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)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
Give me an alternative to wikipedia with less noise in it, or shut the fuck up.
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.
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There's also the issue of how much you should trust the people doing the banning.
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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.
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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 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 specif
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:4, Informative)
Try clicking on the numbers next to each sentence next time you stop by.
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
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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 extra "not" in a key place.
And I think to myself, "either I'm wrong, or this page was vandalized."
-:sigma.SB
What about the reliability rating thingo? (Score:2)
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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Re:An interesting experiment (Score:4, Informative)
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I would be very surprised (and a little annoyed) if they don't use this as the basic mechanism behind their validation scheme. This preserves the freedom of editing, and greatly decreases the probability that somebody reading Wikipedia will see a vandalized/substandard version of an article. Rather 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.
The
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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 (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
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Too many featured articles have lost their status due to people adding piles and piles of useless information, ripping up consistency and well written texts.
That way there might be more focus on improving the information that's there, than on just adding and reverting small edits.
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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. 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 becau
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Re:An interesting experiment (Score:4, Insightful)
Wikipedia: Pop Culture Resource (Score:3, 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.
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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
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I dare say, it surpassed standard encyclopedias some time ago.
The Wikipedia is not without fault, but the same can be said for any source.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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The hell it isn't. The average stuff the average school project is based on would be nearly impossible to find the original sources.
School libraries are small, most of them aren't even interconnected. And even the public library system, which is interconnected, is slow. I recall trying to find the sources listed once in a britannica article in school so that I didn't have to cite britannica - (note it wasn't that i didn't
That's sort of my point. (Score:3, Interesting)
Finding primary sources in print is hard and extremely time-consuming, and requires access to a big library. Completely agree. It's totally beyond the scope of most students in public primary and secondary schools, and probably most college students who aren't at a big university.
However, this is where Wikipedia is better than Britannica. In a Britannica article, you usually get a few print sources as references. In a Wikipedia article, you usually get a ton of re
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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
Re:An interesting experiment (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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.
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fundamental flaw (Score:3, Insightful)
Irony: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
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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:Truth vs consensus (Score:5, Insightful)
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Uhh, you just proved the GP's point. He didn't say HOW consensus was reached, just that it was ruled by consensus.
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Re:Truth vs consensus (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I think reaching the truth via consensus is realistic; it seems to work pretty well in the scientific world.
No. No it doesn't. At every major breakthrough of science, the entire preceding body of work has to be challenged and rewritten. Truth comes first. The consensus comes later.
At every breakthrough, if the truth was subject to a vote, the new discovery would be outvoted--you have one guy (or team) with his experimental data, against every one else who still believes in the old perspective.
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Sure, but Wikipedia's goal is not to produce new scientific breakthroughs, but to document current knowledge.
In the scientific world, you can judge the validity of theories or try to reproduce experimental results in those areas in which you are an expert. For anything else, your best bet for getting as close to the truth as feasible is relying on the consensus. And, as I said, I think this works pretty well.
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Slam them in the discussion page with NPOV [wikipedia.org]. The irony would not be lost :)
Same thing here (Score:3, Interesting)
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Firstly, you don't have to register to add citations. Citations are the same as the rest of the page - if you can edit anything, you can edit the lot. I don't know what you were doing wrong, but it wasn't Wikipedia's fault.
Secondly, registering doesn't destroy anonymity; it improves anonymity! You don't
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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.
Why do I get this awful feeling I know exactly which subject you're talking about?
Seriously, what are you talking about?
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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 ar
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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 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 me
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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 absolutely rampant throughout the site.
That will NEVER stop. The perpetrators will simply get better at hiding it. If you run a large corporation, NGO, government etc etc, and you are not using Wikipedia to manipulate your agenda, then you are an idiot, be
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The whole poi
Re:Won't change a thing (Score:4, Interesting)
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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 claims, he merely made a list of pages he disagreed with rather than providing the information requested (even after being given a clarification.) As of this moment, both the article and talk page are semi-protected to prevent disruption.
The rules were fol
Better Living Through Benjamins (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Better Living Through Benjamins (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
On the other hand (Score:2, Interesting)
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2. Fire contributors who screw up, depriving them of that revenue.
Who determines if #2 happens? Who gets to decide if a statement is not factual? You can only use other experts to decide that--so are you proposing finding 3 experts for every subject matter? We have that now, btw. It's called the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
And you didn't even address where the money for #1 would come from. Ads? Then we would risk having advertiser bias. Subscriptions? Then how is this better than the Enc Brit?
It's
Wikipedia is fine how it is.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Trust? (Score:2, Interesting)
Flagged revisions on Wikipedia / mediawiki.org (Score:5, Informative)
Extension:FlaggedRevs on mediawiki.org [mediawiki.org]
rfta (Score:3, Interesting)
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Registration is a small hurdle. While it's impossible to bot-register accounts, and thus requiring registration would provide a layer of insulation from vandalbot accounts, we haven't actually had a serious vandalbot attack in years. For your garden variety fuckwittery, registering an account doesn't fix much - most of our total fuckwits are registered.
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Link to the actual New Scientist article (Score:5, Informative)
Instead of using a link to a sub-optimal blog site, how about a link to the actual New Scientist article. [newscientist.com]
free encyclopedia strategies (Score:2)
tmcnet trustworthy? (Score:2)
"As a result, although Wikipedia has grown in since its launch in 2001 around
per cent
f all internet users now visit the site on any given day its information
ontinues to be treated cautiously."
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,
Interesting article (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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I was blocked for a few days until I went through their system
Hm. I wonder if it would help to have a queue of articles that have been edited, but do not yet show up on the main page? Then the wiki Nazis could monitor that queue, and catch vandalism before it actually made it the published pages. After a period of time--say 24 hours, the edits are automatically published.
This would have the disadvantage of introducing a latency to good fixes, but I think it would really cut down on vandalism and graf
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 no
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.
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: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:No longer everyone's knowledge, now just citati (Score:2)
But shouldn't it be people with experience in the subject matter of the topic who go through and find what is wrong?
Yes! Yes! But a) how do you find those people, and provided that you do, b) how do you get them to work for free?
Re:No longer everyone's knowledge, now just citati (Score:3, Insightful)
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] through references. This policy of demanding references is a matter of necessity, and not just an attempt to "look academic" as you make it out to be.
Trust isn't the big problem (Score:2, Insightful)
True History or spin with no trust, just bias .... (Score:2)
I remember reading encyclopedias and listening to news in the 1950/60s. By the mid 70s, I knew there was little truth in any history, but many extensive facts spun to cultural propaganda.
Among many cultural groups globally names like Hitler, Stalin, Mao
Interesting but tough problem (Score:2, Informative)
Cache citations (Score:3, Interesting)
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].
No, It Doesn't (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Uranium-232 decay energy seems correct... (Score:2)
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http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OpenID [mediawiki.org]