Academics and others have long objected to the writing principles fostered by Wikipedia. Now, for the first time, the online encyclopedia is considering restricting the edits that users can make.

After a Wikipedia user edited the site to say that both U.S. Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd had died after an inaugural luncheon earlier this week, the managers of the site are considering changing the process, which currently allows almost unlimited edits by users. The system being considered is known internally as Flagged Revisions, according to a CNET article. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is quoted as saying, “This nonsense would have been 100 percent prevented by Flagged Revisions.”

Under the system being proposed, some number of known, trusted editors would be able to edit content and immediately publish those changes, just as all Wikipedia users are today. All other user edits would be placed in a queue for submission to the trusted editor group. Until reviewed and approved by a trusted editor, the changes would not appear on the site.

Apparently the German edition of Wikipedia has been using a form of the Flagged Revisions system for several months. Under the German process, all articles go into the queue to be looked at by a trusted editor. This has apparently led to a delay of up to three weeks in getting some new articles and edits published. By adding the immediate publication of new articles and edits by known, trusted editors, this delay could be shortened or eliminated.

Wales say “Our version should show very minimal delays (less than one week, hopefully a lot less), because we will only be using it on a subset of articles, the boundaries of which can be adjusted over time to manage the backlog.” Wales says the the new system gives the site the flexibility to cover breaking news stories quickly while avoiding some of the shenanigans it’s seen in the past.

Ironically, this proposed change by Wikipedia comes at the precise time that one of its biggest critics, Encyclopedia Britannica, has been considering allowing user edits to its online version. Presumably, these two new trends have a chance of intersecting at some ideal point, allowing both sites to have relatively spontaneous edits while still maintaining some academic control of the information being presented. That intersection sounds like the best of both worlds.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, January 24th, 2009 at 8:53 pm under Internet, Open source.

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
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