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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: 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]