Wikipedia’s latest band-aid
The Times of London is unjustifiably impressed by Wikipedia’s latest promise to make good on an old plan. (It’s also unjustifiably impressed by Jimmy Wales’ claims to be the sole founder of Wikipedia, but never mind.)
As anybody who has followed Wikipedia at all closely knows, they have been talking about having a new review-before-publish system — for well over a year — to be piloted by the German Wikipedia. The system would identify people called “trusted editors,” by which they mean people who have made 200 edits or who have been in the system for 30 days. In other words, your average Wikipedians are now “trusted editors,” and the hope is that, by having them approve every edit made by newer people, they will become more “reliable.”
Let’s be clear.
This tool will probably solve one of Wikipedia’s more minor problems, namely, simple vandalism. You know, the kid-writing-dirty-words-on-clean-walls problem — which was never a big problem, though it is the one that people are most impressed by, at first. I’ve always said this was a facile criticism, against which I’ve always defended Wikipedia (even recently). It has always been easy for Wikipedia to fix obvious vandalism quickly.
But it was never vandalism, per se, that led thoughtful critics to say that Wikipedia has a credibility, or reliability, problem.
Wikipedia’s reliability problem, of course, lies in the fact that the old hands, “Wikipedia’s trusted editors” (a phrase never to be used without scare quotes!), include all the people who make Wikipedia so problematic, and the process still permits all the behaviors that were so problematic. So the worst problems will not be touched, for the German Wikipedia. Old hands may still copy from a textbook without understanding what they’re copying. They may still delete perfectly good text, or ruin reasonably good drafts, inserting not-so-subtle bias. The endless edit wars, too, will continue on without any effective means of resolution. And if someone is ejected from the project, he’ll have another sockpuppet, registered over a month ago, ready to step in and render the disciplinary action essentially ineffective. All of this will continue on as before.
I wonder what unintended consequences such a system might have. Wikipedia’s self-management is already a bit of a joke. Creating a layer of oversight in which most of the people in the system are moderators is apt to create a million tinpot dictators; one of the most annoying things about the Wikipedia community is the way that people really do act like each others’ editors, forming their requests as orders and in other ways competing to outdo each other in how condescending they can be. I’d like to point out that one rarely sees this sort of attitude on CZ. We actually, for the most part, have some respect for each other. There are exceptions, of course. Maybe this will change with a larger scale, but I really don’t think so. When Wikipedia was CZ’s current scale, it already had the problem of ridiculously condescending attitudes — a bit too much boldness, perhaps.
I’m delighted to be able to say that there simply isn’t any need for such a system in the Citizendium. We have virtually no vandalism. Wikipedia-style moderators would be very bored; virtually every single one of our many daily edits would be, of course, approved.
Cassiopedia (http://www.cassiopedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page)is another wiki that is basically Wikipedia with author applications having to be approved (though usernames need not be real names, nor is a user page obligatory). It copied Wikipedia’s 1.4 million articles, and seems pretty dead right now.
Comment by John Stephenson — September 22, 2007 @ 2:46 pm
Hi John, well, if you look into it, you’ll see why it never went anywhere. Enough said
Comment by Larry Sanger — September 22, 2007 @ 4:37 pm
Dead indeed: http://www.cassiopedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges
Comment by Stephen Ewen — September 22, 2007 @ 10:22 pm
The reason that CZ doesn’t have the Wikipedia problem with condescension and petty rivalries is, I think, exactly what is different about them. Two major differences: (1) CZ has real names and real people who feel some sort of social relationship with each other; (2) the actual editors on CZ are people who feel fairly secure about their abilities, and don’t need to prove too much. The relationships between authors and editors is more tentative, but slowly is working out, I think.
In contrast, Wikipedia has real problems of contested status, infighting, and a general lack of respect for other people’s real-life achievements. There is no quickfix for the WP problems…
Comment by Martin Baldwin-Edwards — September 25, 2007 @ 5:48 pm