[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] Review mechanism ? Stable pages ?

[Brion Vibber]

On Tue, 21 May 2002, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:
> On 21-05-2002, Brion L. VIBBER wrote thusly :
> > On mar, 2002-05-21 at 10:40, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:
> > > Have you looked up recently the Wikipedia page
> > > http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Karl_Landsteiner as I did yesterday ?
> > Well, I did just now, and I replaced the garbage with a brief stub after
> > a 10-second google search turned up several informationful web pages
> > about the guy. You could have done that yourself!
> OK. Next time when I spot such ugly article I certainly will.
> I just thought that some discussion would be helpful. It was an example
> of the problem.

Nic nie szkodzi. No harm done, but you could still have fixed it and then
brought it to our attention. :)

> > The system we have is based on two ideas:
> >
> > a) Changes to articles will be seen and reviewed by other wikipedians
> >   and
> Do we have enough people to look after 100000+ articles ? (+int'l)

If we have enough people to *write* 100000+ articles, then hopefully! If
contributions drop off in the future to lower levels, then there will be
fewer changes to sift through in the list, and new vandalism will be even
easier to find.

The worrying thing is not new vandalism -- it's *old* vandalism. Once
something drops out of RecentChanges, it may as well have fallen off
the face of the Earth until somebody stumbles into it. An article that
nobody fixed a month or a year ago might still be sitting around, and
making it the Stable version ain't gonna help that now. Unless you propose
that 30,000+ articles be individually checked before creating the
"stable" namespace?

> and the reformed Karl Landsteiner article can be (though rather unlikely)
> be vandalized again any minute now.

It can be, of course. And it can be fixed again...

The idea of a stable namespace/review process has been discussed from time
to time, but there's not really been consensus.

If we were to introduce such a system, I think basically this would mean
that for each article, some particular revision of it would be designated
the known good/stable version, and only that version would be shown to
random visitors / distributed in static CD versions. Logged-in users
and those who elected to see the latest unstable version could see and
edit the current revision... New edits would be (somehow) reviewed and,
if ok, designated the new stable version.

There are at least two big questions about how this ought to work:

1) How do we get new folks to dive in and contribute? Having your
improvements show up *immediately* is a big draw to the wikipedia
experience.

2) How does the review process work? If very few people are interested in
a topic, a new article or change might get completely ignored, and very
good articles may never be seen; so limiting reviewing to certain trusted
users would likely not be sufficient. On the other hand, it's child's
play for organized vandals to set up secondary accounts to mod up their
own work, as many discussion-oriented sites have discovered on
establishing user-run comment moderation systems.


> > b) Wikipedians will improve articles they find to be lacking
> >
> > A is dependent on the number of wikipedians interested in any particular
> > topic (or with a mind to check out new articles), and B is dependent on
> > YOU.

> OK. I admit I am amazed by overall quality and how little impact vandals
> have had so far. But is this just an exception or are there more articles
> that need mending ? How do we know ?

I would say that it's an exception (the vast majority of articles are
indeed not vandalized) *and* that there are more that need mending. Keep
looking -- watch the skies!

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)