User talk:Bodnotbod/David Gerard on Radio 5 Live (flagged revisions)
"5 live Drive" transcript - broadcast 25th August 2009.
Wikipedia is changing the way people contribute to their pages. The online encyclopedia used to allow anyone to edit their pages, but now certain pages about living people or major organisations will have to be approved by an editor. There are some Wikipedia followers who are up in arms about this: let's speak to David Gerard, he's a media volunteer for Wikipedia. First of all what's a 'media volunteer' exactly, David?
It means I do a lot of press for Wikipedia but I'm a volunteer, I'm not actually an employee. I mean basically it's all volunteers all the way down, there's just a few staff who run the website.
Yeah. So it seems that ethos, which is something Wikipedia prided itself on, is changing.
No, not really. Basically the flagged revisions thing, which we first announced a few years ago when we thought about doing something like this to increase the quality of things... "approved editor" could mean anyone who's been around for, say, a month or so or a few months - we haven't worked out that detail yet - but we're talking about lots and lots of people. They've already put flagged revisions in place on the German Wikipedia so we have some experience to go on. What we're talking about here is a change on the English Wikipedia.
But why do it at all? Because up til now, even for those pages where it is possibly highly litigious, somebody who goes into a living person's page and fiddle faddles around with it, the Wikipedia community is extraordinary: they don't leave it there very long, they jump on it and correct it very Quickly.
Yeah. Articles about living people are special because you can cause real damage to a real living person in real time, because if they're minorly notable the first hit on their name on Google will be Wikipedia about them. So we've had strong rules in place for a few years now, ever since we realised "oh! Actually we're quite famous! We need a bit of responsibility...". I mean this is a community feeling, that as a community we have a responsibility to make sure it's right and not wrong, it's really important.
So it's not a fear of litigation?
No. No, it's because it's wrong [laughs]. Wrong is bad and it's actually is damaging to people and that's the wrong thing to do.
As a community, those who have given a lot of their time for nothing - as you say - to Wikipedia, are they all with you?
Not all. A lot of people do fear that it will slow the encyclopedia down. The "instance" thing is very important to why people volunteer. As I say, the German Wikipedia's tried it. They use it on a lot wider range of articles, and often the queue to have edits allowed was days in some places and that's just not acceptable. What we're doing is limiting it to the most troubling articles: living people ones, and you can be sure there'll be a huge number of people watching to see what happens. We don't know when this will go into effect. It'll be probably several weeks. We've currently got a test set up where we're seeing how it all works and working out the fine details. We're taking it all very slowly. The "instance" thing is important but also not doing damaging things that actually hurt people with bad information is also important.
Really very interesting, thank you very much. That is David Gerard.