Edit-Approval System Proposed For English-Language Wikipedia 439
An anonymous reader writes "A group of powerful Wikipedia insiders are pushing for FlaggedRevisions which will require a 'trusted user' to approve of edits before they go live on the online encyclopedia. There is also opposition but with support of founder Jimbo Wales it is likely to go through. The German version has tried the system, leading to three-week delays between edit and publication. The English wiki with its higher number of anonymous editors per trusted user is expected to suffer longer queues if FlaggedRevisions is implemented on all articles. This comes just a few days after Britannica announced that readers will be allowed to suggest edits and have them reviewed within 20 minutes. Will we see the day when Britannica can be edited almost instantly while editing Wikipedia requires fighting bureaucracy, patience and the right contacts?" Note that, according to the quote from Jimmy Wales in the linked article, this system would only be used "on a subset of articles, the boundaries of which can be adjusted over time to manage the backlog."
Let Obama do it (Score:2, Informative)
Re:not smart (Score:5, Informative)
The german wikipedia has this system for quite a while now, and it works pretty well. Approvals for edits (sighted) come in fast, and that's the criteria for displaying your edit. The next level would be a confirmation by an expert, but I have yet to find an article that has this flag.
Three week backlog?! BULLSHIT! (Score:5, Informative)
The overwhelmingly majority of edits to the German Wikipedia are flagged within seconds.
However, the single oldest non-reviewed or reverted change will often be a few weeks old. This is usually because someone made a large edit with a mixture of good and terrible changes, so no one wants to either sight it or revert it⦠so the draft hangs around awhile until someone improves it enough to justify publishing it, or until someone finally decides its crap and removes the change.
Under the old system edits like this, ones which were of mixed quality, were quickly undone. The new system is much better at conserving the users work.
Of course, everyone can see the latest draft version: There is a big banner that tells you the the version you are viewing is not the latest.
I think it has been an enormous improvement.
Re:User preference to view un-reviewed articles? (Score:2, Informative)
Logged-in users will always see the latest and greatest (or less-than-greatest) version. This only applies to anonymous users.
(Really, the summary is about as propagandistic in its distortion and misrepesentation of the facts as it could possibly get without resorting to outright lies.)
Re:A wikipedia that was "cool like that" (Score:4, Informative)
> it makes the place feel like it is full of anal retentive blow-hards on power trips.
Erm, I think you've found the problem.
Re:User preference to view un-reviewed articles? (Score:5, Informative)
Seems they could have the best of both worlds; if they gave users the option to see either
1) the most recently edited version, or 2) the most recently approved version.
Your suggestion is already a part of flagged revisions. The summary is rather misleading as to the nature of Flagged Revisions, in my opinion. Edits won't simply disappear until they are reviewed; they'll still be visible to anyone who wants to see them.
If you're logged in, there will be a user preference for whether you want to see the approved version or the most recent version by default. Whether you're logged in or not, the most recent version, along with the complete history (including unreviewed edits) will be accessible through a tab at the top or similar interface.
I think that a lot of opposition to Flagged Revisions comes from misunderstandings about what it will actually do, though there are certainly plenty of legitimate concerns about it as well.
Re:I for one ... (Score:2, Informative)
Why bother with SEO? Just get your URL or product on a wikipedia page.
Won't work (rel="nofollow"). Indeed, the reason it doesn't work is a large part of the reason Wikipedia pages are ranked so highly.
Not all subjects... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Will there be no wiki truths? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Will there be no wiki truths? (Score:5, Informative)
At least save us some time and link to the fun version [wikipedia.org] of the article.
(Fun content is at the end.)
Re:Will there be no wiki truths? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not all subjects... (Score:3, Informative)
In their defense, that's exactly what they're planning to do.
Re:Will there be no wiki truths? (Score:5, Informative)
At the bottom:
One thing everyone should know... (Score:3, Informative)
In case this goes through, the easiest way to filter Wikipedia pages from your Google results is to add this to your query string:
-site:wikipedia.org
What a sad end it would be for such a beautiful idea. Let's hope it never happens.
Re:Exactly (Score:3, Informative)
> One should question a political ideology lead by people who dismiss those with education.
I would question a political ideology that dismisses all those with educations.
On the other hand, a political ideology that dismisses certain sets of people with certain educations might make sense.
It's not clear to me whether you feel that "conservative pundits" fall in the former camp, or whether they fall in the latter and you have actually evaluated the educations of the people they are bashing.
My experience is that amongst people with a high level of education (PhD-level, say) there are plenty of people I wouldn't trust to make various decisions for me. Heck, some of them are pretty poor at making decisions for themselves. Education doesn't guarantee competence. Chekhov put it fairly well: "An education develops all of one's faculties, including foolishness and sloth." (My translation; can't find an "official" English version offhand).
At risk of Mr. Godwin interfering in this discussion, it's interesting to look up the education levels for the Waffen-SS. I am unable to find an online reference, sadly, and the real-world reference I saw was at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, but a fairly high percentage of the Waffen-SS officers held advanced degrees (much higher than in the army as a whole), and very few had no university diploma. The enlisted men were also very well educated. This had a lot to do with the unit's effectiveness, of course.
Even more simply, modern-day research has a major problem: you have to specialize very narrowly to achieve results. It's very easy to have someone who is an expert in their chosen field, but fairly clueless outside it. And "chosen field" is a very very narrow sliver of human experience in this case. "Climate science", for example, is far too wide for any single person to be an expert in it at this point, as is "Economics", "Sociology", "Mathematics", "Physics", and so forth. Of course any scientist worth anything (see points above) in any of these disciplines will know more than the man on the street about the basics of the discipline. But on fine points, outside their narrow specialty, they might not be much better off.
Re:Whine whine whine (Score:3, Informative)
And your statement invalidates my convervatism-is-anti-rationalism thesis how?
Re:Three week backlog?! BULLSHIT! (Score:3, Informative)
That's because the Sighted Versions system in the German Wikipedia is only used to verify that edits don't include obvious vandalism ("Bob's mohter is gay!!eleven"). You don't need any expertise to identify such obvious vandalism. Checking the accuarcy of those the newly added facts is done the same way it was done before this system was implemented (watchlists, wikiprojects, casual readers/editors, etc..)
And many edits by anonymous users are just corrections of typos, linkfixes, layout changes, etc.. those can be checked in a glance and flagged as "sighted". And edits by users with the sighter status (older than 60 days, more than 300 edits, clean block log) are flagged as "sighted" automatically. At the moment, there are about 5800 users with this status.