Today’s NYT take an in-depth look at Wikipendia. A major topic is the methodology for monitoring content:
The administrators are all volunteers, most of them in their 20’s. They are in constant communication — in real-time online chats, on “talk” pages connected to each entry and via Internet mailing lists. The volunteers share the job of watching for vandalism, or what Mr. Wales called “drive-by nonsense.” Customized software — written by volunteers — also monitors changes to articles.
Mr. Wales calls vandalism to the encyclopedia “a minimal problem, a dull roar in the background.” Yet early this year, amid heightened publicity about false information on the site, the community decided to introduce semi-protection of some articles. The four-day waiting period is meant to function something like the one imposed on gun buyers.
update (June 21, 2006): Jimmy Wales responds to the article: The New York Times gets it exactly backwards
Comments
@ 08:15
Hi Judy,
Now also a poster for SmartMobs and I noticed this article in the NYTimes today harkens back to a complaint that some have raised about Wikipedia - that it had died (at least in spirit) when it started to limit what could appear. I came down on the side of having some protections if only to stop comments that are clearly untrue from being written into someone’s biography.
“Death of Wikipedia” post http://www.webmetricsguru.com/2006/05/the_death_of_wikipedia.html
Glad to be on board and I’m actually reaing SmartMobs right now yet I feel that I have lived SmartMobs over the last 7 years (we all have).
@ 06:24
The problem here is that both Nicholas Carr and the New York Times got the simple basic facts wrong. Far from starting to close articles from editing, the semi-protection policy was designed to open the articles to more editing.
It has been exhausting for me the past few days trying to set the story straight. So far, the New York Times offers nothing to me other than that I should try to write a letter to the editor. Ok, I did that. But also I am trying to reach out directly in as many relevant places as possible so that people can understand that the New York Times blew it in a big way on this story.