And also gone by July 21st is any mention of the problem of false accusations.
So who is the cyberstalker here? Is it Aine63 who stalks that article to keep out for his/her own reasons any discussion of false accusations? Or is it me because I a) used the compare feature to find out why a section was removed, b) noted Aine63's involvement, and here state that Aine63 is a Wikinazi, who has a definite POV and should be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
I wonder why Aine63 is so worried about false accusations as to remove their discussion from the wikipedia.... What a fucktard though.
If you read the talk page you find out that this has happened repeatedly. Someone puts in sections about false accusations and things like that, and it gets expunged by some sort of article stalker. In fact, the discussions of this behavior have themselves been removed from the talk page. Why is the wiki so worried about talking about false accusations? Well you might look at how the wiki itself has been used to promote false accusations against John Seigenthaler.
My sense is that the Wikipedia ultimately is doomed due to its insistence on Neutral Point of View articles and all of the fights that that causes. The traditional media is encountering the same thing with the bloggers. An open, but non neutral point of view is far superior in terms of presenting information AND context than a supposedly neutral, objective, point of view that can only fail to provide context and that hides a hidden agenda.
Because let's face, to claim that cyberstalking is not subject to false accusations is just bullshit, and definitely not a neutral point of view.
So what have we learned here? Wiki's NPOV is fatally flawed. Wikiality, truth based on majority rule is fatally flawed. Aine63 is fucktard that probably uses the false accusation of cyberstalking as a tool in his/her life.
I don't know how their new editing rules will prevent Aine63's malicious attacks, we shall see.
Re:Corruption (Score:3, Interesting)
So here is what life has taught me, "Wikipedia hurts the underdog and there is Slittle you can do about it."
At least that is my experience with wiki-crap.
Me, I've given up on it and relegated it to the trash bin. For the longest time I didn't understand why so many people actually hated it, but then I started to realize there were issues.
My last effort to clean up some wiki entries specifically targeting my company were met with a roll back and a warning. (It's pretty much a joke at this point what is written there.) Look, the underlying issue happens to be this... if you are a minority voice in the community you will not be heard. It goes a step further and actually turns wikipedia into a mobilized war machine that can actually be used against you by the thousdan monkeys pushing from behind.
At least, those are my experiences...
Nope... not giving out the link... I don't need anymore headache.
Peer review is how it works now. (Score:3, Interesting)
Peer review is how Wikipedia has always worked, though in Wikipedia everyone is a peer. I assume what you are suggesting is some way of ranking peers, but that is not as easy as it sounds. Sure, a professor of astronomy from UCLA is the peer of a professor of astronomy from Harvard, but what about an experienced amateur astronomer or a high school science teacher? Are they peers with the profs? Are they peers with each other? If the article is about economics rather than astronomy, does that change the peer relationships? Are they all trumped by a first year economics student? And how exactly do you prove your credentials on-line, especially if they are not academic credentials (work experience, hobbyist, enthusiast, etc)?
Re:Experiment in human nature (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikipedia has actually hung on to some surprising small society-type things. For instance, a significant number of indefinite blocks are still done under the remarkably informal "exhausted the community's patience" clause of the blocking policy. (Usually starts with a handful of people discussing what to do about a problem user in a high visibility spot. If somone proposes that their patience is exhausted, everyone is asked if they object to a block. If not then an admin does it. If the blocked user can't find an admin who thinks he deserves another chance then he's supposed to get the picture.)
Not trolling. This reflects my actual experience (Score:4, Interesting)
When I first discovered the Wikipedia, I thought that it was cool that I could help to "fix" broken articles (I'm a writer in my day job). So I spent a little free time correcting the grammar errors (and generally sloppy writing) in a number of articles, probably around 10. Within a week, all but one of them had either been reverted so that the original mistakes returned, or re-edited introducing the same or similar mistakes. When I saw that, it became clear to me that what Wiki-boosters claim as the main strength of Wikipedia is also a weakness. It also significantly cooled my interest in editing the poorly written articles I come across.
Basically, writing done by committee is always going to be inferior. Since that's the method that the Wikipedia currently uses, it's hard to see any significant improvement in the quality of the articles coming along. Further, I think that there's no real solution to this problem as long as every article is open to editing by anyone at any time. Someone suggested that there should be a static "live" article and then people would work on a dynamic "backend" article that would become the live article once it was edited and checked for accuracy. But I'm not sure even that would work, since it requires someone to take ownership of the article.
Perhaps there's a solution out there, but none of the proposals I've seen suggested looks like it would work.
See my reply to the sib (Score:3, Interesting)
And no, I didn't keep careful records of edits. Change tracking and content revision is something I do in my day job, so I'm not really interested in expending that kind of effort on the Wikipedia in the evenings.
Back when I was making edits, I was interested enough in the project that I bothered to keep a list and return to articles I'd changed with the idea of "keeping them up" if anyone had added new info. "Maintenance" of knowledge base articles is something I'm very familiar with as a writer who has done a good bit of editing and I was expecting that Wikipedia articles would require something similar. Imagine my surprise when I returned to articles I'd edited to find that while no new information had been added, the articles were either reverted or re-edited by someone with apprently no grasp of English. It doesn't take many instances of that to show the futility of editing Wikipedia articles and to kill off all enthusiasm for the task.
That's my personal experience. Other writers I know (and I know quite a few technical writers here in the Bay Area) have expressed similar frustration.
Again, there's the possiblity that someone could come up with a solution for this, but I haven't seen it yet.
Re:Sources (Score:4, Interesting)
Have the articles I've written been subject to vandalism? Sure. The logs also show that fairly substantial vandalism was completely eliminated within a matter of days. That's not bad going for pages on some truly obscure, regional information. We're not talking about stuff likely to get a hundred visits an hour, I'd be amazed if the articles got a hundred visits a month. For readers to spend the time to undo damage, refine the page (there have been numerous truly wonderful additions to the articles) and contribute some excellent material is (to me) proof that the Wikipedia system works fine even for stuff that is rarely visited. (Those who contribute to the less-popular pages can consider themselves thanked. General knowledge can be found anywhere, so the true power of a system like Wikipedia is felt when more obscure material that would normally be scattered and incoherent - if it existed on the Internet at all - is readily available.)
I would like to see reference enforcement added to Wikipedia, but it is unclear how you'd go about doing that. You can check a link exists, but the book and paper references would be hard even to verify to that degree, and AI text analysis systems are not nearly advanced enough to tell if a reference has anything to do with the claims in the article, although it might be possible to eliminate some definitely invalid references. No automated validation of articles is possible at this time.
It might also be good if Wikipedia also provided a grammar checker. They are far from perfect, but it would be useful for catching some of the more basic errors. A spellchecker would be good too, for the same reason. Again, perfection isn't necessary, it merely has to reduce the number of uncaught errors to make it worthwhile. Requiring approval would catch very little outside of the specialist knowledge of the approver and the more general-knowledge stuff. (This is why journals use peer-review, where the reviewers are - by definition - peers in the same specialist field. It is also why newspapers - who tend to rely on sub-editors and editors who do not have specialist knowledge - are forever apologizing for article errors.
Wikipedia hasn't the resources to provide a full nth-degree cross-checking peer-review system. As such, changes to the submission process will really contribute little. Having validators for Wiki syntax, grammer and spelling would likely correct a far greater number of errors with far less effort. Validators would also add insignificant latency compared to full reviews. Yes, I understand that Wikipedia is in an unenviable position as a result of vandalism creating libellous content. However, Wikipedia has some grounds for claiming common carrier status at the moment, as it just carries the content and does nothing more. If it had a review process, it would lose any such defence, so any libel that DID slip through the cracks would be a far greater risk.
All in all, then, I think Wikipedia is reacting under intense pressure but is diving in entirely the wrong direction and may actually put itself more at risk with this idea.
Re:Open Edit vs. Professional (Score:3, Interesting)
I've lost count of the number of times this canard has been repeated on Slashdot.