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August 25, 2009, 10:35 AM ET
New Editing Process Seeks to Improve Wikipedia's Accuracy
Students citing Wikipedia in papers about living people can feel a little more secure about the online encyclopedia's accuracy.
Copying an effort that was tested in Wikipedia's German version, a new feature called "flagged revisions" will not allow posts on living people to be updated until "an experienced volunteer editor" approves the changes, The New York Times reports.
"We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks," Michael Snow, chair of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees, told the Times. "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."
The change comes after several inaccurate edits were made in articles on the Web site. In May, a college student in Dublin successfully added a bogus quotation to a post on the French composer Maurice Jarre just a few hours after his death. The quotation was picked up by several blogs and newspapers.
Jimmy Wales, the site’s founder, has in the past wavered about Wikipedia's place in academe. Although he discourages college students from relying on Wikipedia for their papers, he had hinted that the change was coming and could help content become more reliable.
Faculty members, will this new editing process make Wikipedia acceptable as a source in papers?
Comments
1. benjamin_geer - August 25, 2009 at 03:26 pm
I think it will depend on how the volunteer editors are selected, and how good a job they end up doing in practice. Wikipedia will have to earn credibility by producing results, like any academic publisher. And this process will have to be adopted for all articles, not just articles about living people. The same sorts of problems occur in articles about all sorts of controversial topics.
2. kosboot - August 25, 2009 at 04:45 pm
To my mind, this policy change is prompted by complaints from living people, and not from any desire to improve the overall standards of Wikipedia.
One of the things that could improve Wikipedia was if they disallowed anonymous contributions. Once you have registered, more should be done to verify who you are.
3. mselliem - August 25, 2009 at 06:31 pm
Postsecondary students should not be using Widipedia under any circumstances. It's one thing to get a bit of background information to help a search along, but to use it as a reference when the reliability of even some of the information remains unclear goes completely against the grain of what a postsecondary education is all about. We continue to have too many students who have difficulty distinguishing between good information and bad, biased or dispassionate, to allow them to consider Jimmy Wales' web site as a valuable resource.
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