On 10/1/06, daniwo59@aol.com daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
There is a tension between accuracy and openness. Citizendium and Everything2 are two extreme answers to that tension. If, however, we are to maintain both, we must address the tension when it occurs. We must come up with creative solutions. And that is something that involves more than just the English Wikipedia.
I do agree. I think we have to come to a shared understanding (which includes our readers) that wikis are open workspaces, and we need to define clear processes by which content can gradually (!) reach the state of being a verified, reliable encyclopedia article, textbook, or whatever. Porchesia is merely a good, fairly value-neutral example of a general problem.
If the article about Porchesia had told me, as a reader, in no uncertain terms that the content has undergone no verification whatsoever and could be complete bollocks, whereas the article about, say, Albert Einstein, has undergone verification for sources, comprehensiveness, neutrality, and so on, then I would be much more comfortable with the current model. The fact is that, with the exception of a very small number of articles, we put rubbish on the same level as elaborate work that has continued for several months, and that is a disservice both to our readers and to our community.
Whether we are talking about companies or fictitious islands, I do not believe "block, nuke, and salt the Earth more aggressively!" is the answer. That's partially because blocking is a very, very flawed tool (it's very easy to circumvent), and "hard" security measures in a fundamentally open environment tend to only inspire people to find clever ways to circumvent them and to make themselves even more of a PITA than they already are. Of course we should block individuals where appropriate, but I'm not convinced that increasing the amount of blocking and nuking is going to help us much right now.
I do believe "identify, label and improve more systematically!" is the way to go. In this process, we need to not only have a "gold standard" of articles which we strive for, but should also make the entire process of article review more transparent and participatory. We may not have a "featured revision" for each article, but at least we should have a "best known available" one, and make it clear what exactly has and has not been done.
As is typical in such cases, the article on Porchesia was copyedited before it was discovered to be a hoax. That someone chose to copyedit it should not be held against them; it's perfectly fine that people work in the areas where they are strong. Some people love fixing typos or adding category metadata, no matter how many quality initiatives we launch. However, that it was _only_ copyedited and not fact-checked could have been made clear to the reader.
For some further thoughts on this, see: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/WikiQA
I believe that the problem of developing a collaborative, scalable, functional quality annotation model for wikis is as complex as all the work that we've done so far. Nor is this problem limited to certain areas, like companies or living people. It's just that inaccurate articles, vandalism and hoaxes hurt us more in some areas than in others.
This problem is not going to be solved by writing a couple of software features. It needs a long term, ongoing collaboration of interested developers and Wikimedians. And you are absolutely correct that this is not an en.wp issue, but a Foundation issue. I will have a discussion about this with members of the Technical Team once the very important and pressing need of single login is finally resolved.