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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 07 2015, @05:33PM
Yup. This sounds like yet another iteration of "I know, I'll use technology to solve an intrinsic problem with human nature!"; naive and usually fruitless. Any system left in place for long enough will frequently acquire an over-abundance of power-mad dicks because only power-mad dicks want to stick around wielding their power amongst other power-mad dicks, most sane people will find somewhere with less power-mad dicketry.
Is there any system for punishing Wikipedia's resident power-mad dicks?
Don't have any particular beef with wikipedia myself. The few edits that I've made to it (all anonymous, I don't have an account) are all still there, in whole or in part. Only know about the power-mad dicks behaviour second-hand but I don't find the idea surprising in the least. TVTropes (a site I edit a lot) certainly has more than its fair share of rules zealots who'll happily go around changing all your colours into colors (or vice versa) and all the other crap despite DBAA guidelines about it. Yawnsome, but an omnipresent evil when living in a universe not entirely populated by clones of myself.