From : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5286458.stm

Wikipedia is considering introducing a form of prior restraint on
edits. Bill Thompson wonders what this means for its users

For some time the people behind Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia
assembled from reader contributions and edited and maintained by those
who care to get involved, have been coping with the fallout from a
widely-publicised failure of their quality control mechanism.

Last November US politician John Seigenthaler took Wikipedia to task
in the columns of USA Today over a false and defamatory biography of
him that had been posted on the site.

The biography, it eventually emerged, had been written as a prank, but
it remained online for four months before it was noticed and removed.

Since Mr Siegenthaler Sr was neither controversial enough to merit
consistent attention, or interested enough in what happened online to
bother to Google himself regularly, his biography simply sat there
unremarked, although we have no way of knowing how many school essays
mention his entirely fabricated involvement in the assassination of
Robert and John Kennedy.

Change management

Those of us who had been using Wikipedia for some time were, of
course, well aware that not everything on it was necessarily true or
accurate, and the real surprise was more about the wider media
interest in the site and its content that the Seigenthaler story
triggered.

Wikipedia is, and will continue to be, a work in progress, a best
effort by thousands of people to create an accurate, impartial and
useful repository of human knowledge. As such it has succeeded in
covering more topics, in more languages, than any other encyclopaedia.

But it necessarily contains errors, some placed there deliberately by
writers with a specific agenda and others simply mistakes that have
gone unnoticed.

Sometimes the errors are entirely frivolous, of course, as happened
earlier this month when fans of US comedian Stephen Colbert followed
his joking suggestion and edited pages on elephants to say that their
population had recently tripled.

The errors are not a reason to dismiss the site's usefulness or
importance. While Wikipedia should never be the last place one looks
for information about a specific topic, I increasingly find that it is
the best starting point for an exploration of a new subject.

However the nature of the "Wikipedia" itself seems to be shifting,
largely as a result of policy decisions made since the Seigenthaler
case, and this may well affect its continued usefulness.

While it continues to advertise itself as "the free encyclopaedia that
anyone can edit", in practice there have always been limits on what
some users can do, and an administrative and managerial team who have
greater privileges than other users.

From relatively early in its existence it has been possible to ensure
only administrators edit a page, but recent changes make it harder for
ordinary users to create and update pages on the site.

Over time this new layer of control could mean that its timeliness and
breadth - which other encyclopaedia has a list of Muppet characters
based on real celebrities? - suffer as those with something to share
are deterred from doing so.

A big change at the end of 2005 was the introduction of
"semi-protection" for pages which were being vandalised. Once a page
was marked in this way only registered users of at least four days
standing could make changes.

Semi-protection seems like a sensible and moderate response to a major
problem for the site, and it is clearly not being abused by
administrators to limit debate unnecessarily.

Fresh start

But now there are suggestions that a new architecture of control will
be introduced for Wikipedia as a whole, if it proves successful when
it is applied to the German-language site next month, and this could
have far wider implications.

Under the new approach, page edits will no longer be immediately
applied to pages but will instead have to be approved by an
administrator before they become visible. Vandalism or changes which
are not approved will not appear.

This is a major shift, from a "publish and fix" policy to one of prior
restraint, where a cadre of privileged users will supervise what
appears.

It is still only a proposal, so it is not yet clear if the new checks
would be applied to every page, but this is obviously being considered
seriously by Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales, and the site's Wikimedia
Foundation.

The large number of control features that are being added to
Wikipedia, raise an interesting question for all who care about the
site and its content: when does the Wikipedia stop being a wiki and
just become another website?

After all, if the special thing about a wiki is that pages can be
edited by any user, then introducing layer upon layer of editorial
control must mean that at some point Wikipedia becomes no different
from any other online publication where content is approved before it
is displayed.

And then the only special thing is that the editing tools allow
in-page editing rather than requiring site visitors to use special
software or go to an administration section of the site as most
blogging sites do.

But that's hardly the basis for a revolution in the way human
knowledge is gathered and distributed, is it? It begins to look more
and more like any other community website with a limited degree of
user participation.

What makes Wikipedia special and encourages those of us who are
registered with it to participate in the community is the sense that
we can all make a contribution. Putting more and more steps between
editing and publishing risks damaging that sense of engagement and, as
a result, could rapidly diminish Wikipedia's usefulness.

If Wikipedia can find a way to combine community participation with
greater oversight, perhaps by encouraging every registered user to
check changes and edits instead of leaving it largely to the central
cabal of administrators, then they may be able to make the new
approach work.

Perhaps we should all be asked to check one random page for every ten
or twenty we look at, giving our time to make the site work in return
for better content?




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Paul <lamewolf2004[REMOVE]@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Perhaps we should all be asked to check one random page for every ten
> or twenty we look at, giving our time to make the site work in return
> for better content?

Pitty. What's next? AdSense on it?

I do fix pages now and then (recently the Dutch page on scorpions which
had a lot of bullshit copied from a badly written pet keeping book), but
all this moderation stuff sounds like it will become a kind of DMOZ.
What's next? Bribing wikipedia Ubercontrollers?

--
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On 26 Aug 2006 01:20:46 GMT, John Bokma <john@castleamber.com> wrote:

>Paul <lamewolf2004[REMOVE]@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> Perhaps we should all be asked to check one random page for every ten
>> or twenty we look at, giving our time to make the site work in return
>> for better content?
>
>Pitty. What's next? AdSense on it?
>
>I do fix pages now and then (recently the Dutch page on scorpions which
>had a lot of bullshit copied from a badly written pet keeping book), but
>all this moderation stuff sounds like it will become a kind of DMOZ.
>What's next? Bribing wikipedia Ubercontrollers?

I hope not, I have a few IBLs from wiki. Hate to see it go downhill
like DMOZ.
--
Handmade Jewelry
http://www.houstoncrafts.com/handmad...chokers-2.html
http://www.houstoncrafts.com/handmad...ces-page3.html
http://www.houstoncrafts.com/houston...ets-Page3.html

----== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com - Unlimited-Unrestricted-Secure Usenet News==----
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Paul <lamewolf2004[REMOVE]@yahoo.com> wrote:

> On 26 Aug 2006 01:20:46 GMT, John Bokma <john@castleamber.com> wrote:
>
>>Paul <lamewolf2004[REMOVE]@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Perhaps we should all be asked to check one random page for every ten
>>> or twenty we look at, giving our time to make the site work in return
>>> for better content?
>>
>>Pitty. What's next? AdSense on it?
>>
>>I do fix pages now and then (recently the Dutch page on scorpions which
>>had a lot of bullshit copied from a badly written pet keeping book), but
>>all this moderation stuff sounds like it will become a kind of DMOZ.
>>What's next? Bribing wikipedia Ubercontrollers?
>
> I hope not, I have a few IBLs from wiki. Hate to see it go downhill
> like DMOZ.

Ditto. I can live without the traffic (I might regain it in a few days),
but I think the links do contribute to the article they are added to (and
so do the people who click on them, or so I guess).

--
John Experienced Perl programmer: http://castleamber.com/

Installing and configuring Apache on Windows XP (virtual hosting):
http://johnbokma.com/windows/apache-...-hosts-xp.html

On Sat, 26 Aug 2006 03:20:46 +0200, John Bokma <john@castleamber.com>
wrote:

>> Perhaps we should all be asked to check one random page for every ten
>> or twenty we look at, giving our time to make the site work in return
>> for better content?
>
> Pitty. What's next? AdSense on it?
>
> I do fix pages now and then (recently the Dutch page on scorpions which
> had a lot of bullshit copied from a badly written pet keeping book), but
> all this moderation stuff sounds like it will become a kind of DMOZ.
> What's next? Bribing wikipedia Ubercontrollers?

I am afraid Wiki can be doomed since the Seigenthaler case as that was the
moment it has attracted attention not of the gentle folk of internet, but
of crooks with different agendas. And just like email is abused by spam
just because it is free, wikipedia can become abused for (almost) the same
reason - no idea how exactly and why, but we have seen with SEO spam how
creative people can be; I am afraid they will find a way to exploit
Wikipedia to the point it will become useless.

I hope I am wrong, but I am old enough to have no delusions.

Best,
Borek
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