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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, @08:05PM
As long as Wikipedians believe that some of their wacky ways of doing things are superior to everyone else's, then there will be a problem. Many of these are about trivial details.
For example, currency: most publications will put a value in local currency and then an equivalent in US dollars as a standard reference. On Wikipedia, this is allowed for most currencies, but not for some major currencies, such as the British pound. It is not uniformly enforced, so some pages will have one currency while others have two. And an editing war will occur if you add the US amount as a reference.
Other wacky things: making odd units of measure as equivalent - such as acres and square meters instead of acres and hectares; the latter are the same order of magnitude and are used equivalently in most land measure.
One of the strangest is that you can't use a Wikipedia page as a reference on another Wikipedia page. This is to avoid circular references. However, it is not permitted even when there is no circular reference.
The entrenched editing mafia will not allow the rationalization of these things, since they made the decision and will not change it, regardless of how many examples from other respected publications are offered.
I gave up significant contributions a long time age, though I still make minor changes (spelling, grammar or things that drive me nuts) occasionally. Most stick, though some are rolled back.
If the AI enforces these rules, then it is Artificial Stupidity.