Wikipedia - the Golden Age is gone

[Darren Dirt]

http://osm.org/site/story/2005126wikipediascandal?currow=1

Wikipedia's scandal of secrecy



Compiled by Pajamas Media Staff in Los Angeles



Tuesday, December 6, 2005



Wikipedia is at the center of an online storm as the web-based "encyclopedia," written in secret by anyone with a keyboard, whose identities cannot be learned even by Wikipedia's owners, takes a drubbing for a bio of a USA Today editor jammed with innuendo. Associated Press reports that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales now says he will require a 15-second registration process to reduce the unverified writeups by thousands of strangers whose often-controversial claims cannot be checked by his 600 volunteers. The blogging community has at it, with The Shape of Days using a few choice words, The PC Doctor saying the secrecy format is doomed to fail, j's scratchpad's exhaustive series of posts on the phenomenon, Ratcliffe Blog calling for eliminating anonymous articles and Pajamas Media's Roger L. Simon arguing that untraceable writing means a free-for-all.

Personally, I have seen how quickly the volunteers correct bad data, spelling errors, and especially non-NPOV verbiage. The system works. But now, to require a quick-contributor to take "15 seconds" out of their busy day, to take ownership of their offering? That's gonna make Wiki no different than the countless other webcyclopedia out there...

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, is tightening submission rules after a prominent journalist complained that an article falsely implicated him in the Kennedy assassinations. Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Web site, said Monday. People who modify existing articles will still be able to do so without registering. The change comes less than a week after John Seigenthaler, a one-time administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy, complained in an op-ed published in USA Today that a biography of him on Wikipedia claimed he had been suspected in the assassinations of the former attorney general and his brother, President John F. Kennedy.

Idiots. Stupid, overreacting, cutting-with-a-broad-blade idiots.

[Lazybones]

I think its a good idea.. Really if you are going to CREATE a new article and make a good one, you are going to take some time to do it.



If you see something you want to add info to, you can still do it anonymously.



Really.. Big whoop.. I according to Jimmy the vast majority of content is already created by registered users. Where does the bad content come from? Anonymous..

[Darren Dirt]

I think its a good idea.. Really if you are going to CREATE a new article and make a good one, you are going to take some time to do it.



If you see something you want to add info to, you can still do it anonymously.



Really.. Big whoop.. I according to Jimmy the vast majority of content is already created by registered users. Where does the bad content come from? Anonymous..

I'm skeptcial that it will stay this way. It's just like legislation; they put it into place for the "extreme" cases, everyone says "good idea" or especially "won't affect me anyway", then later the PTB say "well since it's been in place for a while let's just modify the way it works" and voila, in this case no more anonymous postings period.



It's a private service, so I have no problem with Wikipedia doing this from a "rights" point of view, of course... I'm just sad that it's happening, especially because of some guy's attempt to use legal threats to silence alternative opinions, which remember were removed within minutes.  

[Lazybones]

This is not because of one guys problem with Wikipedia.. There have been MANY cases of "Edit Wars" on the site where garbage content was posted, edited, edited, edited....



There needs to be control.. I would neve use Wikipedia as anything but a jumping off point for finding info.. I find its good for tech info, but when you get into history and what not it is VERY tilted toward the opinion of the writers..

[Shayne]

I cant help but laugh at the people that use Wikipedia for actual referance.

[Darren Dirt]

I cant help but laugh at the people that use Wikipedia for actual referance.

( Note to self: increase frequency of Wikipedia references in future RW postings, to freely give Shayne plenty of irrestible laughs... )

[Lazybones]

I like penny arcade's take on this:



http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/16

[Darren Dirt]

Nice.



On the News page of the same day, there was a link to something even nicer, btw. Wowsers:



Rise of Legends SCREENSHOTS (1UP_com)

[Darren Dirt]

Apparently "no follow" is going to be added to all outgoing links, pretty soon. To reduce "link love" being given to vandals. And maybe to reduce the popularity of its competitors.

Either way, this blogger has some thoughts on the subject, and offers some middle-ground compromise suggestions.

There are things Wikipedia could do to restore some of its legitimate link love without helping spammers. It could add nofollow only to links that are suspect -- links that are new, or were added by an user without a solid track record on the site, or that have survived several rewrites of a page, or some combination of such factors. Even a simple policy of using nofollow for the first two weeks might work well enough. Wikipedia has the data to make these kinds of distinctions, and it's not too much to ask for a site of its importance to do the necessary programming.

:-\

[Shayne]

Couldn't less "public" search engines like ignore the no follow rel tag?  *shrug*  I think this will solve nothing

[Darren Dirt]

Couldn't less "public" search engines like ignore the no follow rel tag?  *shrug*  I think this will solve nothing

That's what the blogger said will probably happen -- the search engines, even the "majors" probably already have Wikipedia-specific code so it would take nothing for them to ignore (if they so choose) the no-follow from Wikipedia links. I expect a "blows up in their face" result of this futile attempt to deal with spammers (allegedly).

[Shayne]

Ah, i didn't read the article, but i got the general jist of this through other media outlets covering this new tactic by Wikipedia.  As much as Wikipedia doesnt want the links followed, its probably in google/msn/yahoo/etc best interest to have the links followed regardless.

[Darren Dirt]

(!) Wikipedia Static HTML Dumps -- MAKE A LOCAL COPY!

http://static.wikipedia.org/downloads/November_2006/en/
(see http://static.wikipedia.org/ for more info)