

Wikipedia to Add Layer of Editing to Articles - geezer
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/technology/internet/25wikipedia.html?hp

======
gjm11
Unless I'm badly misunderstanding
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_an...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revisions)
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.

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sachinag
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.

~~~
clay
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...](http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/raphaelh/publications/chi2009.pdf)
and then reward answers with points.

~~~
joez
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.

------
wmeredith
"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.

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

~~~
gwern
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.

~~~
Perceval
I agree. As a Wikipedia admin since 2004, I'm upset by the increasing
hesitance of long-term editors to allow anonymous IPs to explore and edit. One
wonders if they can even remember when they were a green anonymous IP editor,
adding content or fixing typos, before being wholly sucked into the wiki-
world.

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.

~~~
gwern
(Hey, an admin of my generation! Not many of us left.)

Reading the _second_ poll, it seems that the plan is to apply it to all BLPs
immediately. I only hope it stops there.

------
tptacek
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.

~~~
gwern
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).

~~~
tptacek
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.

~~~
duskwuff
You know, I've never quite understood why logged-out editing is associated
with "anonymity". You're far _more_ anonymous logged in as a pseudonym than
you are as a logged-out IP address.

~~~
gwern
Not always; it's only true when each IP = one editor, in which case it is
indeed less anonymous than pseudonyms.

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...

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brown9-2
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?

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ricree
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.

~~~
duskwuff
> 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.

------
staticshock
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
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.

~~~
staticshock
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.

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halo
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.

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

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

