So the German site for Wikipedia has finally come into the 21st Century
and embraced content workflow as reported by cnet’s News.com:

Can German engineering fix Wikipedia?

Essentially, if you are anonymous, or have not been a member for some time, your edits will not go live until “approved” by another user. This, in its most basic sense, is workflow. While some would say this is long overdue, ie embracing some form of content filtering, other might point out that it breaks the basic model that have made wiki’s so popular in the first place; ie a flat publisher-less information bucket.

The danger facing Wikipedia is twofold, on the one hand the bigger they get, the more people will want to deface the site and emberass would-be foes. On the other hand, the more they try to introduce controls, the more they face the possibility of restricting the flow of content and becoming irrelevant.

A good example of the latter is of course the crown prince of irrelevance, dmoz.org. Why this site still exists puzzles me to no end. Dmoz, as you should know, is billed as the human edited search directory. But in order to join, you must be approved by an existing editor or meta (super editors), in a category that requires an editor. Now, that sounds fairly simple right? Wrong. Dmoz frowns on joining categories that are already stocked by editors, despite your experience in the area. Dmoz also frowns on you expecting an answer to your registration request, even after a few months (we are meant to know that the lack of email is a rejection). And the piece de resistance, multiple requests per year are also frowned upon. The same seems to be true for submitting a site, however as they are so backed up with work, it could take up to 18 months to have your site reviewed. If you submit more than once in 18 months? You guessed it, that’s frowned upon and probably will lead to your site getting banned. Yes, Dmoz people do do a lot of frowning.

So, I hope the picture is becoming clear. Imagine a year or so down the road with Wikipedia following the same general direction. Some articles will require vetting, others will not. Some new articles will stay in some purgatory while waiting for over-worked editors to approve the changes. Edits, thousands of thousands of edits to existing articles may never get approved. Soon enough, Wikipedia will become just as stale, and just as bad, as the online encyclopaedias it seeks to replace.

But it doesn’t have to be that way!

First off, the classic workflow will never work in a fluid environment like a wiki. Sure, on a small scale it could be doable, but just imaging the thousands of edits and creations happening at Wikipedia every day, every hour.

But control in itself is not bad, what you need though is better versioning and auto-rollbacks. Let me explain. Wiki’s work best because a user, any user, can make an edit or create something new. So your workflow is essentially one step. By introducing more steps, your not really a wikki anymore. However, what if a piece of content can be flagged for attention, just like a digg. With diggs, users are highlighting a piece of content that they want others to see. A Wikipedia user however would flag a piece of content so that it is picked up by an editor to review. The one big difference is that I would not recommend having this piece of functionality on each and every page. I think its a bad idea to start forcing popularity on what should be a flat index of knowledge. So the flags, I believe, should only be introduced on new articles, or items that have recently been edited. This way, the community have a chance to act as that second workflow step, well and truly in the open. Most edits/new articles will be fine, and once a certain threshold of positive flags have been received, the flag option will disappear.

In extreme cases, where a high amount of activity hits a certain article, the system will dynamically roll the it back to the previous version until it can be “approved” by an editor.

Lets look at two possible scenarios here:

1. An article is created that contains vulgar language or incorrect information.

• Users begin to visit the page.
• Users flag the item for being inappropriate.
• As the flags continue coming in for the new item, the system determines that the amount of flags has crossed its tolerance threshold considering the length of time the item has been live, as well as the length of time the author has been a member. The item is removed from the site.
• Item is held in a review queue awaiting to be validated by an editor.
• If the editor finds the item is inappropriate, the item is fully deleted and the username/email is banned.

2. An article is edited by a user which introduces information some users find offensive

• Users begin to visit the page once it has been updated.
• Some users find the addition offensive or incorrect, and flag the item to be inappropriate.
• Conversely, some users flag the edit as being correct or good.
• The system determines that the threshold of negative flags has been exceeded. It could either revert to the previous version, or flag the article itself as being under review.
• As the time limit and author experience threshold was not exceeded, the article is kept live and is tagged as under review. No further flags will be accepted.
• The editor could find the item appropriate which will remove the review flag from the article page.

Here is an example of what I’m thinking of:



definitions:

• dispute threshold: when the number of complaints passes a certain percentage, say 60% or 70%.
• age threshold: when the age of the article or edit/change passes a certain time, say 6 hours or 6 days.
• author threshold: when the time the author has been a member has passed a certain time, say 6 weeks or 6 months.

I don’t think either scenario would “break” Wikipedia. Additionally, it would also go a long way towards silencing the critics who feel that Wikipedia lacks the proper controls to be taken seriously as an encyclopaedia/information resource.