[WikiEN-l] Neo-nazis to attack wikipedia

Tue Feb 8 18:58:55 UTC 2005

Tony Sidaway wrote:
> Karl A. Krueger said:
> [...]
> 
>>The problem here is that it depends on someone listing the article as a
>>controversial article on some other page.  Presently, I suspect there
>>are a lot more edit wars than ever get listed on WP:RFC or any other
>>repository for problems.  Moreover, I think we might not even know
>>where many of those problems are, because waiting for people to report
>>them publicly is no guarantee they ever get reported.
>>
> 
> Yes.  Well, a way around this is to identify templates that are highly
> likely to be associated with an edit war, and put those templates into a
> category, which would result in controversial articles appearing in the
> category.  Using the same mechanism on the category would give you another
> view of possibly explosive articles.
> Wikis are designed to be open and flexible so it's unlikely that any
> single mechanism will ever be able to identify all controversial articles
> without fail. Adopting the UNIX standard of "works in most cases" is good
> enough, because other users will adopt other methods to identify the
> controversial articles. --~~~~

The real problem that arises, I think, is in new articles.  If someone 
from, say, the Stormfront crew creates a new article loaded with bias 
from day one, it's entirely possible it my fly in under radar (as 
'twere) for quite some time without being noticed.

--
Chad