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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: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Tuesday December 08 2015, @02:05AM
Yes, we all know about Wikipedia's egotistical editors. Yes, good job everyone, +5 posts all around.
Do you have a better idea? How do you make a project like Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia anyone* can improve (*assholes and retards not welcome) and keep it, well, working? How do you motivate and encourage contributors while keeping out both the ill-intentioned and the well-intentioned that end up doing more harm than good (for example, the people who truly believe that creationism is factually correct and wish to educate non-believers for their own good).
Go on, I'm all ears.
While we're at it, maybe you guys can also come up with ways to keep sociopaths out of our real life governing systems too.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday December 08 2015, @02:39AM
I get the idea you are from Wikipedia. If so, please convey my thanks to you and your organization for bringing a much appreciated asset to the web.
I have left a few edits on Wikipedia ... and they stayed. Mine were mostly additional info, grammar, or spelling corrections, as I have been loathe to edit unless I knew good and well there was a technical error. As far as point-of-view stuff, I will not touch that kind of stuff with a ten foot pole. If I cannot backup my claim with laws of physics, math, or well-known fact, then it is my belief - and given my inability to prove it - far be it from me to spew it all over Wikipedia.
I will frequently spew beliefs over here on Soylent, but its in the form of running something up the flagpole to see what others think of it. My belief systems are apt to change radically when others present other information I had not considered.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @03:39AM
There is no solution. It is a microcosm of real life, jerks and all.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NoMaster on Tuesday December 08 2015, @05:53AM
Do things to address the "assholes & retards"?
Yes, there are some fairly fundamental changes involved involved in those suggestions. That's because Wikipedia is fundamentally broken...
(On that last 2 or 3 of points: I'm currently closely watching - but not involving myself in - a case where a person had a [quite reasonable, imho] gripe with the owner & participants of an outside forum, and ended up letting the door hit their arse on the way out. They've since gone full-on stalker-nutjob for the last few months, harassing the forum with spam/offensive posts, using the DMCA to try to take down the forum & owner's YouTube channel, & re-activating an old Wikipedia account to involve themselves in an AfD discussion & general edit-warring of the forum owner's Wikipedia page.
And yet - despite the fact that 30 seconds of Googling and http requests is enough to connect the disgruntled forum user with their real name, location, employer, their behaviour, and everything else to their Wikipedia account and at least at least two other sock/meatpuppet IPs used in the AfD discussion / edit war / attempts to "win, or derail the whole discussion - Wikipedia won't do anything because all the original dispute happened off-site, the editor concerned denies any connection, and Wikipedia assumes good faith...)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @03:25AM
The last I heard, decisions in the Articles for Deletion process were supposed to be based upon the arguments presented in the deletion discussion, not on the mere number of accounts favouring each side.
If someone appears to be misusing multiple accounts, one can request a so-called sockpuppet investigation [wikipedia.org] and sometimes the matter will get looked into. In doing those investigations, only a few of Wikipedia's administrators (those with "CheckUser" privilege) are able to see the IP address from which someone is logging in, and they are supposed to only look at that information only when there's "clear, behavioural evidence" of abuse.
(Score: 2) by NoMaster on Wednesday December 09 2015, @07:38AM
On consideration, I probably shouldn't have mentioned that specific case - it was an example only of how easily Wikipedia's too-rigid processes can be manipulated and, in order to keep it non-identifiable except to those already involved in / watching it, I kept detail to a minimum. But since I did bring it up and you've suggested an option for dealing with it, I'll expand on relevant parts a bit:
WP:SPI won't work, because:
There's a lot more to it than that - the article has been to WP:AfD twice (the second time nominated by the editor in question just after his falling out with the article subject); it's just been through a (failed) WP:DRN, and 'discussion' is still ongoing.
The matter of IP accounts has even been raised several times by the editor in question to hint darkly that there's ongoing off-wiki collaboration organised by the article subject to influence the vote/content - despite the fact that all the IP comments have agreed with the editor in question, and all the IP !votes were for deletion. One result of that has been to make it impossible for anyone other than the editors who have been involved up to this point to work on the page - anyone, from a casual IP right up to a respected but previously-uninvolved editor, will be (& have been) accused of bias or collusion and have (and had) their edits reverted &/or their contribution to the ongoing discussion tainted by those accusations.
Basically, the editor in question is playing a long game - not to improve wikipedia content, but to succeed in his little on and off-wiki vendetta against the subject (who has repeatedly stated he does not care about his Wikipedia page) by either getting it deleted or failing all the Wikipedia processes until everyone else gives up.
The truly stupid thing is I actually agreed with his reasons for giving up on the article subject's forum - what he was saying was right, he stood up for it, and the article subject (who I agree is a bit of a cock) and sycophantic forum members harassed and trolled him until he left. But his behaviour since then - literally trying to destroy the article subject's website, credibility, and livelihood - is seriously unhinged. Though it's not obvious to the casual observer or Wikipedia hierarchy because he's compartmentalised it all, he's keeping calm about it, denies it & makes vague claims of harassment if it's ever mentioned, and is concentrating on playing the game of rules to the bitter end.
Live free or fuck off and take your naïve Libertarian fantasies with you...