Guardians at the Wikipedia Gate
Posted by: Rebecca Vnuk
I have a love-hate relationship with Wikipedia. The hate part has to do with the unstable “everyone is an editor” aspect of information on the site, so I was interested to see an article in today’s New York Times about how Wikipedia will soon begin to impose more control over articles about living people.
Once the new system, called flagged revisions, is put in place, only registered, trusted users will be able to make edits that will go live immediately. Edits made by other contributors will be held back until one of the trusted users has signed off on them. Another difference–registered users will be able to see and edit the most recent version of a page, but users who are not logged in will only see the validated version.
The question of greater editorial control has been under discussion for some time, and German Wikipedia has been using flagged revisions as a test case for more than a year (resulting in a backlog that is typically three weeks long). The push towards flagging gained momentum when Wikipedia pages for Senators Kennedy and Byrd were altered to claim they had died after leaving President Obama’s inaugural luncheon last January. Although these alterations only appeared on the site for a few minutes before they were fixed, that was long enough for the Washington Post to catch them.
August 25th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
I read the article this morning, too. I even considered blogging about it, but I’m glad you did. I love Wikipedia, despite its (sometimes) unreliability. I’m glad the Wikipedia editors are exerting more editorial control, despite the fact that Wikipedia then becomes less of an encyclopedia that everyone can contribute to on relatively equal terms. I guess I’d rather see the world’s largest encyclopedia be more authoritative rather than more democratic. I use Wikipedia frequently, most recently last night to look up the photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper. The entry compared favorably with Cooper’s bio on the Pace Wildenstein website. Each complemented the other.