Wikipedia To Unlock Frequently Vandalized Pages 244
netbuzz writes "In an effort to encourage greater participation, Wikipedia, the self-described 'online encyclopedia that anyone can edit,' is turning to tighter editorial control as a substitute for simply 'locking' those entries that frequently attract mischief makers and ideologues. The new system, which will apply to a maximum of 2,000 most-vulnerable pages, is sure to create controversies of its own."
Hypocrisy (Score:1, Insightful)
The "locked" articles are guarded by ideologues whose views differ from the "mischief makers and ideologues" Wikipedia hates.
Tools have improved for vandalism, screening works (Score:5, Insightful)
(I try to volunteer a bit of my time on Huggle, a .NET application that allows for Wikipedia users with rollback permission to quickly patrol, revert vandalism, warn, and report users)
Vandalism has been down a lot from what I've seen in the past, and more and more I get beaten to the punch reverting it.
The biggest problem I see with this "pending changes" is that there will be so many edits that intentional subtle trolling (deliberately inserting incorrect facts/statistics) is more likely to get through just by the nature of the fact that experienced editors will have to read thousands of edits.
However, it does make Wikipedia more accessible to a wider variety of users and should stop scaring away new contributors. Most anonymously made edits are actually not vandalism, so it's good to see Wikipedia trying to take an approach that allows these people to contribute to "bigger" (in the sense of # of visitors) articles.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not hypocrisy if the rules or "ideals" are open and clear. Their "ideal" is an honest attempt at a neutral point-of-view. If that offends you, then perhaps Wikipedia isn't the site for you.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:2, Insightful)
Who gets to define neutral though? One man's fact is another man's propaganda.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:2, Insightful)
The "locked" articles are guarded by ideologues whose views differ from the "mischief makers and ideologues" Wikipedia hates.
Such as the ideals of truth?
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to mention that even simple edits like updates or the like get reverted randomly.
In the end Wikipedia manages to scare away potential editors rather than attract them.
deeper problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:2, Insightful)
If someone is truly that petty, we settle it the only way reasonable people do: alphabetically.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this idea that there are two-sides to everything is actually a significant problem in politics, and especially in media. "Balanced" should not mean getting a frothing-at-the-mouth liberal shouting at a born-again-conservative... it should mean getting some people who can see multiple sides of an issue and trying to be honest about the relative merits of both sides.
Let's use your example of abortion. Setting someone who is "pro-choice" against someone who is "pro-life" does not really capture the issue very well - only the extreme edges. I'd wager that most people would lie somewhere in the middle... most people would probably not object to abortion when the fetus is deformed or the mother's life is at stake, or in the case of rape. On the other hand, most rational people seemed to find partial birth abortions pretty horrifying, and I don't seem to have much trouble finding people who dislike abortion as a form of birth control.
This muddy middle is rarely captured by polarized discussions.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia's neutrality policy and its style isn't really just to have two sides on a matter write a paragraph of propaganda and hope it balances out. It's to write an article whose accuracy is impeccably true by discussing the opponents and proponents in the controversy in a factual way. ("Planned Parenthood says this. The Catholic Church says that. Criticisms of the Catholic Church's position include X, Y, and Z, from organization J, K, and Q; for more information see the sub-article on this particular controversy so we don't detain the main article any further.") No one ever doubted that the one is a supporter and the other a detractor.
To take a page from Indiana Jones, it's about facts, not truth. If it's truth you're after, go study philosophy.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia strives to provide a reference for every fact:
The President ran in the cornfield naked - bullshit.
On July 1 2010 New York Times reported that the President ran in the cornfield naked - fact, easily checked.
Of course, there are gray areas, but to claim that the distinction between fact and fiction is too vague to achieve a decently neutral point of view in most cases is just pure sophistry.
Re:deeper problem (Score:4, Insightful)
I generally had a very positive experience with editing WIkipedia. Your examples indicate that there is a lot of bullshit going on behind the scenes, but still, we need this friction, because without it it would be little better than uncyclopedia. If I wanted to edit articles in the earnest, I would definitely create an account, I would write intelligible comments explaining my edits, and I would start asking to lock articles with dumb-skull bots guarding them, and get my way after a proper bureaucratic process. The end result is a better article, so it is totally worth the effort.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
For some topics, it's difficult to find an impartial-but-competent editor. Take politics: if the editor understands the topic, they will very likely have a personal position on it. If they don't understand it, they probably won't be able to figure out what's worth including, and how much coverage to give different points of view. (Articles that simply list every possible point of view -- like "Some people believe this; other people believe that..." -- are rather useless.) At some point, someone needs to make a judgement over which points of view are fringe and which are mainstream, if only to convey that to their readers, and that is a judgement that someone will always contest.
Re:deeper problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Recently I added a couple of sentences to a WWII-era biographical article in which I referred to the Nazi party, and someone's bot reverted it because "Nazi" was a keyword that it was programmed to assume indicated vandalism.
Should Wikipedia continue to allow personal revert-bots to troll webpages?
If it's really necessary, maybe Wikipedia should create an internal auto-revert framework and accept page specific submissions.
Re:Oh really? Then... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Taleban put a 7 year old to death for spying. That's as neutral and baldly factual as it gets. Neither of your statements are correct, they are emotion-filled words meant to evoke a response and not state facts.
Re:Oh really? Then... (Score:5, Insightful)
See? Not hard. Perhaps it's not as good at galvanizing people into righteous outrage as the phrase "brutally murdered" but that's just the price you pay sometimes. It's an encyclopedia. I don't think Britannica would use language quite so loaded either, you know?
Re:Oh really? Then... (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes you think you have to choose one of those two? Or, to put it differently, what part of "neutral" don't you understand?
If I take your account at face value (not being familiar with the incident; would perhaps be nice of you to provide a link, but I know that's asking a lot around here), then here would be some neutral facts:
- The Taliban did (something), killing a 7-year-old boy
- The Taliban say the boy was spying and that they punished him
- Critics of the Taliban say that the punishment was unjust and constitutes an act of murder
Perhaps there are some other facts, such as evidence supporting or refuting each side's claims. Perhaps there aren't. But frankly, if that's your example of a "hard" problem for being neutral, then I'd have to conclude there's no problem and you just don't know what neutral sounds like.
Re:Oh really? Then... (Score:2, Insightful)
So let's change it to
Re:Tools have improved for vandalism, screening wo (Score:2, Insightful)
I wouldn't agree with this - for the main reason that (AFAIK) anti-vandalism currently relies a lot on automated processes that check for common vandalism patterns. This change will bring the changes under the scrutiny of real people (for example, if they'll add a tool to show a diff between the public version and latest unapproved version, it'll be plain obvious someone changed some numbers, etc.). There's also that "anti-vandalism patrol" involves people reading random articles in which they have no personal interest - I imagine that the task of reviewing and publishing changes with the new feature would fall to editors with some interest in the article in question.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed that listing every possible point of view (including nut case ones) in detail is not very useful. However, listing main points of view and giving the primary arguments for each is quite useful.
Picking the first hot topic that came to mind led me to the Wikipedia article on gun politics in the USA [wikipedia.org]. While this article has a lot of warnings (including neutrality) at the head of it, it seems like a fairly balanced coverage. Nuts on either side won't like it, but I think knowledgeable and open minded people, even those who lean strongly one way or the other, will find it tolerably neutral.
People who can do this exist for most topics or, at a minimum, a couple people who are open minded and knowledgeable but are on opposite 'sides' of the issue exist and could work together to make the judgment.
The problem is, most of these people have real jobs (often in academia or in think tanks) and probably unlikely to spend their time on Wikipedia when they could be publishing their insight and research either for creds or for money. They are also likely to be unwilling to spend the necessary time to defend their contributions from editing by people who know little about the topic or are unable to accept that any position but their own could be useful.
Re: Neutral (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Oh really? Then... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, that would be more appropriate.
However, I found it ironically illustrative of the fact that when someone claims something is “as neutral and baldly factual as it gets”, even if they’re honestly trying to make it neutral there’s still a very good chance that it isn’t. PitaBred still fell into a logical fallacy with making what he thought was a purely factual statement.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not convinced that you need someone who doesn't have a personal position on a topic. It's true that some people have a problem putting their bias aside to write an impartial article, but this is not true of everyone. The people most likely to abuse that situation by suppressing the opposing view, are the ones who fear the opposing view because when you get right down to it they aren't so secure in their own view.
I'm also not convinced that you need an expert on a topic to evaluate which perspectives are worthy of inclusion. An encyclopeida is a secondary source; you always have to know who's claiming this-or-that before you can include it. So all you need is someone who can rate the significance of the source. Do I have to be an expert on American politics to know that the official Republican and Democratic positions on an issue are more significant than a view that I can only find cited by Bob at the corner bar? Not really.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:3, Insightful)
As a historian once told me, a statement of pure facts would render everything meaningless. It would reduce history to mere chronicle. It's all "what" and no "why." Nothing can have an effect, things just follow one another in a rote manner with no real connection of cause.
It is possible to state opinions as facts in this context, if you can cite them from an outside source. E.g. "So-and-so said this[#], while Other-party disputed it thusly[#]"
So you could remain neutral without deciding whose statements are credible, and you'd still get your "why".
Re:Oh really? Then... (Score:1, Insightful)
Inserting "allegedly" is redundant in this context since the original does not imply guilt or innocence.
There is a difference between "X is a spy" and "X is allegedly a spy" but there is no difference between "X was convicted of spying" and "X was convicted of allegedly spying."
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh really? Then... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody said convicted of. Being “convicted of” something means a court decided you were guilty, and as courts have been known to make mistakes it is possible (though usually not likely) that being convicted of something does not mean that you were guilty of it.
We are talking about someone being put to death for something. Why was he put to death? Because he was a spy. ... well, allegedly a spy. However the literal reading of the sentence, “The Taliban put a 7 year old to death for spying”, explicitly states that a 7-year-old was spying, and the Taliban executed him for it. If you put that sentence forth as a fact, the fact that he was only allegedly a spy disappears: you’ve stated it as a fact.
Saying he was convicted of spying is one thing. Saying he was executed for spying is another thing. If I say he was executed for spying, I am implicitly endorsing the conviction (the opposite would be if I said that he was falsely accused of spying and then executed). That is an opinion, not a fact. The fact is, he was executed for allegedly spying.
Re:Oh really? Then... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh ok I see where we differ.
It doesn't seem to me that a conviction establishes the ultimate truth of guilt or innocence, but rather states a point of view. Saying that the Taliban convicted someone of spying doesn't, in my mind, determine whether or not that person actually did such a thing. Just that they convicted him of it. In an ideal world a conviction would always match a true determination of guilt, but as we've seen in America it's perfectly possible to convict and execute an innocent man.
We're saying the same thing, but approaching it from opposite viewpoints, imho.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:3, Insightful)
Which they patently aren't. The whole idea of a wiki is that people contribute what they know, and others enhance it. It's how wikipedia grew from a few small articles to a wealth of information in many languages. Yet they now have bots going around and automatically deleting anything that the nothing-better-to-do, always-there gatekeeper-zealots decide is (currently) too short or isn't (yet) worded in a uniform way.
Frankly, at this point I'm hoping someone will come along with a better, more open semantic knowledge base, import the wikipedia content, and that we can all move on to a better future.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't think that's correct. I think that even if you think you're being neutral, bits of your ideology will still seep through. And I think it will be subtle and difficult to detect unless you are knowledgeable in the subject.
I think an article that is blatantly biased that someone that is not entirely familiar with the topic could pick up on would be better than an article that is subtly biased.
Re:Hypocrisy (Score:1, Insightful)
I may get marked for trolling here, but it seems to me that the people who complain most about Wikipedia's POV make the same complaint about the mainstream media: specifically, that it's too liberal. The Schafly family in particular felt strongly enough about that to start their own wiki, and IMO it's easy to see, at least when it comes to their take on evolution, just who has stricter requirements when it comes to checking sources. (There is a "liberal-pedia, by the way, but it looks like it has 50 articles and was intended to parody Conservapedia.)
Not that it doesn't go both ways, but I just tend to see it coming from that side more. And this is of course generalizing, but when I look at the facts that show up in books and shows by far-right pundits (Swift Boat comes to mind, FNC's early support of the birthers) I get the impression that they are just not that concerned about factual accuracy in the way that even your average Wikipedian is[citation needed].
Climate science, I think, makes a good litmus test. Surveys of publishing climate scientists reveal that over 95% of them (I have seen over 97% quoted too, FWIW) are convinced of global warming, and yet I am sure that there are those out there who would like to see the Wikipedia pages covering the topic to spend at least half of their text covering the opposition--despite it being mostly politically motivated. In a perfect world, I think we'd see a split that represents the way the scientific community is split (that is, not much), rather than what I see as a false-equivalence-promoting "teach the controversy" style.
I guess what I'm saying is that I find it questionable when people say that WP is biased towards a particular view.. if anything it's neutral to the point of unfairly promoting *all* views. Consider that the WP page on Demonic Possession has a subsection called "notable cases."