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Idea from Citizendium: list of corrections

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Re: [WikiEN-l] Widespread...

David Gerard

28 Mar 2008 28 Mar '08

9:43 p.m.

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Proposals/Self-Correction_Policy Hmmm. I can see it being nice, I can see it being unmanageable and full of noise. Your thoughts? What would English Wikipedia do with something like this? - d.

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Mathias Schindler

28 Mar 28 Mar

10:04 p.m.

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 10:43 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Hmmm. I can see it being nice, I can see it being unmanageable and full of noise. Your thoughts? What would English Wikipedia do with something like this?

If any, I could imagine to try to compile such lists of corrections automatically. I am very interested to see if CZ will come across the problem of defining what constitutes an error (opposed to a misleading ommission, an outdated information, a correct but unsourced information or an information that was correct but was forced to be removed for privacy law reasons). Mathias

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Eugene van der Pijll

10:13 p.m.

David Gerard schreef:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Proposals/Self-Correction_Policy Hmmm. I can see it being nice, I can see it being unmanageable and full of noise. Your thoughts? What would English Wikipedia do with something like this?

The version history is our corrections list. It's not workable, I think. It is only viable if corrections are the exception, something to be ashamed of (and therefore, by showing the corrections, you show that you are a responsible source). But for wikis, corrections are fundamental in the evolution of an article; corrections is what our articles are made of. The proper place to note that you've corrected something is in the edit summary; it would be nice to be able to mark an edit as "Major", so that you could build an automatic correction list, but as long as anyone is able to edit WP, that will not be possible. Of course, separate correction lists would be great opportunities for edit wars. So it could be very entertaining. At Citizendium, it could work, because they have approved articles. They can use these correction lists to summarize the changes from one version to the other. As there are often months between approved versions, this would not increase the workload too much. Larry Sanger's proposal says they should be made for all unapproved articles as well, which I'm very sceptical about. However, it's a good thing if they would try this. The above is just my opinion; it would be good if Citizendium could provide us with experimental results. Eugene

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Risker

11:51 p.m.

On 28/03/2008, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Proposals/Self-Correction_Policy Hmmm. I can see it being nice, I can see it being unmanageable and full of noise. Your thoughts? What would English Wikipedia do with something like this? - d.

An interesting idea, but I cannot see it working on Wikipedia. A good chunk of the correcting that happens relates to BLP problems, which clearly we don't want to put into a nice big list. Probably our History tab serves the function as well, as it gives times and dates of edits and can be used to determine how long a particular segment of information has remained in an article. Having a separate list makes more sense in a restricted editing environment, but it does not seem workable on our open editing project, at least not until all edits are prescreened for validity. Even with stable versions, I don't see that happening for a very long time. Risker

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James Farrar

29 Mar 29 Mar

12:08 a.m.

My thoughts? It's just Larry Sanger finding an excuse to take more pot-shots at Wikipedia... On 28/03/2008, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Proposals/Self-Correction_Policy Hmmm. I can see it being nice, I can see it being unmanageable and full of noise. Your thoughts? What would English Wikipedia do with something like this? - d. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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Thomas Dalton

12:15 a.m.

An interesting idea, but not something that's practical or desirable for all articles. If we list corrections I fear we'll give the impression that the current article is guaranteed to be error-free (that makes no sense, but I fear it's what will happen). If, with the new FlaggedRevisions extension that's on its way, we end up with a "fact checked" option (under whatever name), we could list corrections made to versions which have been declared correct by someone, but we certainly shouldn't try and do it for all articles.

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Stephen Bain

1:09 a.m.

On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 8:43 AM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Proposals/Self-Correction_Policy Hmmm. I can see it being nice, I can see it being unmanageable and full of noise. Your thoughts? What would English Wikipedia do with something like this?

Any such scheme on a wiki of this size would likely be immediately unmanageable (and can you just imagine all the new fights over what gets listed as a factual error?). However, see the tracking page for error correction following the December 2005 Nature study: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_peer_review/Nature_December… Here there were no fights and no manageability problems because we were running off an externally compiled list. It was made possible because Nature released the list of errors that they identified, but we should endeavour to do this for all external peer reviews: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_peer_review -- Stephen Bain stephen.bain(a)gmail.com

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David Goodman

3:08 a.m.

At Citizendium, or wikipedia, I think this is unnecessary complication as applied to unapproved articles-- they edit on a wiki, so they can make corrections as we go. The earlier versions are by definition working versions that have been supplemented or corrected. For any system with approved articles, one does need a system of making corrections. This is one of the reasons I''m rather skeptical about such schemes--they grow very cumbersome. this proposal is a good illustration. Less talking about how to correct and more correction is what is needed. I urge people not to look just at the proposal , but the discussion. On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 9:09 PM, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 8:43 AM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Proposals/Self-Correction_Policy Hmmm. I can see it being nice, I can see it being unmanageable and full of noise. Your thoughts? What would English Wikipedia do with something like this?

Any such scheme on a wiki of this size would likely be immediately unmanageable (and can you just imagine all the new fights over what gets listed as a factual error?). However, see the tracking page for error correction following the December 2005 Nature study: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_peer_review/Nature_December… Here there were no fights and no manageability problems because we were running off an externally compiled list. It was made possible because Nature released the list of errors that they identified, but we should endeavour to do this for all external peer reviews: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_peer_review -- Stephen Bain stephen.bain(a)gmail.com _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

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Ian Woollard

4:58 a.m.

On 29/03/2008, David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote:

For any system with approved articles, one does need a system of making corrections. This is one of the reasons I''m rather skeptical about such schemes--they grow very cumbersome. this proposal is a good illustration.

I agree, but I'm not sure that they're not more or less inevitable. Perhaps the wikipedia bureaucracy around at least some approved articles will eventually grow to the point where you don't correct the article, instead you raise a bug report and an approved editor will correct the problem? I could see that happening *eventually*, on very well established and/or particularly contentious articles.

-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

-- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.

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David Goodman

3:32 p.m.

There's already an form of that: "editprotected" see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Editprotected On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 12:58 AM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 29/03/2008, David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote:

For any system with approved articles, one does need a system of making corrections. This is one of the reasons I''m rather skeptical about such schemes--they grow very cumbersome. this proposal is a good illustration.

I agree, but I'm not sure that they're not more or less inevitable. Perhaps the wikipedia bureaucracy around at least some approved articles will eventually grow to the point where you don't correct the article, instead you raise a bug report and an approved editor will correct the problem? I could see that happening *eventually*, on very well established and/or particularly contentious articles.

--

David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

-- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

-- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

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participants (9)

David Gerard
David Goodman
Eugene van der Pijll
Ian Woollard
James Farrar
Mathias Schindler
Risker
Stephen Bain
Thomas Dalton