Hallo zusammen, anbei eine Übersetzung des Artikels von http://www.nrg.co.il/online/10/ART1/469/513.html Mein Dank gilt [[he:User:Drork]]. Viele Grüsse, Manuel Schneider [[Benutzer:80686]] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Yekim* will put things into order An experiment in the German Wikipedia will test the patience of the bored internet users: will they stop adding pictures of genitals to the entries when the result is not immediately uploaded? * Yeke (pl. Yekim) can mean either a German Jew, or occasionally a German person in general, and is also slang for a well-organized diligent person with no sense of humor. By Dora Kishinevsky, AUG 25th 2006, NRG-Maariv When Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, called upon students to avoid basing their academic papers on the free encyclopedia, he was happily quoted by Wikipedia's rivals. However, Wales did not question the credibility of Wikipedia as a free encyclopedia, but rather referred to the questionable method of using any kind of encyclopedia when writing academic papers. Wales demonstrated the line of defense popular among Wikipedia's supporters: it is the claim that even if the encyclopedia they care so much about is not entirely credible, it is at least as credible as the traditional encyclopedias. The entry "Wikipedia: credibility" in the Hebrew version of the free encyclopedia has a decent part about "essential problems in printed books and Internet encyclopedias with established editorial board" and reminds that "the world is far from being a case of black and white". It will take some time until most of the population which was trained to distinguish between authoritative information and any other non-trustable information, adapts to this idea. Maybe some more researches such as the one published by Nature.com, which compared Wikipedia to Britannica and found them to be equally credible, will convince the wide public. But even the most enthusiastic Wikipedians will admit that the free system has its own unique problems. One of them is vandalism, those passers-by who stop at Wikipedia in order to add lies, jokes, indecent pictures and other kinds of graffiti. Such an entry is accepted in the Wikipedia's system automatically like any other entry, and will be displayed to the future visitors of Wikipedia. At some stage, one of the veteran and sharp-sighted surfer will come across this entry and restore it. It might take a few minutes in the case of popular fire-catching entries, or up to months and even more in the case of desolated entries. Wild thorns For the Wikipedians, vandalism raises no doubts about the idea of surfers' collective responsibility; rather it is perceived as a marginal phenomenon which should be handled technically. "Wikipedia aims at writing an encyclopedia, not handling behavior problems of children with DSL", says to NRG Mathias Schindler, member of the German extension of Wikimedia Foundation, the operator of the Wikipedias. Therefore, the experiment which the organization plans to implement in the German version of Wikipedia, will try to diminish Wikipedia's appeal to vandals, thus saving the efforts dedicated to fighting graffiti. During the experiment new updates will not appear in the main page of the encyclopedic entry for a while after uploading them. Updating the entry might require an approval from a veteran Wikipedian. Is Wikipedia giving up on the anti-authoritative approach? Schindler believes that the users will not come to this conclusion, but acknowledge the practical advantages of the change. "The longer you work in Wikipedia, the more you value the pragmatic approach within the community", he says. "The common assumption, which we have not yet proven, is that "stable versions" will reduce people's eagerness to commit sporadic acts of vandalism. We are here to find out whether this assumption is true." Another advantage of the planned change - it will enable the release for editing of major entries that were frozen and blocked due to their inclination to catch fire. This kind of entry is, for example, "George W. Bush" in the American Wikipedia. The policy change will open the entire Wikipedia, including the main page, to updates from surfers, providing they are willing to wait a while before the update is approved. The experiment is in stages of development, which will probably take a few months. If it is successful in the German version, the second in size after the English-speaking version, it will be copied to Wikipedias all over the world, including the Hebrew version. -- Regards Manuel Schneider Wikimedia CH - Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens Wikimedia CH - Association for the advancement of free knowledge www.wikimedia.ch