Wikipedia to crack down on celebrity Wikideaths Wikipedia is preparing a program to combat the leading cause of premature celebrity Wikideath by requiring "experienced volunteer editors" to sign off on changes to certain articles. The Wikimedia Foundation has said that in coming weeks it will introduce a two-month trial of "flagged revisions," intended to lessen the impact …
...the WikiPolice have official powers now. There are some people who are so overly protective of the articles to which they have contributed (note I choose not to say *their* articles) that they literally revert every single edit, whether it improves the readability or factual content or not. IMHO it is these people that are the problem with wikipedia, yet they seem to be showered with high-school awards from the wiki foundation!
> "Under the system, new or unknown users would be required to have their article alterations vetted before they become viewable to the public."
I think you meant: "Under the system, everyone will have to conform to the official group-think".
Ah, Wikipedia - the encyclopedia that anyone can edit - as long as they don't differ from what's already there.
@Matt: Definitely agree. For every 1 writer of wikipedia there are 10,000 readers. For the so-called "rights" of those 1 writers, 10,000 peoples "rights" get compromised. (yeah, yeah, everyone one knows that wikis could be wrong - goto brit encyclopedia for the correct info.)
People will argue back that this police-free rules are what made wikipedia. Well dudes, as a product evolves, the needs change and the changed needs creates new rules. Need of the hour 10 years back was policing free, public created knowledge database. Now that database is there.. the need is to protect the sanctity of it. Funny thing is - people who advocate policing free speech also are advocates of the "winds of change"... (but when winds change on them - they can't seem to embrace the change).
Phew... didn't know I had this in me. Apologies if I hurt any feelings. Paris, coz she would stage her own wikideath.
I actually think this is quite a good idea. From what I've gathered, "new" users whose updates aren't auto-accepted are those who joined less than 3 days before the edit. It seems fairly clear that that will stop most opportunist pranksters, since registering is too much of an effort.
But, I doubt this will work, for a couple of reasons:
- it introduces a tonne of extra work for moderators, who won't have time to vet all the changes, and as such
- there's a concurrency issue. If two 'new' users make changes to the same page, what if those changes affect each other? This issue was of course there before, but on a much lower scale.
Matt's prediction: further changes to come.
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