Vandals prompt Wikipedia to ponder editing changes
Updated
Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the internet, attracting about 6 million visitors a day.
The site allows users to revise and edit in real time, but its accessibility also makes it a soft target for the bored and the malicious.
In one case, a vandal bestowed former treasurer Peter Costello with the nickname "Captain Smirk", but in a more serious case last week, two US senators were reported dead - Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd.
"Kennedy suffered a seizure at a luncheon following the Barack Obama presidential inauguration on January 20, 2009. He was removed in a wheelchair and died shortly after," the Wikipedia entry read.
A similar error was made on the Wikipedia entry for Senator Byrd.
Wikipedia says both erroneous entries were fixed within minutes, and admits its policy on allowing anyone to edit means it is more easily vandalised or susceptible to unchecked information.
It is proposing "flagged revisions" that would require trusted users to approve edits by first time or anonymous users.
"Basically to allow logged out users, which is probably most users, to see the most recent approved version and for logged in users to see the most recent version, which includes unapproved edits," explained Wikimedia's Australian president, Brianna Laugher.
"The proposal is just for a trial and only for articles which are considered biographies of living people, so it's not for all of the English Wikipedia."
Proposal criticised
Ms Laugher said the edits would be approved by a set of users in the community, and "it would be a community-driven process".
She says the proposal would increase access to the site.
"At the moment the only tool that we have for biographies that are being hit by vandalism is protection, or semi-protection and that stops either logged out users or all users from editing such articles," she said.
"Whereas being able to have flagged revisions on an article would mean that we could take off that protection and anybody again could edit the article."
But one of the site's 2,000 global administrators, Andrew Owens, says the proposal will fail because it goes against what the site stands for.
"Essentially you would be saying that particular editors would have control over what was being said and it may well be that they're making errors," he said.
"You've basically got a situation where you need to find a balance between the needs of the encyclopedia, which would be about containing neutral reliable information that people can trust, and the needs of the editing community, which basically means that you're not including some views and censoring others, you know just because they haven't been on the encyclopedia long enough."
Online vandalism
Professor Julian Thomas from Swinburne University's Social Research Institute says biography hackers are becoming more common.
"Kanye West had his Gmail and Twitter and MySpace accounts broken into," he said.
Professor Thomas says there is no obvious solution to counter online vandalism.
"I'm not sure that it'll ever be completely prevented but I think that as time goes by, and as users of sites like Wikipedia become more accustomed to what they are and how they work, then the impact of vandalism may be reduced," he said.
Professor Thomas says the incredible take-up of sites like Wikipedia and social software like Twitter make them extraordinarily difficult to police.
"They've grown phenomenally quickly at different times and many of the problems we're talking about are the results of systems which are designed for a fairly small community of users to begin with, scaling up very, very rapidly," he said.
But he says most users take the information with the same grain of salt they would other forms of media.
"Becoming savvier, if you like, about how they work, about the fact that occasionally someone can hack into a MySpace account or a Twitter account or something like that, and send out a tonne of spam."
Based on a report by Rachael Brown for PM on January 27
Topics: internet-culture, australia
First posted