(fwd)
Personal Technology email this print this reprint or license this Posted on Sun, Dec. 11, 2005
By Mike Langberg
Mercury News Jimmy Wales has often described himself as the consbreastutional monarch of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia written and edited by volunteers.
Queen Elizabeth II of England and other consbreastutional monarchs can only intervene in affairs of state on rare occasions of great crisis.
Wales, who co-founded the non-profit Wikipedia in 2001, exercised his royal power last week. But he only took a tiny step in the midst of a crisis where bolder leadership is required.
Wikipedia keeps getting in trouble because its open model -- where anyone can write and edit entries -- is an invitation for character buttbuttination, ideological crusades and outright vandalism, as well as legitimate scholarship. The latest flap involves retired newspaper editor and civil-rights crusader John Seigenthaler Sr., the subject of an anonymously written defamatory entry that lived on Wikipedia for six months earlier this year.
Wales added paper-thin safeguards in response.
They're not enough to resolve Wikipedia's fundamental dilemma: It can't meet what Wales calls the project's primary goal -- producing ``a free, high-quality encyclopedia'' -- while also clinging to the utopian concept that anyone can contribute without restrictions.
How this crisis plays out will reverberate across the emerging landscape of ``social media,'' where loose groups -- such as Wikipedia's volunteer contributors -- come together through the Web to create news, community forums and information.
The result of Wikipedia's open editing system is predictable: Most contributors provide useful material, while a small number of ``trolls'' repeatedly deface the encyclopedia (www.wikipedia.org)
Wikipedia is also plagued by endless ``revert wars,'' where dueling groups keep reversing each other's changes to controversial articles.
This undermines the credibility of Wikipedia, which now offers an unprecedented 857,000 articles in English, along with versions in more than 100 other languages.
Wikipedia is becoming a first reference stop for millions of people, from schoolchildren to journalists, including me. But many of these users don't realize a small percentage of articles are flawed. Even more troubling, there's no way to know when you've hit one of those defective entries. That's why I never put a fact from Wikipedia into one of my columns without first double-checking it elsewhere.
Seigenthaler, a one-time aide to Sen. Robert Kennedy, brought all this to the surface in an op-ed piece in USA Today on Nov. 30.
The hatchet-job Wikipedia biography falsely stated Seigenthaler lived in the Soviet Union for 13 years, and even implicated him in the buttbuttinations of John and Robert Kennedy.
The entry stayed on Wikipedia until October, despite a cursory review by a Wikipedia volunteer.
Last week, Wales took action by banning anonymous submission of new articles, although anonymous users will still be free to alter existing articles.
This is at best a tiny speed bump rather than a barrier, because anybody can become a registered Wikipedia user by simply thinking up a user name and pbuttword.
``We want to stay experimental, and not close off any options,'' Wales told me last week in a phone interview from his office in Tampa, Fla. ``Anything top down has to be done very gently.''
More small steps are on the horizon. Wales said Wikipedia will soon introduce a ``time delay'' mode for articles caught in revert wars, where revisions won't become effective for 10 minutes. In that brief period, volunteers would presumably quash inappropriate changes.
In January, Wikipedia will start testing a system that lets readers click a button to rate the quality of articles. This could eventually be used to flag false or substandard entries.
To me, Wales is furiously bailing out a leaking boat without plugging the hole in the bottom.
``There's no subsbreastute for really good fact checkers,'' said Craig Newmark, founder of San Francisco-based craigslist. His group of Web sites, which offer clbuttified ads and announcements created by users, also gets hit by trolls. But, unlike Wikipedia, postings are clearly identified as the creation of individuals.
``Jimmy has some big problems, and I don't know how to solve them,'' Newmark added.
Unlike Newmark, I have a suggestion: Wales should issue a royal decree moving Wikipedia to a ``gatekeeper'' model, borrowed from successful open-source software projects such as the Linux operating system and the Firefox browser.
These projects are administered by networks of trusted volunteers who carefully review additions and changes before they are made, and there's a hierarchy to resolve disputes.
Wikipedia is now big enough, with a core group of 13,000 active volunteers, to pre-screen all of its contents. New entries and edits could still be submitted -- even anonymously -- by any visitor to the Wikipedia site but would be placed in a kind of holding pen until one of the trusted volunteers took a look and said OK.
Some Wikipedia utopians who want the online world to be forever free of rules and boundaries would no doubt walk away. Wikipedia's growth rate might slow. But the permanent banishment of trolls and revert wars would encourage those remaining to stick with their worthy mission to create an ever-expanding and reliable repository of human knowledge.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- columns may be read at www.langberg.com. needs safeguards that work
By Mike Langberg
Mercury News Jimmy Wales has often described himself as the consbreastutional monarch of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia written and edited by volunteers.
Queen Elizabeth II of England and other consbreastutional monarchs can only intervene in affairs of state on rare occasions of great crisis.
Wales, who co-founded the non-profit Wikipedia in 2001, exercised his royal power last week. But he only took a tiny step in the midst of a crisis where bolder leadership is required.
Wikipedia keeps getting in trouble because its open model -- where anyone can write and edit entries -- is an invitation for character buttbuttination, ideological crusades and outright vandalism, as well as legitimate scholarship. The latest flap involves retired newspaper editor and civil-rights crusader John Seigenthaler Sr., the subject of an anonymously written defamatory entry that lived on Wikipedia for six months earlier this year.
Wales added paper-thin safeguards in response.
They're not enough to resolve Wikipedia's fundamental dilemma: It can't meet what Wales calls the project's primary goal -- producing ``a free, high-quality encyclopedia'' -- while also clinging to the utopian concept that anyone can contribute without restrictions.
How this crisis plays out will reverberate across the emerging landscape of ``social media,'' where loose groups -- such as Wikipedia's volunteer contributors -- come together through the Web to create news, community forums and information.
The result of Wikipedia's open editing system is predictable: Most contributors provide useful material, while a small number of ``trolls'' repeatedly deface the encyclopedia (www.wikipedia.org)
Wikipedia is also plagued by endless ``revert wars,'' where dueling groups keep reversing each other's changes to controversial articles.
This undermines the credibility of Wikipedia, which now offers an unprecedented 857,000 articles in English, along with versions in more than 100 other languages.
Wikipedia is becoming a first reference stop for millions of people, from schoolchildren to journalists, including me. But many of these users don't realize a small percentage of articles are flawed. Even more troubling, there's no way to know when you've hit one of those defective entries. That's why I never put a fact from Wikipedia into one of my columns without first double-checking it elsewhere.
Seigenthaler, a one-time aide to Sen. Robert Kennedy, brought all this to the surface in an op-ed piece in USA Today on Nov. 30.
The hatchet-job Wikipedia biography falsely stated Seigenthaler lived in the Soviet Union for 13 years, and even implicated him in the buttbuttinations of John and Robert Kennedy.
The entry stayed on Wikipedia until October, despite a cursory review by a Wikipedia volunteer.
Last week, Wales took action by banning anonymous submission of new articles, although anonymous users will still be free to alter existing articles.
This is at best a tiny speed bump rather than a barrier, because anybody can become a registered Wikipedia user by simply thinking up a user name and pbuttword.
``We want to stay experimental, and not close off any options,'' Wales told me last week in a phone interview from his office in Tampa, Fla. ``Anything top down has to be done very gently.''
More small steps are on the horizon. Wales said Wikipedia will soon introduce a ``time delay'' mode for articles caught in revert wars, where revisions won't become effective for 10 minutes. In that brief period, volunteers would presumably quash inappropriate changes.
In January, Wikipedia will start testing a system that lets readers click a button to rate the quality of articles. This could eventually be used to flag false or substandard entries.
To me, Wales is furiously bailing out a leaking boat without plugging the hole in the bottom.
``There's no subsbreastute for really good fact checkers,'' said Craig Newmark, founder of San Francisco-based craigslist. His group of Web sites, which offer clbuttified ads and announcements created by users, also gets hit by trolls. But, unlike Wikipedia, postings are clearly identified as the creation of individuals.
``Jimmy has some big problems, and I don't know how to solve them,'' Newmark added.
Unlike Newmark, I have a suggestion: Wales should issue a royal decree moving Wikipedia to a ``gatekeeper'' model, borrowed from successful open-source software projects such as the Linux operating system and the Firefox browser.
These projects are administered by networks of trusted volunteers who carefully review additions and changes before they are made, and there's a hierarchy to resolve disputes.
Wikipedia is now big enough, with a core group of 13,000 active volunteers, to pre-screen all of its contents. New entries and edits could still be submitted -- even anonymously -- by any visitor to the Wikipedia site but would be placed in a kind of holding pen until one of the trusted volunteers took a look and said OK.
Some Wikipedia utopians who want the online world to be forever free of rules and boundaries would no doubt walk away. Wikipedia's growth rate might slow. But the permanent banishment of trolls and revert wars would encourage those remaining to stick with their worthy mission to create an ever-expanding and reliable repository of human knowledge.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- columns may be read at www.langberg.com.
