Officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit in San Francisco that governs Wikipedia, say that within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.
The new feature, called “flagged revisions,” will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved — or in Wikispeak, flagged — it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia’s servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.
[…]
Foundation officials intend to put the system into effect first with articles about living people because those pieces are ripe for vandalism and because malicious information within them can be devastating to those individuals.
My own Wiki page was instigated by an internet “stalker”, in fact, the same individual who once authored a blogspot site using my stolen identity.
Requests to Wikipedia to delete the page went unheeded, and it’s remained a reliable source of misinformation, false attribution of quotes, and drive-by smears ever since. Even the current, cleaned-up version contains this curious passage;
Lampooning Celine Dion for what McMillan calls “post-Katrina egocentrism” on Larry King Live.
Here’s the entry they reference for that “quote”.
It wasn’t until I threatened a Wiki editor personally with legal action for restoring defamatory material to the page, that they began to take tighter control of the content. It seems they mistook me for someone who had agreed to jump my requests through Wikipedia’s hoops.
As I explained to Mr. “I’m just a volunteer following policy” Alexander;
I really am unconcerned about whether you agree. You see, I did not sign up for Wikipedia. I did not volunteer. I did not give my permission to have my birthplace and other personal information published. I did not give permission to have content such as “in addition she has been known to polish the knobs of some very influential ‘conservative minds'” appear on a site purporting to be a “biography”.
But Wikipedia is a big organization. I’m a little person.
And you’re a little person. I’ll take on you.
Kathy, I agree with nearly everything you just said.
Now that really is my last word!
Last word’s yours, TJ. Thanks, Kate, for providing
us with the opportunity to talk about this a little bit.
following links from the wiki…
A Soldier of the Great War, seriously?
Vitruvius said: “If some people are too stupid to understand how to use Wikipedia correctly, that’s not really Wikipedia’s fault.”
They aren’t “too stupid” Vit, they just don’t agree with you about how to use Wiki. They want to use it for what THEY want, which is at odds to your purpose.
This is like saying it isn’t the MSM’s fault they are biased to the Left.
These comments on wikipedia remind me of Mr.Goebels,the propoganda minister in Hitlers regime,”if you tell 99 statements that are 100% correct and one statement that is a complete lie and insist that because the 99% are true,why would you question the one,you will soon be able to tell statements that are 100% false and people WILL BELIEVE THEM.
Let’s see how long the edits I had fun with will survive.
Wiki is okay to get links to other websites which many a time are authentic and informative. Nothing else.
Muahahahaha! Poor them ‘volunteers’!
Muahahahaha! Poor them ‘volunteers’!
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kate_McMillan&diff=310067472&oldid=309975349
Hm. I’m thinking of beefing up the entry with a section about Kate running residential schools for schnauzers.
All jokes aside, Kate is very well known in dog show and breeding circles. I’m surprised her work with miniature schnauzers isn’t mentioned.
Phantom 6:15. Ms. Shaidle did not imply wanting to control anybody. She meant that those who did not pay taxes or earn their own way in society should have any control over those who do. And in as much as Wiki editors cannot be numbered amoungst those who have actually advanced our society and humanity, we should accord them little attention or respect.
What would be OT, Vindictivus? Pointing out that Wikisleazia has a less than honest record when it comes to “Global warming”?
Or saying that I agree with Kathy?
Sorry, Vit, you’re on the wrong page on this one.
Well, too late probably, but there’s a weak link issue here. If a source is wickedly, even dangerously unreliable in any sphere, it’s unreliable, period. If a salesman tells me a whopper I won’t trust him on any future sales pitch.
Remember Vitruvius your own snark on that cat you posted something here from the Daily Mail. I mean, really, surely some things in the Daily Mail are correct. I mean obviously people who complain about the Daily Mail are obviously too stupid to know how to use it, right? I mean, Geraldo informs us that he reads the National Enquirer ‘cos it’s been right all the way on the Edwards scandal.
Which you should not take personally, ‘cos as I’ve said a few times here I think you have a huge and charming brain.
Wiki has instructions for squids………
“……. You are not currently logged in. Editing this way will cause your IP address to be recorded publicly in this page’s edit history. If you create an account, you can conceal your IP address and be provided with many other benefits. Messages sent to your IP can be viewed on your talk page.
Please do not save test edits. If you want to experiment, please use the sandbox.”
Vitruvius – I am informed that only philistines keep organs at zero celcius. Sound velocity in air is strongly temperature dependent, so the 32-foot pipe should actually be 32 feet long for instruments maintained at temperatures in the mid-teens.
Pedantic. Sorry.
Wikipedia should only be another tool in the research process of a project and should be treated as suspect for bias when the topic is non-technical and compared to a number of other sources.
As the temperature increases the speed of sound in air increases so the length of a pipe for a given frequency increases, Tenebris, so for temperatures above zero Celsius a subcontra C pipe gets longer than 33.12 feet. In other words, a subcontra C pipe simply isn’t 32 feet long, it’s just known as a 32-foot pipe in the pipe organ field. Also, I picked zero Celsius because I was thinking of attaching the pipe to the outside of my house, in Edmonton, so I was thinking of something closer to the average annual temperature.
…and here I thought it was gonna be a quiet day at SDA.
Posted by: Aaron at August 25, 2009 8:57 PM.
Good one ‘Aaron’. I wonder how long it will last.
Wikipedia: use common sense, if it doesn’t look right then it is probably bullsh!t
Kate, I tried to fix your WP page. Please do not take what you read in Wikipedia personally and please remove that invitation to vandalism from your blog.
Hi. I’m a Wikipedia editor, though not a particularly active one. I’ve been meaning to write a short note explaining Things Most People Don’t Know About Wikipedia. Reading this discussion has finally pushing me into putting finger to keyboard. Here it is.
Wikipedia advertises itself as “the encylopedia that anyone can edit”, which is good marketing: simple, appealing and true as far as it goes. But, as many have found, editing an article and making lasting edits to an article are quite different things. It’s not just enough to put something in an article because you know it to be true; anything remotely controversial has to be backed up by a quote from a so-called “reliable source”. Many people expect Wikipedia to be, at least in theory, a compilation of facts about each topic, but instead it is a compilation of statements that “reliable sources” have made about each topic. (BTW, Wikipedia uses the term “reliable source” with a rather distinctive meaning.) That’s a big difference.
Wikipedia has lots of pages explaining its rules and processes. You can read the key ones in less than a day, but it takes most of us a few weeks of editing to understand how it all works. Once you understand that Wikipedia has a very narrow focus (creating and improving encyclopedia articles), everything tends to make sense. (Example: working on articles is more important than seeing that Justice Is Done in disputes, much less that Justice Is Seen To Be Done.) People familiar with blogs and other Web 2.0 communities tend to assume that Wikipedia will work in similar ways, but it doesn’t. For one thing, reputation matters at lot less at Wikipedia, and in different ways.
Kate is right about the quality of the article about her: it’s not good enough. That doesn’t surprise me. Many (most?) of Wikipedia’s articles are not good enough by Wikipedia’s own standards. The amount of vandalism, character assassination and opinion masquerading as fact we get is quite depressing. The articles that experienced editors pay attention to tend to get better over time, but (1) the improvement is generally slow and (2) there are lots of articles that don’t get enough attention. (As it happens, I just cleaned up one of the latter: Kate is right about the quality of the article about her: it’s not good enough. Actually, many (most?) of Wikipedia’s articles are not good enough by Wikipedia’s own standards. The amount of vandalism, character assassination and opinion masquerading as fact we get is quite depressing. The articles that experienced editors pay attention to tend to get better over time, but (1) the improvement is generally slow and (2) there are lots of articles that don’t get enough attention. (As it happens, I just cleaned up one of the latter, about the Somena people of Vancouver Island.)
Articles on non-controversial topics tend to be easy to work on. (But Wikipedia attracts so many crackpots that it is very hard to predict which articles will be controversial!) Wikipedia’s articles about computing, games, maths, hard sciences, geography etc are generally not too bad. Anything to do with politics is much less reliable. In my experience, articles about conservative bloggers, writers and politicians get abnormal amounts of vandalism and bias-pushing — especially those about women. (See especially Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, and Sarah Palin.)
So I’ll start paying more attention to the article about Kate. (My only edit to it so far was to undo one hostile edit in July 2008.) Wish me luck!
Arrgh. Sorry about the mess in my “Kate is right …” paragraph. It should be as follows.
Another thing I forgot to say is that the NYT article is confusing and misleading. The main advantage of the “flagged revisions with patrolling” approach is to allow non-logged-in users to edit but prevent most users from seeing those edits until an experienced, registered user OKs them. Most edits from people who aren’t logged in are vandalism, but quite a few are good edits, such as the recent addition of “Coined words and phrases” to the article about Kate. In fact, this article is a perfect example of the advantages of the new facility.
Thanks, Chris.
I tried to vandelize your page dearest Kate, but as soon as I did, it was corrected by “User:Bsmithme” and then I received a ‘warning” not to continue such “attacks”.
So I decided to check out Bsmithme’s user page.
He’s a real piece of work. Check out his web page, and see what I mean.
Perhaps the most telling statement he makes is on his user page where he says this: “First and foremost: I genuinely believe that Wikipedia is the greatest technological invention of the century…”
Yeah.
Every other discovery man has made in the last 100 years or so are secondary to Wikipedia.
Right.
Kind of sums up what your up against Kate…
Good luck battling the techno-nerd Wiki-weenies, your gonna need it.
tomax7,
I, too, “thought it was gonna be a quiet day @ SDA”…. you could always break out that Celine 8-track (of her Greatest Hit) you’ve been saving for a slow day !!
Cheers….