On October 9th an IP editor decided to update the list of casualties in this important battle of the American revolution.



This important information was finally reverted on the 17th after it received about 1700 page views

However, the information about the 400,154,874 wounded drummers remains in the article....(this will probably get reverted now....)

What else is in WP that nobody sees?

The fact that breakdown of dead and wounded is otherwise zero?

I have no idea why the American Revolution battle articles get so much abuse. The Battle of Bunker Hill article gets a lot of vandalism and controversial content changes like the Brandywine article.

Possibly some Brits want their colony back?

One of the odder byplays of WW II was the sequence where Roosevelt, the quintessential American, wanted Churchill, The Last Victorian, to give up any pretense to British colonialism. Churchill, of course, was horrified. But couldn't really say so clearly, since he was counting on one of Britain's former colonies, one they'd fought to keep and later fought to abuse, to pull his cookies out of the fire. The ironies of history!

It's probably because of frustrated American grade-school kids who come home from history class and make fun of whatever it was their teacher said in class.

There's still over 400,000,000 wounded drummers in that article...I guess nobody cares, huh?

(oh, and before you say "just fix it", I'm still banned over there...)

Schoolkids, maybe? I think most vandalism comes from them.

hah, beaten as i typed

Sorry about that!

It looks like Risker reads this board, since she fixed this...

It gets rather pointless to "fix" something only for it to be broken or vandalized again and again and again. I have done that many times on Wikipedia and eventually you begin to feel like Sisyphus rolling that boulder up the hill. It gets tiring and ridiculous.

Kudos to Risker, but it's a war of never-ending attrition that no one can win.

If it's continually fixed, then 99.9% of readers see an unvandalized article. If it isn't fixed, then 100% of readers see a vandalized article. I think that's a pretty big difference.

Of course, you can't win the war in the sense of extinguishing vandalism once and for all. You fight the war in terms of keeping articles clean for the maximum amount of time and deterring vandalism to the greatest possible extent. In that sense, Wikipedia does OK right now. I rarely come across an article in a vandalized state (when browsing and not deliberately patrolling), and when I do it's normally in a very obscure corner of the encyclopedia. It was much more common to come across vandalized articles back in 2004/05.

But it's boring and demoralizing to keep reverting vandalism, which is one of the reasons many people leave the Wiki-nam War.

I'm still trying to figure out why just reverting makes people admins. "You just revert vandals all day? Have you no life?" I would say at a Vandal Fighter's RFA and quickly be blocked for incivility. It's one thing to revert vandalism as you come across it as a reader or article writer, but reverting just for reverting? Slightly off-topic, but it is a puzzlement.

Wasn't there a study about how many number of people notice vandalism if it lasted X number of time?

I don't find it odd -- it is consistent with FDR's quintessentially American world-view. We know about his conversations with Churchill thanks to his son Elliot, who recounted them in As I Saw It. If FDR had lived a bit longer, we might be in an entirely different world now -- Truman kissed Churchill's ass, and the re-colonization began, along with the requisite colonial wars, some of which are still active.

But WMF have a technological fix for this already, and de:wp uses it... sighted revisions. I wish en:wp would start using it, and soon. Sighted revisions mean vandalism has practically no public effect. Imagine how much less tagging there would be if it wasn't visible unless approved to be visible.

Not to mention the problems it would solve on drive-by BLP edits.

Do you have any idea why EN:WP hasn't implemented this feature, Lar? It would make a lot of sense on any number of levels....

I have no idea why. I have tried to determine why, but as you know, it is sometimes very difficult to even trace the tortuous routes that policy discussions on en:wp take, sometimes. Last I checked, discussion had happened but it had petered out without a consensus clear enough to convince developers to enable it here. I would be astoundingly delighted to find out I was wrong, and it is in fact in train.

This is one thing where, regrettably, one can't just make policy by going forth and doing it, a consensus is needed (and some sketch of a process for deciding what is sighted and what is not) before the devs will turn it on. Can't say as I blame them. Absent a process for approval it would be sheer chaos. Perhaps one would arise spontaneously but I have my doubts.

Oddly, I suspect you already knew most or all this answer but were just asking for the record. So, since I think there are those who suspect that I do like to hear myself talk, I am happy to oblige you in answering.

Before you can tell you have a "consensus," you FIRST need a consensus as to just what a "consensus" is. And since that's a recursive paradox, I'd say you're pretty much screwed. So, what's the big mystery on why you're screwed?

The reason flagged revisions is live already on de.wikipedia.org is that they don't actually work by consensus on that Wikipedia. Being Germans, they work by Das war ein Befehl! Which means that somebody or other, that they all thought was in authority (probably Moeller), told them to do it, and so they just did it.

With the sighted revisions, can't the WP Community just try a trial run? Pick a random sample of articles and let Wikipedians see what it is all about? Then decide in X amount of time whether to move out of the trial stage, expand the trial stage, or forget about it entirely?

Well, that was discussed already. The whole thing has been discussed countless times. We all know that the decision making process at WP is completely fucked. Whenever someone tries to kick off the sighted revisions thing again, a bunch of people turn up to discuss it, but as they're discussing it other people keep turning up who don't read the previous conversations and just post whatever, sucking up the time of the people who were there at the beginning who have to explain everything again. This happens all the time on Wikipedia. Just when you think you're coming to a consensus someone else will turn up and you have to have the whole thing over again because people won't believe that you have a consensus unless they personally agree with you.

They already have tons of pages of proposed processes and policies for sighted revisions. An entire bureaucracy for something that isn't even functional yet. In the end I think it will be one person, probably someone on the board or someone like gmaxwell or kat walsh who will just decide it should happen. The community shouldn't be involved in the decision at all, they are too dysfunctional and self-obsessed to come to a rational decision.

That's a fix to Everyking's problem, but it isn't a fix to "the Joy's" problem.

Although, maybe if Everyking's problem were solved, enough people would stop worrying about vandalism that "the Joy's" problem would become more obvious more quickly.

By the way, de:wp's original implementation of sighted revisions didn't fix the problem. I'm not sure if they ever turned off "autopatrol" or not.

You are talking about scientific experimentation with the Norms laid down by the Ancients. Surely this is forbidden! I cannot imagine what prompted you to such a fundamentally subversive idea.

Imagine if we did this in society? We'd come up with some social program, and if we couldn't decide if version A or B was better, we'd apply one or the other, at random, to neighboring matching states (or similar areas of large enough size to keep too many people from voting with their feet) and then compare them. Then do a cross-over switch and compare THOSE results, according to some pre-determined metric.

The result would, of course, be chaos. Everybody would complain.

Everyone knows that the proper way to run a society is to have a couple of people run for office, on the grounds that they somehow know what do to, without ever having run the experiment. Then we vote for whoever sounds most convincing, or looks the best on TV. Following which, everybody gets what only the majority of them deserve.

On Wikipedia there's no voting per se, because there's no ID-checking of the type you need to avoid ballot box stuffing in a democracy. So, everyone knows the only way to change things on WP, is just to see what direction they sort of drift in, on their own. And hope.

Yes, this is sort of like what happens when two people go walking together, and each one thinks the other one is leading. The direction they drift in, is generally downhill. But what else did you really expect?

Perhaps one reason why FlaggedRevs was rolled out on dewiki before enwiki was so the extension would get a thorough testing on a "large" wiki before being rolled out to "the largest" wiki. (They already tested it thoroughly on the much smaller "labs" wiki before rolling it out on dewiki.)

FlaggedRevs has been live long enough on dewiki now, though, that I think we can be sure it's ready for primetime on enwiki now. I hope a sysadmin turns it on soon; it's sorely needed.

Just be happy that this article doesn't say anything about hobbits.

The community really gets a bad rap--yeah, it can't decide how to fix its problems, but that's only because it isn't allowed to use the necessary mechanism. The community should just hold a policy vote on this issue, along with any secondary issues involved, and then implement it if the vote is successful. No more "voting is evil".

Remember though, it is not just turning on flagged revisions, it is implementing features on top of that to say that you only get to see unflagged revisions by some positive action. What are the rules that would be set for unsigned in users, or even signed in users? How does this affect talk pages, with ready access to far more scurrilous claims that can be kept out of the articles - I have heard it said here that people turn to talk pages to get the background?

Ya know what WP is a good reference for? Anime series. I used the WP articles in my personal blog posts about anime, because there aren't any decent summaries of those cartoons anywhere else online (that I know of). (part 1, part 2)



Good example: look at my article about the KT66 tube. Been there for four years, barely touched since then except for a few tiny changes of wording or punctuation. But then, in June of this year, someone named Pol098 decided that wholesale, trivial changes had to be made.

Flagged revisions my ass.

Didn't the Battle of Brandywine involve Hobbits fighting female Ents? Or was that the Battle of Brandyriver?

I think people are thinking of Bywater.

No, it's when the female Ents of the Old Forest attacked the Hobbits of Buckland.

I wonder if 400,154,874 drummers died in that battle? They may have. I've never read The Silmarillion (and few people have or can).

Still, the only way to stop the kind of vandalism the Brandywine article gets is to have some form of control over what edits get through. I do not see Wikipedia doing that unless there are overseeing editors with subject expertise and technical functions like approved revisions to allow some handle on the situation. That would require radical change in the structure and culture of Wikipedia, however.

Since a lot of this vandalism comes from naughty schoolchildren, why not have a policy to ban school IPs? Schoolchildren should not be editing Wikipedia during educational time and wasting my tax dollars. They can edit from public libraries or from home if they so desire.

That already is pretty much an unofficial policy. When admins see vandalism coming from school IPs, they usually block the IPs six months to a year.

The Brandywine River separates Buckland from the rest of the Shire.

http://www.shirepost.com/ShireMapLarge.html

Of course Wikipedia gives it the weird, less-used elvish name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baranduin

I don't think there were female Ents in the old forest. One of the problems the Ents had was loss of the entwives (wye=woman), who had gone to another place to protect aggricultural plants. The male Ents had lost contact with them by the time of the Lord of the Rings, and there's a hint that the reason we don't have Ents today is they never found them.

Tolkein didn't have much regard for females, and in his books, his critters don't either.