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."
User preference to view un-reviewed articles? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
fork it (Score:5, Interesting)
It's decent now, so even if it was frozen as is it would still be a valuable resource. And edit approval won't freeze it, it can still grow just more slowly.
Besides, there's enough dissatisfaction already with Wikipedia's policies to warrant a fork. This will just increase the likelihood of someone forking off a better wikipedia, a wikipedia for the masses with no notability bullshit, fewer rampaging herds of deletionists, and commitment to the original idea of an online encyclopedia which everyone can contribute to and edit.
Re:bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. But it isn't surprising. Remember that Wales never wanted wikipedia- his original idea was for a free encyclopedia written by experts. That was taking way to long, so he did wikipedia as a way to create articles which could be edited and brought into the "real" encyclopedia. He's always hated that the bastard child took off, and always wanted to move back to his original idea. If he could kill the idea of a user edited encyclopedia, he would. He's *just* practical enough to know he can't, but it will get progressively less open as he closes it as much as he can.
A wikipedia that was "cool like that" (Score:5, Interesting)
Is what is needed. Look, most people understand that they need to take anything they read on wikipedia with a grain of salt; a website that anybody can edit has to be. But see, wikipedia seems to project the aura that it doesn't think it's shit stinks. As a result, you get crap like the warnings for this [wikipedia.org]. Look, who cares if that article isn't well referenced or cited. I was just looking for a general idea of why the Chinnese consider "May you live in interesting times" a curse. We dont need the damn disclaimer, it makes the place feel like it is full of anal retentive blow-hards on power trips. And the best part is, the article I linked to seems to have had at least one of those warning boxes since Sept. 2007! Nobody cares!
I used to remove every one of those stupid warnings when I'd hit an article via google just for spite. Now I stopped caring. When I see one, I just back out and go somewhere else. I certainly wouldn't take the time to do whatever the silly warning box wanted. Obviously I'm not alone or those boxes wouldn't have been around for more than a year.
My ideal wikipedia would not have any of that "citation needed" or "needs more references" bullshit. Just leave the damn thing alone. We all know the thing is never going to be a bastion of truthliness. We all use it for trivia and cases were we really dont care how accurate the information we get is. And if we spot bias, we just might edit it out. Isn't that the point?
Bottom line is wikipedia would be better served by removing every single one of those annoying warning boxes. Every one. They serve no purpose other then to project the aura of pretenciousness.
Re:bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Amazing how some internet "services" become popular (ebay, youtube, etc) and then get progressively destroyed by the ones that own them and how they destroy what made them once great. Let's hope it doesn't happen to gmail and google.
Although the architecture of internet itself sought to decentralize delivery, it's funny that humans always gravitate toward provided services that are so centralized. I wish there was a way to provide these services in a more decentralized fashion while not being completely chaotic, but that likely won't happen.
alternative suggestions (Score:4, Interesting)
Restricting edits to trusted users is ideologically opposite to the core principles that made Wikipedia great. I think it is a terrible idea.
Instead, I've advocated alternatives in the past: article 'sets' based on quality and notability, and real-time feedback of edits/history and controvercial regions
article sets: instead of an "in or out" policy for articles... let people make any article the want - any person, any thing, but have a graded system for what makes it to full publication. For example: Level 5 articles, "Full Publication" are basically all the things on Wikipedia now. Level 1 are minutia of almost no interest to anyone but a select few, and only accessible to logged-in users. All new articles start at Level 1. Level 0 and -1 are candidates for deletion. Levels in between are various degrees of publication openness; community nominated moderation panels select articles' levels (think: meta-moderation). This would create an even more open ecosystem of creative expression that would lead to higher-quality publication of new articles in Wikipedia.
real-time feedback: The web pages need to include a sidebar or underlines, or some integrated, obvious feedback mechanism to flag recent edits and controversial (high-change-rate) sections of text. This is critical to understanding the longevity, accuracy and community agreement to content in a page. This would eliminate one of the most serious criticisms of Wikipedia, by letting readers know what was recently changed or what has been changed often. One would need to create many complex metrics about article edit rates, user reliability and content filters to make such an integrated flagging/feedback system work well.
These are the areas where the Wikipedia foundation could innovate and create things that are better than we have today - not with closing down edits with approvals.
Re:Will there be no wiki truths? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, you say? "People will find and edit, no problem! That's why we have vandalism patrol, RC patrol etc! The system works!" - does it? No, it don't [wikipedia.org]. Apparently, Ms Tavares "preferred color of vibrator" sat, untouched, through such measures, and according to statistics, had over 1,000 visitors. The vandalism was only reverted after being pointed out in Wikipedia Review [wikipediareview.com], a site that goes to great lengths to expose a lot of the more nefarious back-room manoeuvrings that plague "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit" (and thus has garnered such a great deal of spite from certain factions at Wikipedia (uncoincidentally, many of whom are exposed for their part in said manoeuvrings), that there have been times when WR was added to spam blacklists to prevent linking to it from WP, and proposals, one called "BADSITES"(!) were raised to curtail any mention of sites which said negative things of WP (and yet, here people are screaming "NO CENSORSHIP! Except for the things WE don't like!"). Even now, if you find yourself caught up in the WP TLA bureacracy, (RFC, RFArb, MED, AN, ANI, etc, etc, et al, et al), or trying to gain, say, Administrator status, it's a nice way to poison the well by having someone point out that "Gasp. Such-and-such is a KNOWN WR CONTRIBUTOR!".
Flagged revisions do no more, and no less, than allow people to tag revisions which have been reviewed to be vandalism-free. They don't prevent anyone editing. They don't censor information.
I find it highly telling that the "anonymous reader" trying to rouse support for the "end of Wikipedia as we know it" has not the courage of their convictions to name themselves.
Re:yay!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
um all the most popular services and apps on the web are part of half assed solutions which crowd the limelight.
Facebook, myspace, ebay, wikipedia, etc.
And I use Wikipedia, not because it is the most accurate but because I don't have to pay for access to it. Britannica charges for access to articles that in general have less knowledge in them than wikipedia. So you pay to get less, but it's all trusted right? With the number of spelling grammar, and just plain wrong facts i found in my parents full set of encyclopedia britannica (purchased 1990) on information from even the 60's I vowed never to pay for an encyclopedia let alone their useless drivel.
noooooo (Score:2, Interesting)
this breaks the entire reason that wikipedia worked!!!!
Obsessive compulsive? (Score:5, Interesting)
Digital approval signatures (Score:2, Interesting)
I wrote some time ago an article about peer reviewing Wikipedia:
http://cameralovesyou.net/random/wikipedia-digital-signatures.html [cameralovesyou.net]
I submitted it to Wikipedia Village Pump about six months ago, but at the time it didn't go through to the implementation phase.
The basic idea was that a revision of an article could be peer reviewed, so that it could later be referenced as if approved by the peer reviewers. The idea looks actually quite much like the "flagged" revisions that are now under discussion. :-)
Re:A wikipedia that was "cool like that" (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikipedia used to be more like that. Then... they started taking themselves seriously. It is -- after all -- little more than an indulgence in vanity and power. Then came the drives for quality, a new regime with "citation needed" everywhere and other such tools of fascism.
The problem with your idea is, as good as it is, is that Jimbo can't make any money with a Wikipedia site that's just a fun playground. And lets be very, very clear, all the noble philosophy that the wikipedians like to spout -- all hot air. It's about money, power and vanity. Jimbo sells wikipedia info to third parties. He can't do that if it was just some kid writing something that he though might help people, can he? That is what this is all really about.
It's about money. Sure, there's a whole Wikipedia non-profit construct built around the real core business. You're not supposed to notice that. You see the noble slogans, and the "anyone can edit" etc, and it all feels inclusive and socialist and fuzzy.
Meanwhile... authors' contributions are being sold off for hard cash. Fiscally, legally, not exactly by Wikipedia per se, but in reality, that's just splitting hairs.
Re:A wikipedia that was "cool like that" (Score:3, Interesting)
I mostly agree with the spirit of your post, but I would never let go of the "Citation needed"-tag. I wouldn't make it a precondition, but at least it is good to see when a certain claim is not backed by any proof of any sorts. Let me try to explain: I see my undergrad students copy/paste from Wikipedia mercilessly. OK, I may look over that, but when they also copy certain physical values or statements that in the Wikipedia article are not supported by any citation, I want them (the students) to see that.
Re:bad idea (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you are right, and after all, how do you build the foundation for an encyclopedia? You have to either rely on information so old it is no longer under any sort of copyright, pay a bunch of people to write it from scratch, or as was done, get an even larger bunch of people to do it for free.
Once the base is established, it takes a much smaller group of people to keep it up to date.
Wikipedia is free in the sense that I can send someone a link to an article without having to worry that I've committed them to sign up for something to read it. I don't see how Britannica will ever be able to match this. Their mistake was to remain in the hardware business (selling blue leather-bound books) for too long and in the process actually devalued the quality of their own content. I had a fancy set of the books and a subscription to the update service for a few years. Those updates (which would potentially find their way into future books) were every bit as sloppy as the Wikipedia updates. Only the iteration rate for Wikipedia is hundreds of times faster than for Britannica. Wikipedia's problem is to make sure they don't just iterate randomly and instead converge on something generally regarded as accurate. A wide-open system can't do that, and a fully closed system isn't guaranteed to do that either.
While it is possible that Britannica could become a viable alternative to Wikipedia, I think such a thing is unlikely. But maybe Wikipedia morphing into something more like Britannica is the next best thing. We need sources of information that are a cut above folk-lore, but the Internet has guaranteed us that folk-lore is here to stay, that is, unless and until we have another dark age/system reset.
Re:Will there be no wiki truths? (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of the site's problems could be solved by having paid, professional administrators who do not directly edit, but solve disputes. That way, it would be difficult for some of the rampant POV pushers to get their way (as is the case on Israel/Palestine articles). It would also be much easier to break up organized groups of editors (the whole "wisdom of crowds" thing works better when people edit as individuals free of the pressures of groupthink).
It won't happen though. Wikipedia is run by nutcases, and everyone knows that the owner will change pages in exchange for sex.
Re:Wikipedia broke a long time ago... (Score:2, Interesting)
we need a more distributed model like git or something
it is possible to fork wikipedia but it would not be easy, especially with the way google works. And it probably wouldnt produce anything useful
Re:Will there be no wiki truths? (Score:2, Interesting)
I have to respond to this, because while you make some valid points, you're also misrepresenting a number of things.
The censorship on Wikipedia of sites like WR surrounds Wikipedia's consideration for its users' privacy. Sites like WR frequently have users who will delve into the personal lives of editors they happen to dislike, and try to publish as much information as possible, in ways verging on harassment. In addition, having their identities revealed can cause a number of problems for the editors: I know Wikipedia editors who keep science articles free of crackpot theories, and they tend to keep their true identities hidden because otherwise crackpots would go after them with frivolous lawsuits and real world harassment of employers and family. The censorship is based around this, not around what people happen to dislike.
Also, while many threads on WR are useful, many others are not, having been created mainly by people who dislike Wikipedia for not pandering to their particular viewpoints, and thus go about trying to claim that everything about Wikipedia is bad. And while there are occasionally problems with RFCs, RfArb, ANI, RfD, and so on, I've generally found that, unless one is searching for problems, things typically work well. Reading only Wikipedia Review is like reading only news about criminals: it can easily give a very distorted view of reality.
Re:Wikipedia isn't worth it (Score:4, Interesting)
They would just come back under a different account. There's no "reputation" to hold people to a now-banned account, since that reputation would be "worthless contributor." Better to simply be "guy nobody knows anything about" at that point. Karma needs to be positive; it needs to be something that people want, and care about keeping. It would probably work better in the reverse: People with good karma, perhaps in the topic in question, could bypass proposed edit approval queues. Or perhaps send it to the queue for approval, but default to adding the change in and have the queue revert it instead of defaulting it out and having the queue put it in. It's still guaranteed to be looked at at some point, as opposed to the current system where it may or may not be depending on who happens on the page, its subject matter, edit history, etc etc.
Re:bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Please mod OP up.
This is a keen insight that needs more attention. He forgot to mention Yahoo. A lot of internet projects started out great and then died when the copyright czars or PHBs mucked with them too much. And a lot of this has to do with fear of lawsuits and legislation.
Americans should be concerned. If we keep letting incumbents (I'm looking at you Disney) fuck up the new media market it will eventually be taken over by someone else. Think I'm kidding? When Google implodes I guarantee you it's replacement will be Chinese.
The decentralized systems you talk about DO exist and they ARE widely used. It's called P2P, in particular bittorrent. It's just that it's very difficult for the copyright czars and decency police to control such systems so they fight to shut them down. This is the essence of the new media conflict.
Re:Not all subjects... (Score:2, Interesting)
If you remember when semi-protection was introduced, it was only going to apply on a short-term basis to the barest number of pages.
If you're browsing major topics on Wikipedia sometime, glance in the upper-right-hand corner at the silver lock which means that the page is semi-protected. It's gotten so common that they took to using a little generic icon instead of a text snippet explaining what's going on.
Why? Because some admin decides that His Way is the Only Way. And there we are. It'll happen here too, mark my words.
Re:User preference to view un-reviewed articles? (Score:3, Interesting)
How about just letting the users know what was just edited?
I know this'll never work because of the additional load on the servers it would cause, but here's my idea anyway:
Each wikipedia entry would have the last ten, or whatever, edits highlighted. The highlights would add up, so if out of the last ten, five edits changed just the first line, the first line would be more intensive.
That way, when a user checks an article and sees that a piece of information was often changed, he may check out the edit history to check of the version he's viewing is true, false, or whatever.
Wow, talk about spin! (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Wow, talk about putting a spin on the story! The sky is falling and stuff!
The wait times of several weeks don't sound realistic to me for most articles, because heavily edited articles are also heavily watched and scrutinised - I can't imagine there being much bigger delays on getting up-to-date information on current events than there is now.
Also, I don't believe anyone really wants more bureaucracy than there already is. In my personal opinion, article sighting powers should be handed out like autoconfirmation is handed out today: Automatically after a set period of time after article creation.
But let's talk about history.
Last time when we did a major move to "limit the editing", we introduced semi-protection. A lot of people felt limiting newly registered users from editing article was a blow against the principle of open editing. But also, these people didn't stop to consider what the alternative to the semi-protection was.
The alternative to semi-protection was full protection. Either everyone is allowed to edit, or no one is. Which one do you prefer: Wait a few days to get yourself a confirmation to edit all semi-protected articles ever, or always bother the much-hated administrative nazi bastards and hope they add the precious bit of information to the protected article? I'm pretty sure most people feel the former is more within the spirit of open editing.
Flagged revisions aren't taking away open editing either. Instead, they are a tool to let people scrutinise the new additions better. No one's taking away the ability to view the bleeding-edge versions, if you want them. The idea is just to make sure that someone has at least checked the recent edits.
So what's the alternative horror scenario?
The alternative horror scenario is that no one looks through the stuff. Semi-protection is entirely mechanical in nature: we can't technically define a "suspected vandal" as "unregistered or a recently registered account", vandalism is a social issue, and social issues are solved by social interaction, not by computers. The only way to introduce social problem-solving is to let people vet the edits. That's how real editing process works in real life.
An example: Evolution (Score:3, Interesting)
We don't like locking articles, but we can do it already. Flagged Revisions is just another form of locking, and it's unfortunate, but there are assholes who have nothing better to do than sit around and wait for their favorite article to get unlocked so they can start vandalizing it again (like this guy). Whenever we try to unlock the article again (because, astonishingly, Wikipedia editors - and, contrary to what you might think, Wikipedia is very much run by its editors, it's far too vast to be effectively policed by any cabal) the vandalism starts again. We want to be able to deal with it in a way that's simple and fair to other editors. Flagged Revisions seems the best compromise, and it's hardly more Orwellian than locking the article to admin-only edits. Can you suggest a better solution to our problem?