hypocritexposer
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Wikipedia changes welcomed by victims of nasty edits
Published Wednesday September 16th, 2009
TORONTO - For years, Alberta-born author and journalist Ed O'Loughlin watched as his Wikipedia page was barraged by incessant edit wars. Some people criticized his work as a Middle East correspondent, while others felt his detractors were just bent on destroying his reputation.
Accusations of bias were added to his page and eventually removed, but for some time they could be viewed by the public and potentially taken at face value.
Canadian tech journalist Marc Saltzman recently blogged about being targeted by an anonymous vandal who "outed" him on Wikipedia, stating he is "one of the few openly gay technology writers working in the mainstream media." He's actually married with three children.
Saltzman quickly removed the line and laughed off the experience but wrote that it made him rethink the value of Wikipedia's content, which he had previously championed.
The open-source nature of the free online encyclopedia harnesses the collective knowledge of web users around the world to share information at speeds that often rival those of mainstream media.
But for every do-gooder who works painstakingly to maintain the high quality of a Wikipedia entry on their own personal subject of interest, there are pranksters who post a defamatory comment or joke to see how long it lasts until it's digitally wiped clean.
The makers of Wikipedia say they're experimenting with ways to stamp out vandalism, but won't be implementing those tactics as quickly as has been recently reported.
Wikipedia maintains a list of the most vandalized entries, which include beaver, unicorn, Avril Lavigne, Gary Bettman, Steve Nash, Montreal, Ontario, John A. Macdonald, Paul Martin, Stephen Harper and a general entry on the prime ministers of Canada.
Many cases of vandalism are simply sophomoric jokes that are almost instantly removed, especially on the pages of prominent figures or topics.
But sometimes the contentious material is couched in such a way that makes it difficult to prove untrue, which prolongs the process of getting it deleted.
In O'Loughlin's case, he got tired of the back and forth debates over the merits of the information on his profile and eventually asked Wikipedia to pull the plug.
He said the Wikipedia editors he spoke with indicated his profile was about to be deleted anyway, even if he hadn't complained.
"They had been on the point of removing it anyway (a) because they could see it was tendentious and really one-sided and (b) because I wasn't an important enough person to have a Wikipedia entry," he said with a self-deprecating laugh, "and I still am not."
A couple of weeks ago the Wikimedia Foundation - which oversees Wikipedia and other lesser known open-source projects like Wiktionary, Wikibooks and Wikinews - posted on its blog about media reports suggesting a major change was coming soon to the English version of Wikipedia, with a feature called Flagged Revisions.
That feature would require that contributions by new users on some pages be flagged for review by more veteran Wikipedia users.
Although the feature is being considered, it's not necessarily coming "in the very, very near future" and may not be the option Wikipedia embraces at all, said Jay Walsh, head of communications for the Wikimedia Foundation.
Another feature under consideration is a software add-on for Wikipedia called WikiTrust, which would give users information about the author of online information and how reliable that person is based on their history.
"We're researching (the features) and - along with a community of tens of thousands of volunteers, who are the people who in fact operate, build and maintain Wikipedia - we're ... seeing what the community thinks of them," Walsh said.
"They're going to try to break them, they're going to test them, they're going to see where they work and where they don't work."
The Flagged Revisions proposal has already been implemented on the German-version of Wikipedia, but Walsh said it would only act as a sort of cooling-off period for wannabe vandals.
They could still end up spoiling entries a few days after their sign up, after they're promoted to the status of more experienced users.
And those so-called experienced users, who would be called on to vet the edits of new users, wouldn't necessarily have any special credentials.
"Are you an expert if you've been an editor for four days? Maybe, maybe not, but what we're really looking at is people who have positive intent versus people who have clearly negative intent," Walsh explained.
"Not much is stopping somebody who has truly malicious intent from coming into Wikipedia and trying to damage some content," he added.
"People who want to be malicious, people who want to vandalize, tend to need that sort of reflex satisfaction of coming in and going, 'Oh I just did that, I just added a stupid word to a highly visible article.' These technologies are about lengthening that period of time so if someone wants to be a bit of a jerk, it's going to take a little bit longer, and in the vast majority of situations that actually mitigates the vandalism."
Peter J. Nicholson, president of the non-profit Council of Canadian Academies, said he's a big Wikipedia fan but users should have a healthy skepticism about everything they read on the site.
"If you really want to inform yourself on any subject that Wikipedia treats I think it's somewhat the responsibility of the user to follow the links and satisfy themselves as to what can be trusted and what can't," he said.
"I don't think there can be any guarantee of absolute integrity because, in fact, there's no guarantee of absolute integrity in any source of information," he added. "You'll always be dealing with some approximation of the truth."
http://telegraphjournal.canadaeast.com/magazine/article/793045