For what it's worth, we are getting a good amout of email asking about how to help the project because of the BBC and NYT. Here's to that.
-- Sent from my Palm Pre
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 12:27 PM, Andrew Turvey <
andrewrturvey(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
> ----- "Anthony" <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote:
> > From: "Anthony" <wikimail(a)inbox.org>
> > > On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 9:52 AM, Andrew Turvey <
> andrewrturvey(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > > 5) Are you supposed to "check" an entire article prior to flagging it?
>> >
>> >
>> No - I understand it's just the edit(s) since it was last flagged.
>
>
> > What if it wasn't previously flagged?
>
> Good question. I understand the current idea is that the first flagged
> version should be checked completely, but that will take a lot of work to
> implement.
>
Can someone explain how that works from a technical standpoint? If an
article is flag-protected and has no reviewed version, what shows up to IP
users?
We've had a story in the New York Times. Meanwhile, judging by the way
David Gerard and WMUK are dashing around, it's all over the UK media.
Is this just observer bias, or is "internal changes to Wikipedia" for
some reason a really interesting thing to the British press? I have no
idea...
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
Shortly after I thought we'd finally killed off the habit of excessive
polling, an apologetic, humorous and evidently quite common meme
appeared on Wikipedia: the "!vote".
Unlike the "vote", the "!vote" seems to afford the author the latitude
to falsely claim that he is opposed to polls and is not in fact
engaged in a polling exercise.
In short, a "!vote" is simply a way of recasting polls so as to avoid
calling them polls. "!Polls?"
The reason we avoid polls? Because they lead to vote-counting
(counting "!votes" is the same thing even if we're supposed to pretend
that a "!vote! is not the same as a vote). Because they lead to
taking sides. Because they destroy efforts at compromise. Because in
the worst case they encourage people to create a separate section for
people who agree with one another to congregate their comments, where
there is no danger of their comments being mistaken for attempts to
reach consensus by discussion.
I'm seeing ban discussions on [[WP:AN]] being turned into polls, and
attempts to undo this are resisted by people who apparently believe
they're following Wikipedia policy.
It's 2009. Why is this happening?
There has been a centralised discussion on deprecating "future"
templates. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Centralized_discussion/Deprecating_%…
The templates were compared to the "spoiler" templates. Not to drag
all that up again, but I found the comparison interesting. The same
basic point seemed to be made there, though, that such templates
patronised our readers, who can be expected to realise that the
article they are reading is about a future event (and if they can't,
then that is more likely to be due to bad writing in the article, than
the reader's comprehension skills).
Carcharoth
Local english tabloid puts it's slant on the news. Unfortunately we didn't get any quote in there.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1208941/Free-edit-Wikipedia-appoint…
Wikipedia has been forced to abandon its policy of allowing anyone to edit its pages.
An army of 20,000 unpaid 'expert editors' will be drafted in to check all changes to articles on living people before the pages go online.
The move is a response to the hijacking of the site by those with political or personal motives.
jimmy
Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. logo
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says that the change in the system is just a test
Wikipedia
Tory and Labour politicians, as well as 'web vandals', have falsified entries to discredit their enemies.
Wikipedia was set up eight years ago as a free encyclopedia built on the work of volunteers.
All contributors had the power to edit, improve and update the content and it has become one of the top ten internet sites with more than 13million entries.
But well-publicised hoaxes have forced the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit Californian body that runs the site, to curb its freewheeling ethos.
They hope the switch to volunteer editors will curb malicious tampering and reduce the risk of lawsuits. Wikipedia tried to clamp down on the problem in 2005 by banning anonymous users from creating entries.
Experts said the latest change was much more significant and 'crosses a psychological Rubicon'.
The system of 'flagged revisions' will compromise the founding principle that everyone has an equal right to edit any Wikipedia page.
But Michael Snow, who is the chairman of the Wikimedia board, said it was no longer acceptable 'to throw things at the wall and see what sticks'.
Jimmy Wales, one of the site's founders, said: 'We have really become part of the infrastructure of how people get information. There is a serious responsibility.'
With millions of changes made to entries every month, it is thought that 20,000 editors will be needed.
Modified pages go live only with their approval.
Wikipedia is the first reference point for many web inquiries - often because its pages head the search results on Google and Yahoo.
More than 30million visits have been made to the Michael Jackson page since his death on June 25.
'Wikipedia now has the ability to alter the world that it attempts to document,' said New York University professor Joseph Reagle.
A limited number of popular or controversial pages are already protected, including those for singer Britney Spears and U.S. president Barack Obama.
Wikipedia's credibility took a dent when it emerged in 2005 that a biography of American journalist John Seigenthaler, once an assistant to US Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had been altered to accuse him of involvement in the assassinations of both his boss and JFK.
In one notorious case David Cameron’s aides altered the page on the artist Titian to score a point over Gordon Brown.
And in 2007 it emerged one of its main contributors had faked his qualifications.
Ryan Jordan, who had edited more than 20,000 pages of information, had claimed to be a professor of theology but was exposed following a magazine article as a 24-year-old college dropout from Kentucky.
Last year, the New York Times worked with Wikipedia to restrict information about the kidnapping of a correspondent in Afghanistan.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1208941/Free-edit-Wikipedia-appoint…
In a message dated 8/25/2009 6:50:03 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
andrewrturvey(a)googlemail.com writes:
> Not quite. The first publication can be a secondary source, for instance
> if the New York Times publishes an article on a car accident. A primary
> source is something like a census return or, in this case, a witness
> statement. >>
>
------------------------
That is not correct Andrew. Each "source" must be published. Typically
witness statements are not themselves published. You are confusing first-hand
experience with primary source. A primary souce, even a census return is
not first-hand, it's merely first publication.
If you took you example to extreme, then there would be no primary sources
at all.
W.J.
----- "Andrew Gray" <andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
>
> The all-BLPs idea seems to have been abandoned.
I can't find anywhere in the trial pages saying this - where did you find that?
If true, it's interesting. We'll see if after the trial the idea of all-BLPs is resurrected - I'm sure there'll be people out there who'll want to argue for it!
Andrew
----- "Carcharoth" <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
> > Members of the user group "Reviewer". All Admins will automatically be given reviewer status and all other users will be able to apply for it at [[WP:Request for permissions]]; like rollback there will be a presumed threshold of number of edits and time since account was opened. An initial poll rejected the idea of autopromotion, but I notice this issue has been reopened because "only" 50 people participated in that discussion.
>
> To be fair, as more people become aware of this, there will be more
> calls for bigger and longer discussions. That is only natural. Rather
> then risks continual re-discussion, it should be made clear that
> everyone will get the chance to say something at the end of the trial.
> And if they don't, well, that will cause huge upset.
The poll was only ever meant to apply to the trial, with the issue open for rethink after the trial was over. I hope that still happens. I think that's really the usefulness of the trial - a lot of people are concerned because they are unsure of how exactly it will work - once we see it working in practice, people are likely may well make up their minds differently.
Andrew
>
> So apparently all the press reporting is wrong. What's the real story?
> For some reason, I've never actually come across these flagged
> revisions, partly because they always seemed to be happening "in the
> future some time". What's the policy going to be?
>
You get different answers depending on who you ask. This is because people
tend to tell you how they want it to be rather than what the community
actually approved. Even Jimbo and the foundation staff have been guilty of
this.
What is being implemented has two parts, flagged protection and patrolled
revisions. The important part is flagged protection. It is a new kind of
protection besides full and semi. When an article is flagged-protected
readers will not see a new version until it has been flagged.
1) Is this going to apply to every page?
No, only on pages that are flagged-protected individually. I expect there
will be a push to flagged-protect all BLPs (biographies of living people)
but nothing is decided yet. I would personally support that if there are
enough reviewers to keep the backlog short.
> 2) Who gets to flag a revision? Can you flag your own reivsions?
This is very much undecided. Some think becoming a reviewer should be like
autoconfirmation, some think like rollback, while a few think it should be
harder to get than adminship. Hopefully it will be adjusted depending on how
many reviewers are needed.
> 3) What's the interface like? How many clicks?
>
I don't know yet. There is a test implementation at
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org
> 4) Is there any automatic flagging?
There are actually three levels of flagged protection. In semi flagged
protection edits by autoconfirmed users are automatically flagged. In
intermediary flagged protection (probably the most common case) only edits
by reviewers are automatically flagged. In full flagged protection only
administrators (not reviewers) can flag.
> 5) Are you supposed to "check" an entire article prior to flagging it?
> How confident are you meant to be?
>
The reviewer is only meant to check the diff from the previous flagged
version. It should be checked for:
* conflict with the Biographies of Living People policy
* vandalism or patent nonsense
* copyright violations
* legal threats, personal attacks or libel.
Reviewers are not required to check for neutrality, original research,
sources, etc. Of course, obvious cases are better reverted right away than
flagged. I expect there will be some conflict over this. In my opinion it is
very important that we keep the flow of Bold, Revert, Discuss. Controversial
articles must not be constantly backlogged because reviewers are afraid of
getting drawn into an edit war.
> 6) What will encourage flaggers to actually bother flagging articles?
>
Who knows? We'll see.
> 7) What will encourage non-flaggers to actually bother editing
> articles when they don't have any instant gratification?
Good question. Perhaps that an edit will eventually go live unless it's
really bad.
8) Which view will long time editors see by default? Stable (flagged)
> or non-flagged version?
I think flagged, but you can change it in your preferences.
> 9) Can non-logged in editors see non-flagged versions?
>
I am quite sure yes.
> 10) Will this destroy Wikipedia?
Surely not. The potential problems depend on how quickly edits get flagged
and how strict reviewers are. If it takes weeks before anyone even looks at
an edit and reviewers refuse to flag anything they don't actively like, then
we are no more open than Britannica. After all, I can email a suggested
change to them and probably get a reply. Our advantages are:
* You can edit right in the code rather than describe your change in an
email
* Edits don't just get lost in someones inbox. Eventually an edit is either
approved or reverted.
* Speed, if we manage
* A more open attitude, I wish
Remember also that later edits build on the latest draft. There is no
branching so a new persons edits cannot be left unflagged while the regulars
keep editing.
> 11) Will this improve Wikipedia?
Hopefully. Especially for BLPs I think this has a lot of potential.
Currently a damaging edit can last way too long in articles about obscure
but notable people.
So far I ignored the second part: patrolled revisions. This is enabled on
all articles, but readers see the latest version whether flagged or not. It
is used to know whether an edit has been checked or not, so the time of
recent changes patrollers can be used more efficiently. Whether it will
actually be used on all articles is unsure. I expect it will be used mostly
on BLPs, and on other articles if the reviewers have time.
Finally, this is supposed to be a two month trial. What happens after that
is very uncertain.
For details, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_rev…
the subpages linked at the top.
/Apoc2400