Wikipedia institutes new editing policies for certain articles

Today CNN is report­ing that Wikipedia has added a layer of over­sight to arti­cles about liv­ing peo­ple. The hope is that the extra layer of edit­ing on these arti­cles will help iron out inac­cu­ra­cies in these arti­cles, which often appear as the first search result for famous people’s names.

The new fea­ture, called “flagged revi­sions,” requires that an expe­ri­enced edi­tor signs off on changes to an arti­cle before it goes pub­lic, the New York Times reported. The flagged revi­sion sys­tem has been in place on the German ver­sion of Wikipedia for a year.

While there is already an edit­ing sys­tem in place that can fix some inac­cu­ra­cies, it doesn’t always keep up with user demand. As John Abell at Wired points out, the Wikipedia has become a source of infor­ma­tion when news is break­ing. When Michael Jackson died, his Wikipedia entry drew six mil­lion views. As fast as the exist­ing edit­ing sys­tem is, some inac­cu­ra­cies (whether caused by igno­rance or mal­ice) per­sist long enough to get noticed.

“We are no longer at the point that it is accept­able to throw things at the wall and see what sticks,” said Michael Snow, a lawyer in Seattle who is the chair­man of the Wikimedia board. “There was a time prob­a­bly when the com­mu­nity was more for­giv­ing of things that were inac­cu­rate or fudged in some fash­ion — whether sim­ply mis­un­der­stood or an author had some ax to grind. There is less tol­er­ance for that sort of prob­lem now.” (via New York Times)

Wikipedia edi­tor David Gerard, in a BBC inter­view that included Guardian tech writer Kevin Anderson, said that one of the con­cerns about the new edi­to­r­ial poli­cies is that it will take away from Wikipedia’s tra­di­tional user expe­ri­ence — post some­thing and see it live imme­di­ately. There will no doubt be some delay, he told the BBC. The hope is that the delay isn’t too long and that peo­ple don’t get turned off by it. That’s some­thing that will bear fur­ther study as time goes on, he said.

“It is a test,” said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told the Times. “We will be inter­ested to see all the ques­tions raised. How long will it take for some­thing to be approved? Will it take a cou­ple of min­utes, days, weeks?”

The con­cern is that flagged revi­sions vio­late the open spirit of Wikipedia, as the New York Times says:

Although Wikipedia has pre­vented anony­mous users from cre­at­ing new arti­cles for sev­eral years now, the new flag­ging sys­tem crosses a psy­cho­log­i­cal Rubicon. It will divide Wikipedia’s con­trib­u­tors into two classes — expe­ri­enced, trusted edi­tors, and every­one else — alter­ing Wikipedia’s implicit notion that every­one has an equal right to edit entries.

That right was never absolute, and the pol­icy changes are an exten­sion of ear­lier strug­gles between con­trol and openness.

“The phi­los­o­phy of a free-for-all was always a lit­tle bit of an exag­ger­a­tion in the press,” Kevin Anderson, a tech­nol­ogy writer for The Guardian, told the BBC. “Naturally hier­ar­chies really set­tle out in these things. It’s not to say that the cream floats to the top, but in a lot of ways, the most active peo­ple float to the top.”

Wales told the Times that, essen­tially, with great power comes great respon­si­bil­ity: “We have really become part of the infra­struc­ture of how peo­ple get infor­ma­tion,” Wales said. “There is a seri­ous respon­si­bil­ity we have.”

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