Wikipedia 2.0, Now With Trust? 228
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
fundamental flaw (Score:3, Insightful)
Won't change a thing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Wikipedia is fine how it is.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Truth vs consensus (Score:2, Insightful)
I think reaching the truth via consensus is realistic; it seems to work pretty well in the scientific world. The problem with Wikipedia is that each editor self-selects himself to work on the tiny part of Wikipedia he wants to, and so people with an agenda are overrepresented in some articles. I do agree that people with agendas using legalism to try to weed out dissenting opinions seems to be one of Wikipedia's biggest problems (and I'm not even an editor).
Re:Better Living Through Benjamins (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
Give me an alternative to wikipedia with less noise in it, or shut the fuck up.
Wikipedia: Pop Culture Resource (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Truth vs consensus (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wikipedia: Pop Culture Resource (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Won't change a thing (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, what are you talking about?
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Won't change a thing (Score:2, Insightful)
The shortest answer to this post is that Wikipedia isn't trying to publish the truth. It's trying to publish a neutral overview of things that have been claimed to be the truth. People who don't understandt his often have idfficult times on Wikipedia. This is because they are always trying to do what they sincerely believe improves the encyclopedia, and yet are routinely shot down for trying.
It is, however, not a bug in our method. It's a feature.
Trust and anonymity (Score:2, Insightful)
Since large organizations spend millions on PR, they would happily spend the small sums it would require for this plan. We're talking about US$40,000, which is not a lot. The only reason this plan would fail is that it would be too tempting to demand a lot of edits.
Ultimately, the problem comes down to anonymity. You really want people to put their reputation on the line, and you need people who care about their reputation. Paying university professors to write articles is one solution, though there may be others.
Alternatively, you just accept that Wikipedia is what it is: good for the stuff that everyone knows, of dubious value for controversial stuff (though often surprisingly good!).
Re:Won't change a thing (Score:3, Insightful)
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 huge philosophic and scientific revolution.
In the mean time, the best means to truth available to us (AFAICT) seems to be open discussion and review by knowledgeable and experienced people. So far, the Wikipedia has all of that, but I'm not sure it has a method for distinguishing between "open discussion" and "review by knowledgeable and experienced people". Perhaps it should.
Re:Wikipedia: Pop Culture Resource (Score:2, Insightful)
Isn't that true in general? These two things are endless flame wars. For the same reasons, we have separate news networks, separate religions busy blowing each other up, etc.
Finding 3rd parties to write about these things isn't really an answer: either they just plain don't exist, they exist but are not interested at all, or they exist, are interested, and are employed by Britannica or World Book or some other Encyclopedia.
The biggest thing Wikipedia needs right now, IMO of course, is just a general audit of what it's got. They need to Deep Freeze certain pages that are "good" quality (things that aren't likely to need very many changes other than the occasional grammar touch up), they need to Freeze pages that are "pretty good" so that vandals can't come through with bulldozers and draw giant penises in ASCII, and they need to drop the "[Citation Needed]" in favor of "This sentence is worthless without a citation, therefore we're simply omitting it from general view until one is added." The audit could probably clean up a bunch of other general issues like internal linking being inconsistent, image copyrights and formats, templates changing weekly, and making "Category" and "Index" pages more useful.
The Problem Lies with Misinformed Users (Score:2, Insightful)
No kidding. This happens. Guess what? It happens in print encyclopaedias also. Replace vandalism with plain old errors, replace the systemic bias of group Z with that of the editors and voila.
Then you have the camp of "ex-editors" who are really nothing more than bad editors who haven't taken the time to understand what the mission of wikipedia actually is, rather than what their contrived notions lead them to believe it is who say things like "I got scared away because what I added which was so clearly invaluable to me was removed by a long-time editor which clearly means I'm right and they're doodie heads with an agenda omg wtf @!$!".
What they don't realise is what they add has to be verifiable from reliable, secondary sources, with no new opinions of their own. Wikipedia seeks to add established analysis, not what you perceive to be right. And this is exactly what makes wikipedia more reliable than any print encyclopaedia - it has inline cited references to back up it's claims. Any part of wikipedia that does not yet have these inline citations (that anybody can and should follow up on) should still be considered works in progress - consider finding the source yourself!
So I guess my question is, why do you insist we hold wikipedia to a higher standard than other encyclopaedias? Stop being afraid of dynamic content.
Note (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
No longer everyone's knowledge, now just citations (Score:5, Insightful)
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:An interesting experiment (Score:3, Insightful)
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 Wikipedia for answering questions like "what is this thing and where does it fit into the big picture". I also think there are a lot of capable motivated people making sure that it's as close to true as possible. Still, if you're relying on it for some specific fact, you'd better check a second source. Which is good practice no matter what you're reading, wikipedia or otherwise.
Trust isn't the big problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (like the one described in the article) should be used to assign contributors a trust rating, and then let people vote on the validity of an article or section.
I see a conflict here; if you base the trust on a per-user basis, it doesn't get you to trusting the article as a unit. Even if 90% of the page is a series of contributions made by trusted individuals, the remaining 10% might be made by non-trusted individuals, and that 10% might create a very misleading impression on the topic.
I think you need some method for signing off on the article as a whole, as being valid, true, and coherent. I don't think a single 50% majority vote will accomplish this. You really need a person or team who can serve in an editorial capacity, bringing the whole article together, making sure it's coherent and void of misleading ideas.
And yes, you're right that this is a foreign idea to the Wikipedia as it is today. That's exactly why I think a branch is necessary. The Wikipedia should remain essentially as it is for an unstable branch, but the stable version should be new, and it should have a more coherent editorial system.
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:3, Insightful)
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. Removing a "controversial" edit might also remove the appropriate context for a "cited" edit, and in doing so might cause the "cited" edit to become misleading.
You really have to understand how good writing and good editing works. Removing some fact because it's inaccurate might require several adjustments throughout an article, and so a particular edit of the entire article should be set as "approved" or "stable". This also implies that there might need to be a single editor per-article, in order to make sure that the article is well-written.
Of course, I'm assuming that part of the goal is to create good, informative, well-written articles instead of a simple list of objective facts which are either true or false.
Re:Won't change a thing (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole point of Wikipedia is that it's self-correcting. If I know a lot about a subject, I write about it. If some of it is bogus, someone else will correct it. Documenting it with endless citations adds nothing. Wikipedia didn't used to be like that...but then some people got obsessed with "being as legit as Encyclopedia Britannica". I mean, gee, if we can't cite Wikipedia in our term papers, what good is it! Gasp! Yawn. Wikipedia would eventually have been good enough there wouldn't be a question, but now it's gone down this tedious path.
It's hilarious to read now. Go look at most of the higher math or science articles...few citations, but no one questions them because they don't understand them. Now go look at some pop culture article - tons of citations needed or marked all over the place. Some things are inherently un-citable, yet good to add to articles. And of course, there is NO standard for citations - a quote from some yahoo's web page is as good as a cite for a scientific journal. So what's the point?
I've made thousands of edits and created several entire categories, but ultimately it wasn't worth my effort any longer. Now I put my specialized content on web pages and if people find it, good for them; if less do because it's not on Wikipedia, big deal.
As a side note, I sincerely hope that the Wikipedia project is replaced by something with structured data, rather than free-flowing text...i.e., something that is queryable. "Here's an article about the Confederate Generals of the U.S. Civil War" should be accompanied by "and here is the information in a structured format so you can use it programmatically".
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:1, Insightful)
Seriously, if there are "many other sites" that have definitely all folded for that precise reason, you'd think you would be able to provide at least one example...
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:3, Insightful)
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 extra "not" in a key place.
And I think to myself, "either I'm wrong, or this page was vandalized."
-:sigma.SB
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
[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
Re:No longer everyone's knowledge, now just citati (Score:5, Insightful)
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:An interesting experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
Trust misplaced? (Score:3, Insightful)
*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].
Re:No longer everyone's knowledge, now just citati (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Won't change a thing (Score:3, Insightful)
The rules were followed closely in this case, as these were very serious accusations - if you received credit for an invention, you don't want others bringing up unfounded accusations against you, hence the rationale for the [[WP:BLP]] policy.
I can't comment specifically on your situation, but if you need to go against the status quo or make a claim that everyone disagrees with, you need to be prepared to provide strong and legitimate arguments in favour of your content. This depends on what is being added, but mainstream articles are usually a good thing to use.
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:3, Insightful)
Boy, I'll say. I grew up in northern Minnesota in the 60s and 70s. Not exactly the cultural center of the universe by any means. Still, even in that time and place, students were encouraged to find other sources besides encyclopedias in elementary school. We were all expected to find our way around a library catalog by the time we were in junior high.
By the time I was in high school, the only kids still referencing the encyclopedias in their homework were the ones who cared more about taking shop than college prep classes because it was generally cost at least a letter grade drop. Many teachers would give a paper referencing an encyclopedia a failing grade.
Now you're telling me that in this day and age, when research is so bloody easy, that college students think it's OK to even crack open an encyclopedia? Let alone use one as a reference in a paper?? In the words of my teenage daughter, "Ewwwww!"
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:2, Insightful)
[citation needed] (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:3, Insightful)
Because Wikipedia gives an author zero control over editing, it is not the appropriate place to publish something new. This is by design, and is a Very Good Thing.
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:2, Insightful)
Wikipedia is an acknowledgement that a) information is not static and b) it is not the province of the intellectually elite. So long as the social contract as a whole values truth over ideology, Wikipedia will tend to develop towards the accurate, simply because it won't be useful to it's users if it doesn't. There is a kind of currency traded there in the manner of "I'll fix what I have facts about if the rest of you fix what you have facts about."
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:3, Insightful)
An important side benefit of the existence of these more formal systems is that it may help make it easier for content experts to get and stay involved in Wikipedia. When they don't have to deal with the low brow vandalism and other forms of idiocy that the radically open system involve, then they may feel more comfortable getting involved. That should be a major goal of the new systems.
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:3, Insightful)
There's also the issue of how much you should trust the people doing the banning.