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@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.
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
On Thursday 18 October 2001 21:40, you wrote:
- 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.
hmm, just to throw a spanner in several different works: exclude all /Talk or personal page (like mine is [[clasqm]]) activity from the KP system? People should be rewarded for adding new material and editing existing stuff. /Talk discussions are necessary evils at best.
On Thursday 18 October 2001 21:20, you wrote:
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.
It seems more complicated than what JW had in mind, and we can haggle about the exact nr of points, i suppose. But I like the idea of gradually gaining more abilities (lets call it that rather than priviliges)
I would recommend that the edit this page link just not appear unless you have privileges to edit that page.
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.
Or signed up and done 2 edits
Interesting idea. I've rethought the situation and we may need to differentiate here between the English and non-english wikipedias. The portal pages in the non-english wp's are often underdeveloped and may need less strict rules (for now) like you suggest here. But in the English wp most of the portals are well-developed and could use a higher level of protection IMHO.
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.
Excellent idea Of course, I shouldn't be able to raise it to some ridiculous amount to make it uneditable by anyone (even myself). Perhaps up to my KP - 1?
One more thing: I would very much like my KP to be between me and the software, not publically available. We don't need people to start doing millions of minor edits and putting up a KP counter on their homepages! Rather start getting new abilities automagically and almost without noticing it. In fact, really without noticing it in a lot of cases, I'm sure.
Michel Clasquin wrote:
Interesting idea. I've rethought the situation and we may need to differentiate here between the English and non-english wikipedias. The portal pages in the non-english wp's are often underdeveloped and may need less strict rules (for now) like you suggest here. But in the English wp most of the portals are well-developed and could use a higher level of protection IMHO.
I agree with this. It's pretty much a function of total traffic, I think. The busier a site gets, then the more jerks who will find it. _And_ the more sick pleasure to be gotten from defacing it.
(But also, and this is the neat thing: more brainpower available to fix it and defend it! But we don't want to waste our energy fighting trolls.)
One more thing: I would very much like my KP to be between me and the software, not publically available. We don't need people to start doing millions of minor edits and putting up a KP counter on their homepages! Rather start getting new abilities automagically and almost without noticing it. In fact, really without noticing it in a lot of cases, I'm sure.
I think this is really an interesting angle. I was thinking in exactly the opposite direction, but I can see your side of this, too. I was thinking that it would be a fun form of recognition to see who has the most points. But, we don't want to encourage people to be "karma whores".
On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I think this is really an interesting angle. I was thinking in exactly the opposite direction, but I can see your side of this, too. I was thinking that it would be a fun form of recognition to see who has the most points. But, we don't want to encourage people to be "karma whores".
Yes--competition can be a huge motivator, but Wikipedia is a collaborative project, and it's not clear that competition would, in the long run, do any more than create a nasty little pecking order of the sort one of my esteemed colleagues :-) has already mentioned.
Also, I suspect the public display (or even private comparison) of points would be a turn-off to the many adults, including many academics, who wouldn't like to play such games.
Larry
Mark Christensen wrote:
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...
Right. It's really an empirical matter. We want most people to be able to get full privileges pretty quickly by just sticking around.
One nice thing about a points system is that if we find ourselves under constant attack, we can just raise the limits.
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.
Right, I think that's the best way to do it.
The most important thing is that any hierarchical structure must be based on nothing other than *real participation*, and that it should be as loose as we can possibly manage.
I have something in mind here like the "strict scrutiny" test that the Supreme Court uses in judging potential restrictions on speech. The restrictions on newbies must be for a compelling community interest (to prevent vandalism) and must be specifically and narrowly tailored to achieve that goal.
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.
I think it would be fun to see our karma points add up, too, even if they mean nothing. That would allow us to tweak the scoring for awhile, too.
On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Jimmy Wales wrote:
One nice thing about a points system is that if we find ourselves under constant attack, we can just raise the limits.
Moreover, we can simply raise the limits on "old timerhood" if we find that helps solve the vandalism problem. But given that most vandalism is done by people who have done very little editing on Wikipedia, the bar probably won't have to be set very high.
The most important thing is that any hierarchical structure must be based on nothing other than *real participation*, and that it should be as loose as we can possibly manage.
I don't think there should be any hierarchical structure, except to solve very specific, delimited problems like the vandalism problem, and the problem of deciding what articles to promote the "stable" area.
Under no circumstances should there be a hierarchical structure designed to stroke people's egos. :-) Can we agree that egos needing to be inflated is not a problem this sort of structure should be designed to solve?
I have something in mind here like the "strict scrutiny" test that the Supreme Court uses in judging potential restrictions on speech. The restrictions on newbies must be for a compelling community interest (to prevent vandalism) and must be specifically and narrowly tailored to achieve that goal.
I agree 100% with that.
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.
I think it would be fun to see our karma points add up, too, even if they mean nothing. That would allow us to tweak the scoring for awhile, too.
I think we shouldn't keep track of karma points...I don't see what the point would be.
On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Mark Christensen wrote:
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.
I don't much like this sort of "scoring." That will encourage competition that isn't clearly in the interests of actually creating an encyclopedia. I like the idea of just being "in" or "out." Remember, the problem we're trying to solve is simply to disempower vandals. That's it.
Larry
You, lsanger@nupedia.com, were spotted writing this on Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 03:12:09PM -0700:
On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Mark Christensen wrote:
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.
I don't much like this sort of "scoring." That will encourage competition that isn't clearly in the interests of actually creating an encyclopedia. I like the idea of just being "in" or "out." Remember, the problem we're trying to solve is simply to disempower vandals. That's it.
I agree with this. Basically, every place I've seen with a system of points, or ratings, or karma, or whatever quickly developed a social culture of elitism, competing for points, comparing them, building hierarchies, and so on and so on. I would go as far as to claim it's almost inevitable. And that's really not what Wikipedia's about, is it?
I think that the solution of points is overdoing it. We only need to sufficiently discourage vandals to make it not worth their time. The following measure will go a long way towards establishing that:
1) Make some important pages, like the homepage and large categories, editable only by users who actually registereted with an email address, and got themselves login and password.
This already discourages the "casual" vandal, which I think is the majority of vandals. To further discourage a "determined" vandal, try one of the following:
2a) Important pages, when edited, are saved automatically into a different category, say "queue:original-name". Regulars are encouraged to periodically view the queue category changes on a separate page, and to approve of changes using a special link; once a change to an "important" page gets two approvals by other regulars, it goes "live".
2b) Important pages are only editable by registered users who edited considerable amount of Wikipedia pages during the last month; say, changed more than 200 lines altogether; this would be measured automatically by the program. There're no "karma points", no complex hierarchies, only a group of "privileged" users who are only privileged because they know what they're doing, having edited a fair amount on Wikipedia. The "privileged" status is invisible and isn't shown anywhere, except a non-privileged user doesn't see the edit link on important pages.
What do you think?
On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
- Make some important pages, like the homepage and large categories,
editable only by users who actually registereted with an email address, and got themselves login and password.
This could be combined with Jimbo's proposal, and it wouldn't be a bad idea in any case.
This already discourages the "casual" vandal, which I think is the majority of vandals. To further discourage a "determined" vandal, try one of the following:
2a) Important pages, when edited, are saved automatically into a different category, say "queue:original-name". Regulars are encouraged to periodically view the queue category changes on a separate page, and to approve of changes using a special link; once a change to an "important" page gets two approvals by other regulars, it goes "live".
I think a moderating system would be very complicated in the end--simplicity, for Wikipedia, is key.
2b) Important pages are only editable by registered users who edited considerable amount of Wikipedia pages during the last month; say, changed more than 200 lines altogether; this would be measured automatically by the program. There're no "karma points", no complex hierarchies, only a group of "privileged" users who are only privileged because they know what they're doing, having edited a fair amount on Wikipedia. The "privileged" status is invisible and isn't shown anywhere, except a non-privileged user doesn't see the edit link on important pages.
I agree! Although I think that once one has achieved oldtimerhood it shouldn't be revokable (except by a sysop).
Larry
I think Anatoly and Larry are on to something here, but let me rephrase and add some of my opinions:
* A feature that lists "recent changes by user/IP" would speed up damage recovery immensly. Especially combined with:
* A feature with one button on each page displayed to an "old hand" that says "Revert to previous version". When pushed, it will do just that.
* No karmapoints should be implemented. This invariably leads to pointless "who has the longest" comparisons, and will attract people interested in such competitions.
My suggestion is instead: There should be exactly three discreete states for a user to be in: "Casual", "Old hand" and "Admin". No difference should be visible within theese categories, for the above reason. -"Casual" is simply anyone not in the other categories. "Old hand" is a tried and tested user who logged on of course. -"Old hand" status could be given when someone has commited pages for 30% of the days a given 30 day period, thus proving to be a bit more persistent than casual in editing. The ONE thing an "Old hand" can do that a "casual" cannot is edit the restricted pages (in essance the home page). -"Admin" status is reserved for the people owning the actual hardware the wiki is on. Nost people can accept that they have _da_powa_, and as long as they cannot hand it out willy nilly (thus creating an elite) it should be safe. There are TWO things that an "admin" can do: 1) demote an "Old hand" to "Casual". 2) Temporarily block an IP.
* No "hide from beginner" tendencies please. That is slightly offensive to those who actually read up on how to behave on the wiki before starting. Besides, security by obscurity is bad no matter how one looks at it :-)
If we proceed in this way (or something like it) we should have easy recovery of pages that has been vandalized, and also a mechanism of protecting our home page from defacing. This should empower honest users and make serious damage very hard to do unless one is prepared to put in serious work first.
Just my thoughts :-)
/Anders Törlind
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.
Anatoly Vorobey wrote:
You, lsanger@nupedia.com, were spotted writing this on Thu, Oct 18, 2001 at 03:12:09PM -0700:
On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Mark Christensen wrote:
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.
I don't much like this sort of "scoring." That will encourage competition that isn't clearly in the interests of actually creating an encyclopedia. I like the idea of just being "in" or "out." Remember, the problem we're trying to solve is simply to disempower vandals. That's it.
I agree with this. Basically, every place I've seen with a system of points, or ratings, or karma, or whatever quickly developed a social culture of elitism, competing for points, comparing them, building hierarchies, and so on and so on. I would go as far as to claim it's almost inevitable. And that's really not what Wikipedia's about, is it?
I think that the solution of points is overdoing it. We only need to sufficiently discourage vandals to make it not worth their time. The following measure will go a long way towards establishing that:
- Make some important pages, like the homepage and large categories, editable only
by users who actually registereted with an email address, and got themselves login and password.
This already discourages the "casual" vandal, which I think is the majority of vandals. To further discourage a "determined" vandal, try one of the following:
2a) Important pages, when edited, are saved automatically into a different category, say "queue:original-name". Regulars are encouraged to periodically view the queue category changes on a separate page, and to approve of changes using a special link; once a change to an "important" page gets two approvals by other regulars, it goes "live".
2b) Important pages are only editable by registered users who edited considerable amount of Wikipedia pages during the last month; say, changed more than 200 lines altogether; this would be measured automatically by the program. There're no "karma points", no complex hierarchies, only a group of "privileged" users who are only privileged because they know what they're doing, having edited a fair amount on Wikipedia. The "privileged" status is invisible and isn't shown anywhere, except a non-privileged user doesn't see the edit link on important pages.
What do you think?
-- Anatoly Vorobey, my journal (in Russian): http://www.livejournal.com/users/avva/ mellon@pobox.com http://pobox.com/~mellon/ "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly" - G.K.Chesterton [Wikipedia-l] To manage your subscription to this list, please go here: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
lsanger@nupedia.com wrote:
I don't much like this sort of "scoring." That will encourage competition that isn't clearly in the interests of actually creating an encyclopedia.
Not necessarily! The idea is that we need "scoring" to determine who is "in" or "out". Also, a scoring system can be tweaked over time to make it conform more closely to our goals.
Someone argued that the scores should be kept between the user and the software, i.e. non-public. Perhaps the scores should not even be revealed to the users.
I thought that it might be fun to compare scores.
Like, I imagine an active participant like LDC or Bryce Harrington would quickly have a score in the thousands. But it only takes, say, 60 points to be maxed out in powers. So the rest is just for fun.
I like the idea of just being "in" or "out." Remember, the problem we're trying to solve is simply to disempower vandals. That's it.
Right, but no matter what we have to have a metric to make that decision, which pretty much means points or numbers of some kind.
lsanger@nupedia.com wrote:
I don't much like this sort of "scoring." That will encourage
competition
that isn't clearly in the interests of actually creating an
encyclopedia.
Not necessarily! The idea is that we need "scoring" to determine who is "in" or "out". Also, a scoring system can be tweaked over time to make it conform more closely to our goals.
My final thought of the day (actually the next day here;) Why not say "the upper 5% of users, sorted by points, are IN"?
Would give the hard-working class the privileges the commies always promised ;)
Magnus
On Friday 19 October 2001 00:11, you wrote:
My final thought of the day (actually the next day here;) Why not say "the upper 5% of users, sorted by points, are IN"?
Would give the hard-working class the privileges the commies always promised ;)
sixth-percentiles of the world, Unite!
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