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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 Tuesday December 08 2015, @03:10AM
"Interestingly enough, last time I checked, the whole dispute was nuked from orbit: the article edits, the talk page edits, the dispute pages are all gone and don't appear anywhere in the history. I literally went through every revision to find them on the pages and nothing. After talking with different people, I've discovered that such actions from the very top happen more frequently than most realize. The best way to find them is comparing dumps, but most people don't care enough to do that."
Wikipedia says that they generally aren't not supposed to delete things like that. On the one hand I understand that they do have to save space and bandwidth to some extent. On the other hand doing it too often will cause them to lose credibility.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 08 2015, @03:34AM
err ... they generally aren't supposed to delete pages like that *
Anyways, like you said, comparing dump files of mirrors will generally fix that. Perhaps someone can create a mirror that specifically only stores things that Wikipedia deletes. This serves a few purposes.
It draws more attention to historical discussions that have been deleted by highlighting them since that's all that this server contains. This provides a source specifically organized for people to either casually browse around for anything that ha been deleted (without being distracted by everything else) or to look for something in particular that may have been deleted or to see if anything has been deleted regarding a specific topic. The Streisand effect.
It helps ensure that historical discussions are stored for longer periods of time.
It helps us better quantify how often things get deleted and to better statistically track trends that can help us better determine why things get deleted and if there are any possible slants that play a role.
The server doesn't have to be burdened by everything that hasn't been deleted. It can compare different dumps from different mirrors to look for things that have been deleted and store only those that have been. This can help centralize funding so that the amount of funding it receives from those that contribute can be based on how important people think it is to contribute to this specific cause without their funds being distracted by other causes (ie: the more general cause of mirroring all of Wikipedia). It's almost like having different independent mirrors store different parts of Wikipedia instead of just having Wikipedia itself and every independent mirror trying to store all of Wikipedia and having to create a line where past material gets deleted and so all of these independent mirrors avoid distributing the burden of storing different information on different mirrors. An independent mirror that stores what has been deleted is one that focuses on the parts that Wikipedia itself and independent mirrors no longer have the storage to store.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @02:51AM
Pages, or their revision history, aren't truly deleted from Wikipedia. They're just hidden from public view. Hence, storage space is not saved (except by those who mirror the site). Deleted material can be undeleted; it's a simple matter of bureaucracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Oversight/FAQ#Tools_for_hiding.2Fremoving_edits [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Undeletion [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 09 2015, @05:44PM
It sounds like what happened to the edits was the "Oversight" where they didn't show up at all. But I think the claim that "all" edits were converted to be highly dubious. Does that mean all the edits with Jimbo's SSN in them (the original reason for oversight) and other doxing were put back up too?