[Wikipedia-l] Meta-tag filters bad, Sifter good

Fri Nov 15 07:27:21 UTC 2002

"Filters" based on meta tags are utterly useless in a world-editable website 
like Wikipedia. Parents wouldn't be able to trust that 5 seconds before 
Junior accessed the Tigger article that Goat Man hadn't replaced the article 
with an obscene story about Mickey, Minnie and Pluto with external links to 
the goat sex and other similar pictures under every clickable link. If I were 
the Goat Man I would specifically target "G" tagged articles. 

IMO the only effective way to filter is to have humans hand select specific 
article versions and have those versions automatically uploaded into another 
website that is not world editable. One click and you are done. Hm, sounds 
like Larry's Sifter project (the software being developed is GPLd so there is 
no reason why there can't be many Sifters - each with a different focus -- 
but each Sifter project would have to respect Wikipedia's policies and 
conventions to use the easy upload feature). 

We should face the fact that since Wikipedia is a wiki, that is has always 
been and will always be, a work in progress. I don't see anything wrong with 
that at all if there are stable Wikipedia article versions that people can 
put some trust into. Under the Sifter plan, Wikipedia will simply be a common 
resource that all the Sifter projects use and do their editing on.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

Free Software analogy: Wikipedia is like CVS. Yes you can compile the raw 
untested code that somebody wrote 10 minutes ago and run it on your computer 
but don't complain if it makes your hard-drive spin backwards and causes your 
computer to catch fire. Sifter can be viewed more like a stable and 
pre-compiled release that is deemed functional and mostly bug-free by 
somebody with a reputation on the line.