I was happy to see the news recently that Wikipedia would be changing its policies to limit changes on articles about living people.
Under the new policy, according to the New York Times, an experienced editor will review changes to articles about living people before the article can go live. As Michael Snow, a Seattle lawyer who is chairman of the Wikimedia board, the nonprofit board that oversees Wikipedia put it, “We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks.”
The policy is a huge change for an organization that prided itself on letting anyone be a contributor. But with 60 million Americans visiting Wikipedia every month, it’s a necessary change.
The editorial policy, called “flagged revisions,” is already in effect for some famous people like Britney Spears and President Obama and the German Wikipedia version has had this editorial policy for all its content for the past year.
As The Times points out, it’s not difficult to insert false information into Wikipedia right now. In January, for example, someone inserted information stating that Senators Edward M. Kennedy and Robert C. Byrd had died.
I remember watching Stephen Colbert of “The Colbert Report” gleefully tell his audience that he planned to solve the problem of elephants being endangered by getting everyone in his audience to triple the number of elephants. Wikipedia eventually locked out users from tampering with the entry but it convinced me. The prank was a great argument for mistrusting information on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia can be useful for background information or to provide original sources since much of the information is footnoted but I would never use it as a primary source of information.
I hope that Wikipedia eventually decides to have editors review all information posted on Wikipedia. Until that happens, I will continue to take information on Wikipedia with a huge grain of salt. It’s a good place to find original sources of information or get background information but even with these changes it’s still suspect.
Wikipedia image from commons.wikimedia.org
