Wikipedia 2.0? Hold on now…
New Scientist has a new article out about Wikipedia’s “stable versions” proposal as a way to address criticism about how to trust articles that are constantly in flux. The idea is that there will be some type of rating system and selection of a presentable version for ordinary passersby.
Jimmy Wales announced the push to this initiative in August 2006, and the German Wikipedians have been working on implementing this as a pilot. While it’s being implemented later than expected, the New Scientist piece does a decent job explaining the impetus for it, and some of its features.
But then things in the article get oh-so-strange, and it’s caused a bit of a firestorm behind the scenes.
The article goes on to describe “trust ratings” for users, based on the work of Luca de Alfaro at UC Santa Cruz and the color coding system. This was a shock to me when I read it, and I consider myself moderately in-the-know.
Specifically in the article, they mention the feature as described by Erik Moeller, the Wikimedia Board of Trustee member most involved with this:
As well as relying on trusted editors, Wikipedia’s upgrade will involve automatically awarding trust ratings to chunks of text within a certain article. Moeller says the new system is due to be incorporated into Wikipedia within the next two months, as an option for the different language communities.
The software that will do this, created by Luca de Alfaro and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz, starts by assigning each Wikipedia contributor a trust rating using the encyclopedia’s vast log of edits, which records every change to every article and the editor involved. Contributors whose edits tend to remain in place are awarded high trust ratings; those whose changes are quickly altered get a low score. The rationale is that if a change is useful and accurate, it is likely to remain intact during subsequent edits, but if it is inaccurate or malicious, it is likely to be changed. Therefore, users who make long-lasting edits are likely to be trustworthy. New users automatically start with a low rating. [Emphasis mine]
When asked about this, Erik referred me to this page on meta that explains part of this rationale: Wikiquality.
What raises my concern is that this wiki page, created for “brainstorming”, was made available just days before the New Scientist article was published, and it seems the publication has taken it as gospel as to what will happen. I’m not aware of how many people have seen or vetted this idea.
I’ll leave my comments at that.
I’m eager to hear the response from the community about this proposal. Let’s just say we had a lively commentary on the WikipediaWeekly podcast just a few hours ago about this, and I’m sure a vigorous conversation will follow.
September 22nd, 2007 03:41
I got the impression that Eric was really talking about a change to mediawiki, and that no changes would be implemented on-site except those the community decides on — “Moeller says the new system is due to be incorporated into Wikipedia within the next two months, as an option for the different language communities.”
If that’s not the case, I’ll be unbelievably pissed. But this looks like a case of journalistic oversimplification.
September 24th, 2007 01:45
Ben, I think the problem is partly that it’s hard to report on something this complex, but also that Erik said he did let something slip that should have been corrected. If you see the next post, Erik mentions that. Cheers.