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from the this-took-a-study-to-figure-out? dept.
Not everyone who strives to navigate the internet without being tracked is up to no good. This is the underlying premise of a qualitative study led by a trio of Drexel University researchers, who set out to gather the stories of people working on collaborative projects online — like editing Wikipedia — and are concerned about their privacy and taking steps to protect it.
The study, entitled "Privacy, Anonymity, and Perceived Risk in Open Collaboration: A Study of Tor Users and Wikipedians," which was published in advance of its presentation at the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing in February, offers a rare look into why some people turn to IP obfuscation tools, such as the onion router, to keep a low profile and how they experience the internet as a result.
The study's central finding is that perceived threats from other individuals, groups of people and governments are substantial enough to force users below the radar in order to protect their reputation, themselves, and their families.
"Wikipedia editors are volunteers who are trying to build a comprehensive free information resource for everyone on the planet. Tor users are often not seen in those positive ways. But these two organizations are actually committed to the same things — a free global exchange of information with everyone able to participate," said Andrea Forte, PhD , an associate professor in Drexel's College of Computing & Informatics and lead author of the study.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday October 24 2016, @05:36PM
I'm all for allowing options for anonymity, but the fact is that Wikipedia's system for anonymous editing is severely broken. Back in the early days, Wikipedia had loads of anonymous contributions that grew the resource exponentially and made great advances. Now, however, the number of active editors is dwindling, but the potential for vandalism and malicious edits just continues to grow. Even if you still believe that anonymous edits should be made to a LIVE page that millions of people use for reference because "a lot of anonymous people just want to help out," the reality is that new users are viewed with skepticism within the community of established editors. Edits from new or anonymous users are much more likely to be summarily reverted, even if they make a positive contribution.
(There's actually an incentive for editors to do this, since showing a large editing history helps one rise within the Wikipedia hierarchy. But once edits are reverted, new users feel unwelcome and leave, and the positive information from the edits are lost except if someone takes the time to laboriously go back through the edit history of the page.)
So, anonymous edits are a continuous and growing vandalism threat, which has led established community editors to be skeptical and even drive out new potentially helpful people.
Meanwhile, users are stuck with an ever-shifting site that's likely to have random vandalism. Note that many vandals are not just the ones who post profanity or whatever -- bots can easily catch that stuff and revert. What's more concerning are the vandals who change random digits in dates or insert random other falsehoods as if they were facts. Yes, those people are out there, and you've likely viewed a page that had errors created by them, if you use Wikipedia with any frequency. (And studies tend to show that such less visible vandalism can take weeks, months, or years to be noticed... sometimes as these falsehoods then migrate into everything from media resources to student research papers... and sometimes even published books.)
There are various possible solutions to this, but to me the easiest one has always been to have "stable" versions of the live pages that can't be edited directly by random folks. This was discussed a lot way back in the early days of Wikipedia, back when it didn't matter, and summarily rejected by community consensus at the time. Now Wikipedia has grown to be one of the dominant reference resources for people worldwide. Do we seriously think it's reasonable that some kid can just go in there and change stuff on a whim that millions of people view and trust? (That trust may be misplaced, but it's the reality of how people use Wikipedia.)
I've used the comparison before, but I'll say it again -- Wikipedia is like an open-source software project where anyone on the internet can make changes to the current STABLE RELEASE version that people download. The project is older, and many of the original developers are less active or abandoned it, so now a significant amount of time is being spent with programmers continuously fixing random bugs introduced by random people on the internet to the STABLE release version. Does ANYONE here think that EVER sounds like a good idea? Except we're not talking about some obscure open-source software project -- we're talking about knowledge itself, since so many people just rely on Wikipedia now, and we have many known instances where new "facts" have been created on Wikipedia by vandals.
I'm all for still allowing and encouraging anonymous users to PROPOSE edits to Wikipedia. (Perhaps a "testing" or "unstable" page version with bleeding edge edits present or something.) But Wikipedia has some real problems, partly created through its "The Encyclopedia ANYONE can edit!" policies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 24 2016, @06:01PM
Like Linux, udev, systemd, etc all are being run today.
It seems to be the prevalent model across industries in fact, including those exact reference books you mentioned above. I mean how much of college coursebooks have exactly those kinds of changes yearly in order to force the purchase of new books and the dismissal of old versions?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 24 2016, @09:49PM
Holding up systemd as a good example of anything is not warranted
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday October 24 2016, @07:11PM
Wikipedia does have restrictions on certain articles that are meant to keep just anybody from editing. I checked 13 articles about African megafauna and 8 have semi-protection. In a graphical browser, there's a padlock icon toward the upper right of the page.
"This article is semi-protected." --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheetah [wikipedia.org]
"This article is semi-protected." --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocodile [wikipedia.org]
"This article is semi-protected due to vandalism." --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant [wikipedia.org]
"This article is semi-protected." --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu [wikipedia.org]
(no special restriction)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazelle [wikipedia.org]
"This article is semi-protected." --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giraffe [wikipedia.org]
"This article is semi-protected." --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippopotamus [wikipedia.org]
(no special restriction)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopard [wikipedia.org]
"This article is semi-protected due to vandalism." --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion [wikipedia.org]
(no special restriction)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinoceros [wikipedia.org]
"This article is semi-protected." --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger [wikipedia.org]
(no special restriction)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildebeest [wikipedia.org]
"This article is semi-protected." --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra [wikipedia.org]
Semi-protection prevents edits from unregistered users (IP addresses), as well as edits from any account that is not autoconfirmed (is at least four days old and has at least ten edits to Wikipedia) or confirmed.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy#semi [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Monday October 24 2016, @07:13PM
Oops, that's 9 (not 8) out of the 13.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 24 2016, @09:32PM
Throw this guy out! He can't even count!
(Score: 3, Funny) by chromas on Monday October 24 2016, @10:20PM
Oh, he can count; it's just the values were anonymously vandalized while he wasn't looking.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday October 25 2016, @01:57PM
I checked 13 articles about African megafauna and 8 have semi-protection.
Uh, yeah -- but that's obviously a biased sample, because of the whole Stephen Colbert elephant fiasco [wikipedia.org], which continues to be a problem with vandals a decade later. Back when that happened, the vandalism spread to other African animals after the "Elephant" article was protected, and I assume a number of the protections you cite relate to stuff like that. Did you just choose "African megafauna" randomly, or were you deliberately trying to skew your sample to try to score debate points?
(The reality is that semi-protection is used on a few thousand articles [wikipedia.org], out of somewhere over 5,000,000 Wikipedia articles, maybe a rate of 0.1% of so.)
In any case, if you think vandalism is confined to things like that where a celebrity encourages it, you're mistaken. Vandalism is incredibly common, and "semi-protection" only tends to be used (1) when vandalism occurs repeatedly and (2) when editors become aware of the problem. (It's also an imperfect solution for various reasons, but it's better than nothing.) The vast majority of insidious vandalism is much further "under the radar." In my opinion, something like semi-protection should be on by default on ALL articles, and any article WITHOUT it should bear a prominent disclaimer at the top of the page saying something like, "WARNING: THE FOLLOWING MATERIAL MAY BE EDITED BY ANY INTERNET USER AT ANY TIME. IT SHOULD NOT BE CONSIDERED A SOURCE OF STABLE, RELIABLE INFORMATION."
Of course, posting such a disclaimer would just attract more vandals, so I'm NOT proposing it as a serious solution. I already proposed a more realistic solution in my previous post.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday October 26 2016, @07:07AM
Did you just choose "African megafauna" randomly, or were you deliberately trying to skew your sample to try to score debate points?
I was responding to your remark that:
There are various possible solutions to this, but to me the easiest one has always been to have "stable" versions of the live pages that can't be edited directly by random folks.
It appeared that you weren't aware of the restrictions that are placed on what I called "certain articles," so I provided some examples. I clicked on Wikipedia's "random article" link [wikipedia.org] and those were the articles that came up.
(The reality is that semi-protection is used on a few thousand articles [wikipedia.org], out of somewhere over 5,000,000 Wikipedia articles, maybe a rate of 0.1% of so.)
Something else, coincidentally, amounts to about 0.1% of the articles:
Featured articles are considered to be the best articles Wikipedia has to offer [...] There are 4,854 featured articles out of 5,270,458 articles on the English Wikipedia (~0.1% are featured).
Among the examples I provided, 5 are featured articles, and 3 carry the similar, lesser designation "good article." (there are about 25,000 good articles, about 1 in every 211 Wikipedia articles). [wikipedia.org] But as you noticed, my examples weren't a random sample, so they don't prove that certain articles attract more attention than others, both from people trying to improve them and from pranksters. Perhaps people just type randomly, like the proverbial monkeys.
In any case, if you think vandalism is confined to things like that where a celebrity encourages it, you're mistaken.
I didn't say that, so may I be excused for not proving it?
A commenter on the "Elephant" talk page [wikipedia.org] wrote in August "It's been 10 years since Stephen Colbert issued his call to vandalize this page," and asked for the semi-protection to be removed. A randomly chosen quote from the responses: "It's a high profile article that will attract vandals into the indefinite future."
In my opinion, something like semi-protection should be on by default on ALL articles [...]
There are, if I'm not mistaken, curated collections of Wikipedia articles that one can load onto an e-book reader. Conservapedia.com and Britannica.com (to give a random sampling of Web sites) offer curated articles written or checked by experts. I doubt that they endeavour to offer millions of articles--the final printed version of the Britannica contained 65,000.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/05/encyclopedia-britannica-final-print-edition [theguardian.com]
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(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday October 26 2016, @06:56PM
My apologies for unfounded assumptions -- it just seemed like too much of a coincidence that your examples seemed drawn from a pool that included perhaps the most famous example of protecting an article in Wikipedia's history. But if you say you just found these randomly, okay.
Something else, coincidentally, amounts to about 0.1% of the articles [...] featured articles
Just to note, featured articles are not protected as a matter of course, and in fact they aren't even automatically protected while they are featured [wikipedia.org] (a fact that attracts all sorts of vandalism). There's a lot of debate that goes on about semi-protection in the Wikipedia community, and it's rarely applied for long periods unless there's a known pattern of vandalism. I'm not sure if your mentioning of this "coincidence" is meant to imply that Wikipedia was actually protecting articles it thought were good enough to feature -- but if you were implying that, let's be clear that's NOT what semi-protection is used for.
(The reason for your correlation is more likely to be the simple fact that featured articles are often chosen not only because of their quality, but because they're on a topic that's not completely obscure. Topics that are popular tend to attract more views and thus more obvious vandalism. I mention "obvious" here specifically because the further you get "off the beaten path" of Wikipedia articles, the more likely you are to encounter all sorts of dysfunction, from more insidious and persistent vandalism to unresolved edit wars to places where one Wikipedia editor "sits on an article" and refuses to let it change beyond their personal opinion, or whatever. But, anyway, the more popular articles are more likely to more obvious and frequent attacks, thus leading to semi-protection.)
There are, if I'm not mistaken, curated collections of Wikipedia articles that one can load onto an e-book reader.
To my knowledge, there is no official version of Wikipedia available for download like that. I didn't look through everything here [wikipedia.org], but there may be some 3rd-party service that does something like that.
Conservapedia.com and Britannica.com (to give a random sampling of Web sites) offer curated articles written or checked by experts. I doubt that they endeavour to offer millions of articles--the final printed version of the Britannica contained 65,000.
All the more reason why we need stronger protection on articles, at least once they move beyond stub status. There's simply no way to police millions of them effectively.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday October 25 2016, @02:58AM
Many of the Wikipedia editors who use an account use a pseudonym, and the project is strict about what it calls "outing," but might elsewhere be called "doxing": connecting someone's Wikipedia account to the person's activities elsewhere or exposing the person's identity.