http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?action=browse&id=HomePage&revision=802
This is the sort of thing we want to prevent. This is not a
legitimate difference of opinion about the content of the homepage,
this is someone being stupid.
The text here is similar to the text of the propaganda flyers that the
United States military is dropping on the Taliban troops, telling them
that they are doomed if they don't surrender, and giving them a safe
procedure for surrendering.
--
*************************************************
* http://www.wikipedia.com/ *
* You can edit this page right now! *
*************************************************
>lcrocker(a)nupedia.com wrote:
>> If we want to give "reliable" users privileges that we don't
>> immediately give to everyone, that's great. But just give them--
>> don't build a whole system of automating it, just give them to
>> those who ask, and who have earned them. I would far rather that
>> flag be set by a real human being exercising judgment than by some
>> meaningless process.
>
>I understand what you are saying, but
>
>1. one of the goals here is to create a system which avoids even the
> appearance of favoritism or bias. The process of "earning" the
> privileges should leave little or no discretion to the owners of
> the project...
But we do have a specific goal, don't we? I mean we already do
hold the one clear bias that we want to produce a useful encyclopedia,
as opposed to a chat room or news log. We don't want to be too
biased about people or points of view, but we _are_ explicity biased
toward our goal, and the folks who have chosen that goal should be
free to act to achieve it. I want you and Larry and whoever else you
trust to be able to stand up straight and say "this is what we're
doing here, this is the way it is" without having to waste your time
justifying everything. You've taken on a great responsibility here;
don't throw away your power--use it.
>2. The "privileges" under consideration are really quite small. For
> the most part, the concept is to protect the most highly
> trafficked pages from sheer malicious vandalism. So to "earn" the
> privilege should be quite easy -- you basically just have to be
> around for a few days and not be malicious. Even people who we
> don't like should be allowed to edit pretty much anything, as long
> as they aren't being malicious and are willing to ultimately go
> along with community consensus.
"Malicious" is another exercise of judgment. A point system can't
tell that all of the edits done by someone were subtle subversions--
say putting "not" in interesting places. Or adding links to non-
existent or irrelevant books (how many of us check those?). I
suppose it's OK to give random folks the benefit of the doubt and
grant them a flag as long as they have a login name and have been
around. But I'd still like to make sure that some human can revoke
it when necessary.
>But for now, we're just interested in tightening things up *just the
>tiniest amount* on *just the most likely pages for vandalism*.
I do respect the small-steps argument. Making wholesale changes too
quicky risks spoiling what does work well.
0
>I think Anatoly's proposals have merit.
>
>We certainly don't want to allow the changes to impact our culture in
>a negative way. Cautiousness is warranted, because wikipedia works
>well as it is. We're just looking to the future and anticipating how
>to scale as we get more popular.
I'd just like to point out that I dislike "point" systems because
they explicity avoid simple human subjective judgment. They're just
bad AI. The problem we're trying to solve is inherently one of
subjective value: most people's edits are valuable to us, but some
aren't. I don't want to abdicate responsibility for that judgment to
a stupid automaton.
If we want to give "reliable" users privileges that we don't
immediately give to everyone, that's great. But just give them--
don't build a whole system of automating it, just give them to those
who ask, and who have earned them. I would far rather that flag be
set by a real human being exercising judgment than by some
meaningless process.
Hi, I just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Lars Aronsson, I
live in [Sweden], and am a good friend of [LinusTolke], [Pinkunicorn],
[Lisa], and [Mjausson]. In May this year I was active in the English,
German, and Swedish Wikipedia using the signature [LA2]. I wrote
several articles, including [Information Theory], [Book], and
[Germany], but finally got tired of [Larry_Sanger]'s attitude and
pulled out on May 21. My opinion was that different people could
contribute a skeleton of new article headings and hypertext links,
while others could contribute longer texts to each article, but Larry
thought it was important that [Wikipedia is not a dictionary], so I
left. I think Larry agrees with my conclusion that Nupedia grows too
slowly because of an overly strict editorial policy, and that
Wikipedia is a blessing. I think that Larry's criticism of my
contributions to Wikipedia was a leftover from this unnecessary
strictness, and rather than trying to explain this, I went away.
I have to confess I was the one who wrote that [Pittsburgh] is an
"ugly" town and under [Nile] that "denial is a river in Egypt".
I think that Wikipedia (and Wiki technology in general) is one of the
most interesting ideas I have met in the last few years. Rather than
the [Open Directory Project], which only links to existing websites,
Wikipedia tries to document all knowledge, whether already available
on the Internet or not. This is the same idea that [Denis Diderot]
worked on, moved to the [World Wide Web].
In 1991, my friend [LinusTolke] took the idea of [MUD] games (all of
which were in [English language] at the time), and moved it to
[Swedish language]. In 1992, I took the idea of [Project Gutenberg]
and moved it to [Swedish language], calling it [Projekt Runeberg].
When the first NCSA Mosaic web browser came out in 1993, I was one of
the few who had any contents already published.
Both LinusTolke and I are members of [Lysator], an students' computer
club (and alumni organisation of sorts) at [Linkoping University].
In the fall of 2000, I started a free wireless networking mailing list
(http://elektrosmog.nu/) in Sweden, and some of the members asked me
to start a Wiki website for it, just like two U.S. free wireless
projects have, [Personal Telco] and [SeattleWireless]. I thought
about this, and also wanted to use Wiki for [Projekt Runeberg] and
Scandinavian literature.
To get a better idea of how it works, I downloaded my own copy of the
Usemod Wiki software, and started to experiment. I soon realized that
there is true power in modifying the program itself, adding new
features that saves work when writing articles. The program has a
subroutine (a "sub" i Perl) named WikiToHTML that converts the
''special'' characters to HTML. For instance, it translates ISBN:0000
into a link to Amazon and Barnes&Noble, and RFC0000 to a link to
faqs.org. I added a rule that makes a link to the USPTO database
whenever I write uspat: followed by a U.S. Patent number. I modified
the ISBN rule so that Swedish ISBN:91- numbers will link to Swedish
online bookstores. I made a rule so that map: followed by a
geographic latitude and longitude will create an inline image link to
a map from mapblast.com. I could go on and add new rules. This is a
dimension that I haven't seen explored in Wikipedia yet.
I set up my experimental wiki on August 31, and after a month I had a
pretty decent website, all prompts translated to Swedish, and with a
few hundred articles in it. I decided to keep this project, and on
October 1, I gave it a proper Internet domain, http://susning.nu/
The slogan "skaffa dig en susning.nu" roughly translates into "get
yourself a clue, now!"
This website hasn't been indexed by Google yet, and I am writing most
of the articles myself. There are 1700 articles of which 200 are
REDIRECTs, 1100 contain at least one comma, and 600 contain a map from
Mapblast. This places my site slightly ahead of the German Wikipedia
(900 comma articles), and way ahead of the Swedish Wikipedia (90 comma
articles). I have one article for every municipality in Sweden, and
several countries are covered. Very few of my articles are long, and
there is no chance I can compete with the English Wikipedia.
I joined these two mailing lists (wikipedia-l, intlwiki-l) a week ago,
and the discussion on translation links inspired me to implement this.
Whenever I start an article like this:
En katt (engelska: cat) (tyska: Katze) är ett djur.
i.e.
A cat (German: Katze) (Swedish: katt) is an animal.
or
Eine Katze (Englisch: cat) (Schwedisch: katt) ist ein Tier.
the words in parenthesis are made into links to that language's
Wikipedia. This way, if one reader thinks that my website provides a
too simple explanation of what a cat is, and they do understand
English, they can click on "cat" and get the much longer article from
the English Wikipedia. This is great. On the other hand, if they
click on Katze, they will arrive at the blank webpage
http://de.wikipedia.com/wiki/Katze and will have the chance to write
that missing article in German. The best part is that the syntax is
user-friendly and not overly {{{complicated}}} for anybody to
understand. You are welcome to have a look around. Here are some
example articles:
http://susning.nu/Afghanistanhttp://susning.nu/Bokhttp://susning.nu/Dardanellernahttp://susning.nu/IEEE_802.11http://susning.nu/Perlhttp://susning.nu/Pittsburghhttp://susning.nu/TIFFhttp://susning.nu/Tysklandhttp://susning.nu/UNIXhttp://susning.nu/Upphovsr%e4tt
As a "good fences make for good neighbors" principle, I run my own
website independent of what goes on in the Wikipedia project. I just
link to your articles, and my readers can contribute to and benefit
from your work. I think this "scales" well, and that is very
comforting to a programmer like me. I think that we can learn a lot
from each other, and have a loose form of cooperation or mutual,
peaceful coexistance, even if we are not in the same project. This is
how it has worked between me and Project Gutenberg's Michael Hart over
the last eight years.
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik
Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Linköping, Sweden
tel +46-70-7891609
http://aronsson.se
Dear all,
I sent the following to the main North American academic philosophy
mailing list, PHILOSOP.
It would be fantastic if you could take a moment to post something similar
to other academic mailing lists. I think we're definitely to the point
where we can get a lot more academics on board.
Larry
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2001 17:43:40 -0700 (PDT)
From: lsanger(a)ross.bomis.com
To: PHILOSOP(a)louisiana.edu
Subject: Philosophy articles on Wikipedia to review
Hello,
This is an informal call for review of encyclopedia articles about
philosophy. I will try to keep this short.
Begun last January, "Wikipedia" ( http://www.wikipedia.com/ ) is a
"wiki"-based encyclopedia. This is a collaborative, open, community-
edited encyclopedia, led by me (I earned my Ph.D. in philosophy last
year). It has since grown to over 14,000 entries (with over 2,000 more
added each month) and has been the subject of coverage by the New York
Times and MIT's Technology Review. The contents are "open content," which
means roughly the contents will always be freely distributable in any
medium.
Wikipedia is loosely associated with the more straight-laced peer reviewed
project Nupedia ( http://www.nupedia.com/ ). The pair of websites
together constitute the world's first serious open content encyclopedia
project.
So far Wikipedia has managed to attract quite a few active academics (but
none in philosophy, alas--I'm hoping to attract a few here). To be
accurate, however, most of the participants are fairly articulate computer
programmers, students, and professionals from around the world. The
quality of articles is uneven in places, but constantly improving--and,
everything considered, surprisingly good for a project that is as
completely open as it is. We edit each others' work, and the results are
not perfect, but encouraging.
We could use a few philosophers to help vet (and develop) articles written
on philosophical topics. A few articles that I think particularly need
some careful attention from philosophers are these:
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Scientific_methodhttp://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Atheismhttp://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Postmodernism
There are a lot of other articles, that (unlike these) *I* wrote; I simply
pasted the contents in from old lectures, and these need work. Anyway,
many other philosophical articles have been started; nearly all of them
are works in progress that need your input. The central philosophy
jumping-off page is this:
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Philosophy
And if you want to learn more about the project in general, see the
welcome page and the FAQ:
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Welcome,_newcomershttp://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia_FAQ
Finally, if you're very skeptical about the very idea of Wikipedia, please
see this page, which I wrote specifically for the skeptics:
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Wikipedia/Our_Replies_to_Our_Critics
Thanks for your attention!
Larry Sanger, Ph.D.
Wikipedia main organizer http://www.wikipedia.com/
Editor-in-chief, Nupedia http://www.nupedia.com/
Magnus brings up an important point, which has to do with how this will
interact with namespaces, and particularly the stable namespace. I think we
need to have some manual control over what goes into the stable namespace,
so that we can be sure that the people approving articles for the stable
namespace actually know what they are talking about. It may be that people
with enough KP should be trusted to only approve articles on subjects where
they have actual experience, but we may still want some kind of manual check
in place for that function.
Another good point Magnus brings up is that blocked IP's will only work
against people with a static IP address, or against one log in session.
Additionally blocking an IP could stop someone else from being able to use
the wikipedia, if they are later assigned that IP. Tis' true, but I still
think people with enough KP should be able to block an IP but only
temporarily, and by this I mean a really short time, like an hour or two.
This will be enough to make your average vandal get board and leave, and
will be highly unlikely to effect someone else who might log on with that IP
wanting to edit a page. (Obviously blocking an IP should only disallow edit
access and not mere read access). Actually we should probably have an
automatic IP blocker, which shuts down an IP address for an hour or two if
someone makes more than 10 edits in 30 seconds, to make programmatic
vandalism harder.
Yours
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: Magnus Manske [mailto:Magnus.Manske@epost.de]
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 3:41 PM
To: wikipedia-l(a)nupedia.com
Subject: RE: [Wikipedia-l] A proposal for the new software
As the (main) author of the new software, I'd like to contribute some things
to this debate:
- Watching the actions of a signed-up user will be very simple, even if
he/she logs in from different machines.
- Counting edits/new articles will be as simple.
- After each "karma point" addition, the status could be checked and basic
rights could be given.
- All pages can be locked to give write access only to people with the
necessary user rights.
So, no technical problem with that. But, think about what I originally had
in mind (I mentioned that somewhere already) :
- Have about a dozen "sysops"/administrators. Larry, Jimbo, a few others
(and currently myself, for maintnance;)
- Sysops can do everything: edit other user's rights, delete pages (and I
mean delete, not just remove the contents), mess directly with the database
etc.
- Sysops can create "editors", which have less rights, but of whom there are
many.
- *Everybody* can edit pages in the normal wikipedia namespace
- Good articles can be advanced into an "approved" namespace (by everybody,
or by a special "reviewer" class)
- Editors can advance articles from the "approved" namespace to the "stable"
namespace, or remove it from "approved"
- The "stable" namespace can only be edited by sysops
"Reviewers" and maybe "editors" could also be generated by karma points, or
by LSD ;)
Additionally, central pages could still be protected, and my new variables
will change the date and the number of articles on the HomePage
automatically.
A word to "blocked IPs": Almost everyone who goes online via an ISP gets a
random IP from the ISP every time he/she dials in. Blocking such an IP would
not stop trolls, but it would stop other harmless people who come in through
the same ISP at a later time. We don't want "wikipedia colateral damage",
now do we?
Magnus
[Wikipedia-l]
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It seems that TheCunctator has posted some rather inflammatory
complaints about the discussions we've been having here. I thought
that his comments and summary were unnecessarily argumentative, and
inaccurate.
I invite him, though, to come to this list (I assume he reads it since
he was complaining about it) and express his concerns, and tell us
what alternative proposals he might have for defending the site
against hardcore vandalism.
--Jimbo
--
*************************************************
* http://www.wikipedia.com/ *
* You can edit this page right now! *
*************************************************
Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)bomis.com> writes:
> It seems that TheCunctator has posted some rather inflammatory
> complaints ... I invite him, though, to come to this list
Why would we, The Cabal (tm), (TINC) do that?
If this list was open to everyone and allowed open discussion, it wouldn't be
"semi-secret repository for behind-scenes-scheming" now, would it? :)
--
Gareth Owen
I generally think this is a good idea. I'm not sure exactly how the system
should work, but I propose something like adding 1 Karma Point (KP) for
signing up with a username, and one more for every day you connect to the
wikipedia after that (with the same username), and 2 KP for each day in
which you've edited an existing article, and 3 Karma points for each day you
add a new article.
Once you get up to 60 KP, you have basic privileges (Editing the home page
and the like).
Once you have or so 100 KP you can block an IP address, user ID#, or user
alias temporarily (24 hours).
Once you have 200+ KP you can mark an article for deletion. The article is
not deleted for 24 hours, and is clearly displayed as MARKED FOR DELETION on
the recent changes log if you have at least 150 KP. Anybody with level 1
privileges can then check a "don't delete this" box on the article, and it
will be unmarked for deletion.
I would recommend that the edit this page link just not appear unless you
have privileges to edit that page.
I don't think that the above is exactly how we should do it, but I wanted to
through out some specifics because the "devil is in the details." The idea
may be fine, but the implementation could easily bring up real problems...
That said, I think Michel Clasquin brings up several interesting points.
If you want to follow Michel Clasquin's suggestion that we also lock down
the pages linked from the main page, I'd recommend that those pages be
locked only for those with 4 or less KP, which means if you're logged in,
and you created an article you can add a link to it from the appropriate
portal page, since you have 1 KP for signing up, and 3 for adding an
article. We can use Magnus's "watch this page" functionality to keep track
of these changes. And if he adds the e-mail update feature, people can just
assign themselves to keeping up on those pages. I would actually recommend
that there be a field in the data base which assigns the level of
restriction on a page, so an administrator (or potentially anybody with a
high enough KP) adjust the threshold for that page. This would be useful if
the there were repeated problems with a specific portal page.
As far as who assigns Cabal status, I think it absolutely has to be
automatically assigned (of course the administrators can manually edit the
assignments if they feel the need). If there are persistent vandals, other
Cabal members can temporarily ban their IP, and/or administrators can
manually bump down their KP.
As far as how to get the thing started, we could automatically generate some
KP numbers for users by mining existing history data (Say you get a KP for
every 5 or 10 page edits you've logged), or we could follow Jimmy Wales's
suggestion that we implement the KP log for long enough for some people to
gain privileges before marking any pages as requiring privileges to edit,
either way should work.
Anyway, more food for thought.
Yours
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: Jimmy Wales [mailto:jwales@bomis.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 3:23 PM
To: wikipedia-l(a)nupedia.com
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] A proposal for the new software
Let me raise a potentially delicate social issue. :-)
One of the wonderful things about the wiki software, and something
that has served us very well so far, is that it is totally wide open.
I suspect that any significant deviation from that would kill the
magic of the process.
On the other hand, we really are moving into uncharted territory.
Wikipedia is already, as far as I know, the most active and heavily
trafficked wiki to ever exist. It seems a virtual certainty that
the wide open model will start to show some strain (primarily from
vandalism) as we move forward.
(Even now, we see "only" about 5,000 unique visitors a day. Imagine
when that it 50,000 or 150,000. Or more.)
I have this idea that there should be in the software some concept of
"old timer" or "karma points". This would empower some shadowy
mysterious elite group of us to do things that might not be possible
for newbies. Editing the homepage for example. We already had one
instance of very ugly graffiti posted there (a pornographic cartoon).
Some principles that we should use if/when we move in that direction:
1. Cabal membership is available to anyone who puts in time -- there
should be no ability by the part of existing cabal members to
blackball anyone. The reason for this principle is that we don't
want there to be a temptation to ideological blackballing. Anyone
who shows up and sticks around for a couple of weeks can be
trusted enough to give total freedom.
2. Cabal membership should not give anyone any super powers, just a
handful of little things, like locking and unlocking the HomePage,
or placing a temporary block on an IP address or UserID.
3. Newcomers should not have to know or realize that they are
restricted in any way from doing things that some old timers can
do. We should always leave things as open as possible, not
requiring login, registration, etc.
3. Of course, as owner of the physical machine where Wikipedia is
located, I always retain absolute dictatorial power over
everything, if necessary. So if someone gets cabal membership and
uses it to vandalize, I could revoke the status unilaterally.
Basically, I think we always want to make a distinction between true
vandalism and mere un-encyclopedic behavior. We want to develop
little tools and tricks to help us block true vandalism, while keeping
things totally open for people to *work for consensus* on article
content. The "New Age" debate was good and healthy, and never rose to
the level of vandalism.
--
*************************************************
* http://www.wikipedia.com/ *
* You can edit this page right now! *
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