Wikipedia to Add Layer of Editing to Articles

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/technology/internet/25wikipedia.html?hp

by geezer • 17 years ago

49 31 17 years ago

sachinag2• 17 years ago

You know what Wikipedia needs? Game mechanics. Give every registered user x number of commits/edits/reversions. Jack up x based on participation and commits/edits/reversions that "stick". This way, new people can still add stuff (because editors can't infinitely revert) but can't just make a bunch of spam accounts to flood the site.

Obviously, you still do the IP address/superuser stuff as additional checks, but this increases the penalty for adding useless stuff or deleting useful stuff just because you didn't do it.

joez2• 17 years ago

I feel like Wikipedia's latest move is just a bandage solution to a more fundamental problem. A bandage that causes Wikipedia to be even less inclusionist. (See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=761589 for some discussion on deletionist and inclusionist).

I believe Jimmy Wales has indicated that he would like to just stop editing of Wikipedia at some point and save that as version 1.0 and any later edits are a 2.0. This is just a less extreme version of that.

Edit: I also wanted to add that it seems like Wikipedia and Wales is intent on changing. As the saying goes, "where there is change, there is opportunity." I believe this now is when the seeds of the company to overtake Wikipedia are sowed.

staticshock3• 17 years ago

I'm sorry, I must have missed something. With these game mechanics, why exactly can't new people make a bunch of spam accounts to flood the site?

sachinag2• 17 years ago

I'm not advocating tossing all the other stuff out the window. Whatever mechanism they use now to stop spam accounts, keep it. I'm suggesting a different way to aportion the ability to make lasting changes to the site's content.

azanar• 17 years ago

Jack up x based on participation and commits/edits/reversions that "stick"

I would rather a more sophisticated metric than this. The metric of stickiness seems to work off of the idea that, in the average case, every reversion is a net win for content quality. My intuition might be serving me wrong, this sort of game mechanic seems prone to causing all sorts of ill-effects, gaming and odd edge cases.

For instance, who gets credit for a reversion of a reversion? How can you keep someone with a sufficient value of x from camping on an article and reverting whatever changes a well-intentioned and clueful but relatively new user posts? Since that new user has no more x to spend, the user camping gets rewarded for having his trollish reversion "stick", and the new user gets disenchanted and leaves.

clay• 17 years ago

How about a more indirect approach. You could make a Yahoo Answer's type site using Wikipedia. People are encouraged to ask questions about particular sections that they don't understand or are lacking information and then points are given for answered questions with citations.

Or you could do something like this http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/raphaelh/publications/chi... and then reward answers with points.

joez2• 17 years ago

Check out Mahalo Answers? (http://www.mahalo.com/answers/) I think this is basically exactly what you are describing.

I do thank you for the link to this Kylin project. That was a confounded read but this team is definitely trying to do something amazing.

ZeroGravitas• 17 years ago

They already have this and, according to some insiders, it's part of the problem.

Basically the claim is that quantity of edits makes it more likely for you to "level up" within the Wikipedia community. This count includes reverts of perfectly good info as when you optimise for any variable, people find ways to play the system.

They also do simpler things like force you to sign up to create a new page, as opposed to edit an existing one.

ryanwaggoner• 17 years ago

This headline is confusing, to me anyway. In my mind, Wikipedia already has a layer of "editing", but what they mean is a layer of editorial, which to my mind is very different.

sielskr• 17 years ago

Well, the New York Times uses the journalistic sense of the word "edit" whereas you use the sense popular among programmers.

wmeredith• 17 years ago

"The change is part of a growing realization on the part of Wikipedia’s leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and predictable."

This seems like flawed logic to me.

Perceval2• 17 years ago

Wikipedia is increasingly conscious of being sued by public figures because of the high profile vandalism cases that occur with some regularity.

gwern5• 17 years ago

It's not an issue of being sued. The DMCA protects us, and always has. It's an issue of culture - people want to be 'respectable'. They don't have the mental toughness to stay the course; they're traumatized by bad PR.

Consider the Seigenthaler incident: the moment the bad PR started piling up, Jimbo rolled over and instantly banned anonymous page creation. Did this stop bad pages from being created? No. Did this harm the community? Yes. Was it done without consultation? Yes. Has it proven utterly useless and likely wouldn't've stopped the original page from being created? Yes. Did it destroy a valuable source of information for New Page patrollers? Yes.

Yet, it allowed Jimbo to face the press and bleat that Something Has Been Done. Flagged revs is much the same.

gritzko• 17 years ago

They evolve into uselessness, as any system does. They already have their own bureaucracy. Once they will introduce their own editorial process, the transformation will be finished. That makes no difference, actually. I believe, that their technology just does not scale further. A couple of centuries ago, Britannica was also young and disruptive. No anymore.

gjm11• 17 years ago

Unless I'm badly misunderstanding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_an... the article is misleading (and the title given here, which is not the same as the one currently appearing at the top of the NYT article, even worse).

1. The NYT title has "some articles" where the title here has "articles". The title here gives the impression that WP is about to start imposing extra restrictions everywhere, which it certainly isn't. The pages targeted by this measure are biographies of living people.

2. The page I linked to above, unless I'm all confused, says that what's actually going to be done is to allow BLP pages to be protected from vandalism using the flagged-revisions mechanism instead of the (already existing, already frequently used) protection/semi-protection mechanism. So even BLP pages won't be affected by default, but only when an admin specifically takes action.

ricree• 17 years ago

From what I can see, the idea makes sense. They already have levels of protection that can be applied to pages when they feel it's necessary, and this seems to be an extension of that. The only big difference is that it still allows contributions from untrusted users if someone is willing to verify it.

That said, it seems like there is some sentiment that this ought to be something that is put in place over a widespread portion of the site. I don't know what the actual numbers are, but I have a hard time believing that there are enough volunteers for that without stagnating the site. As I said before, this seems like an extension of the protection system, and it ought to be applied in a similar manner.

duskwuff2• 17 years ago

> As I said before, this seems like an extension of the protection system, and it ought to be applied in a similar manner.

And, indeed, this is how it is being applied. Edits to most articles will still be visible immediately, but some articles which have been chosen for "flagged protection" will require edits to be reviewed before they go live. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:FLPPR for details.

halo• 17 years ago

The "flagged revisions" UI was utterly horrendous the last time I used it, way beyond the knowledge of the average user. I hope they've tidied it up since then.

staticshock3• 17 years ago

I dislike the fact that they chose the term "flagged", which, in a lot of other contexts, implies "flagged for review". On wikipedia, instead, an article revision is flagged because it's been reviewed.

This annoys me about as much as the fact that Ctrl + Mouse Scroll Wheel works backwards in Firefox versus every other browser out there (Ctrl + Scroll Up actually makes the text smaller, which is completely unintuitive. Up means taller, bigger, stronger! Who screwed that up?)

Also, they drive on the wrong side of the road in Britain! The first two problems are worth fixing... I guess the third one can't be helped.

dmnd• 17 years ago

Scrolling up means that you rotate the top of the wheel away from you. As things move away they become smaller, not bigger! I think Firefox has it correct, and the other browsers are wrong...

Similarly differing interpretations of controls occur in first person shooters with (non-)inverted mouselook.

staticshock3• 17 years ago

Yes, the scroll wheel itself moves in a horizontal plane, but it triggers a vertical action on the computer screen. Nobody with any experience handling a mouse is thinking about the mouse itself, but only about the effect it will produce on the screen.

The "move towards" / "move away" analogy falls apart because the screen is a vertical plane. "Up" is more intuitive than "away", and "down" is more intuitive than "towards". You may even see an example of this intuition in how people talk about using the scroll wheel: nobody says "scroll towards" or "scroll away". The FF people who came up with the backwards convention must have been looking at a mouse without thinking about its common use cases.

tptacek2• 17 years ago

The backstory to this is that it's just as likely that flagged revisions will open the encyclopedia up. Wikipedia already has a mechanism to keep people from editing controversial pages: "protection". A protected page can't be edited by anyone but an admin. "Flagged" pages are more open than the protected/semi-protected pages.

gwern5• 17 years ago

You know, that exact same argument was made about semiprotection.

Do you know what the result was? A small fall in full protection - and a massive expansion in semiprotection (and thus protection in general).

tptacek2• 17 years ago

But full protection is an extreme measure, and semi-protection is far less extreme, which mostly impacts anonymity.

A tiny minority of WP pages are even semi-protected.

Flagged revisions falls somewhere between semi- and full-, and will likely be used accordingly.

brown9-2• 17 years ago

Maybe I'm alone here but the part of the article about the NYT working with wikipedia for the past 7 months to censor information about their kidnapped journalist is more troubling to me than the article/Wikipedia change itself.

I understand their reasoning - and that thankfully it worked since the reporter is now safe - but doesn't it seem really odd for a leading newspaper to admit to working to censor news?

Not to sound completely paranoid or cliche but... Where does the NYT / Wikipedia draw the line on something like this? Is WP working with any organizations to censor information?

cema• 17 years ago

I think this is a breach of trust with wikipedia users (in a way).

Wikipedia to Add Layer of Editing to Articles

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