Wikipedia to Add Layer of Editing to Articles
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or you could do something like this http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/raphaelh/publications/chi... and then reward answers with points.
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.
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.
This seems like flawed logic to me.
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.
I too wish that Jimbo were more stubborn in sticking to his principles of openness. But openness seems to be giving way to consensus. And the admins on IRC seem to have his ear on vandal fighting.
However, if flagged revisions are meant only to replace protected and semi-protected article status, then I think it's a good move. Because it allows people to edit and hash things out, even if the changes aren't immediately shown to the public. This is better than simply locking all users out. One hopes that we can curb the proliferation of flagged revisions, but I'm not sure one will be able to stop its expansion to nearly everything in Category:Living people.
Reading the second poll, it seems that the plan is to apply it to all BLPs immediately. I only hope it stops there.
Do you know what the result was? A small fall in full protection - and a massive expansion in semiprotection (and thus protection in general).
A tiny minority of WP pages are even semi-protected.
Flagged revisions falls somewhere between semi- and full-, and will likely be used accordingly.
Used 'accordingly', sensibly - like de did by flagging every article?
Pseudonymous editing can be much less anonymous - consider if you are editing from behind AOL's dynamic IPs, or from one of the IP addresses that proxy entire countries. That is, if you're a Qatari editor, editing anonymously means your edits could belong to any subset of ~1.5 million people; if you edit pseudonymously...
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?
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.
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.
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.
Similarly differing interpretations of controls occur in first person shooters with (non-)inverted mouselook.
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.