Wikipedia Gets More Editors

Filed in archive Wikis on September 7, 2009

Wikipedia is becoming just a little less freewheeling and crowdsourced, according to a recent article in the NY Times. The eight year old, user-generated online encyclopedia has decided to make it harder for users to make changes to articles about living people.

Officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit in San Francisco that governs Wikipedia, say that within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.

The new feature, called "flagged revisions," will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved - or in Wikispeak, flagged - it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia's servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.

Wikipedia is a fairly well trusted source in the public mind even though anyone can create and account and make revisions to a Wikipedia article. Political campaigns in the past have seen their candidate's biographies revised during the election cycle. And vandals recently change West Virginia Senator Robert C. Byrd's Wikipedia entry so that it falsely reported that he had died.