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Tom Simonite writes at MIT Technology Review that the Wikimedia Foundation is rolling out new software trained to know the difference between an honest mistake and intentional vandalism in an effort to make editing Wikipedia less psychologically bruising. One motivation for the project is a significant decline in the number of people considered active contributors to the flagship English-language Wikipedia: it has fallen by 40 percent over the past eight years, to about 30,000.
Research indicates that the problem is rooted in Wikipedians' complex bureaucracy and their often hard-line responses to newcomers' mistakes, enabled by semi-automated tools that make deleting new changes easy. The new ORES system, for "Objective Revision Evaluation Service," can be trained to score the quality of new changes to Wikipedia and judge whether an edit was made in good faith or not. ORES can allow editing tools to direct people to review the most damaging changes. The software can also help editors treat rookie or innocent mistakes more appropriately, says Aaron Halfaker who helped diagnose that problem and is now leading a project trying to fight it. "I suspect the aggressive behavior of Wikipedians doing quality control is because they're making judgments really fast and they're not encouraged to have a human interaction with the person," says Halfaker. "This enables a tool to say, 'If you're going to revert this, maybe you should be careful and send the person who made the edit a message.'"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday December 07 2015, @05:17PM
^ This.
Also, many of the major spats on Wikipedia had nothing to do with content quality, and everything to do with content political slant. Those are often confused by people who have a political ax to grind.
For example, how do you describe the violence that is going on in the land bordered by Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon? You could accurately call it terrorism against Israel, theft from Palestinians, criminal gang activity on both sides, war crimes on both sides, threatened genocide on both sides, and so forth. And you could write articles with any of those slants using high quality, well sourced, detailed information. Of course, an encyclopedia article is necessarily incomplete, so the question about what to leave out and what to put in means that there's always important information left out, and if you write with a particular slant in mind you can end up with a high-quality article that is lying by omission.
You can get a similar effect on the Wikipedia page of any candidate for major office.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Adamsjas on Monday December 07 2015, @06:38PM
I agree, there is nothing so fiercely defended on Wikipedia as the political slant.
For a while I was signed up as a Wiki editor/submitter back in the day. Even when you included numerous citations, if the information didn't align with the ruling cabal's views, your changes would get reverted, and your citations would also be deleted.
Wiki is good for documenting anything non-political or non controversial. Anything else is pointless.
Then there is this: http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/4/9848432/peking-duck-fan-backstage-wikipedia [theverge.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 07 2015, @07:00PM
The wake up for me wrt to this was the GamerGate article. I've been part of GG since the start and the Wikipedia article still pushes the feminist lie that the GG community is primarily focused on harassing women. Several sycophantic male feminists were even banned from the article because they were unapologetically maintaining a political slant after being warned.
(Score: 3, Informative) by K_benzoate on Monday December 07 2015, @08:12PM
This isn't a troll, it really happened. [theguardian.com]
Climate change is real and primarily caused by human activity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 07 2015, @09:41PM
Which is why I also read the discussion pages. Others also read the discussion pages so I can also contribute to those seeking more knowledge on a subject by presenting it in the discussion pages. It's generally a policy that things on the discussion pages shouldn't be removed and so at least if something is more controversial than what the main page leads one to believe those who are interested enough can at least get introduced to the controversy from the discussion page which could give them enough to research the subject more if they are interested. The discussion pages are intended to discuss what should be included and what shouldn't and if you feel something should be included because it's relevant than you could mention it there. Even if it doesn't get included because someone else feels it's excessive at least introducing it there can get others who are interested in going beyond the main page exposed to it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 07 2015, @11:35PM
On the flipside I have seen articles reverted to be non-neutral accompanied by ad-hominem manufactured flaming of whatever hapless editor tried to make things NPOV in the first place, on the discussion page. A reader without critical thinking skills is in a poor situation on Wikipedia indeed, and the potential for that type of reaction is so great I have steered clear of contributing in well over 5 years.