p2p news / p2pnet: Wikipedia has been the subject of much unwelcome attention, lately, largely because of a post on USA Today’s John Seigenthaler. It read:

"John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960’s. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven."

It is, of course, nonsense and Brian Chase, who wrote it, said he’d posted it into what he’d believed was a ‘gag’ site.

"Many users have noticed and complained about the level of vandalism in high-profile articles, such as George W. Bush," says a post on the Wiki site.

"Instead of the text and images one would expect from a reputable encyclopedia, the reader discovers vulgarities and either incorrect or deliberately distasteful writing. Vandalized versions are displayed for several hours a day to readers and editors alike. Many edits to these high-profile articles are reversions of vandalism. In the worst case articles receive few good edits; instead, they have turned into battlegrounds in which virtually every edit is either one by a vandal or one reverting vandalism. So much time is wasted that nothing substantive can be done to improve the material or quality of information in these articles. This situation tarnishes the reputation of Wikipedia and hampers the efforts of reputable editors to improve article content quality."

Meanwhile, At the top of the page on which the paragraph above appears is this:

Wikipedia:Semi-protection policy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

This page has been temporarily protected from editing to deal with vandalism.
Please discuss changes on the talk page or request unprotection.

Important Note from Jimbo to news media: I see that some news media have picked this story up as if it is important. Please please please don’t do that. This is one of many changes to the software which are coming soon, including the ability to put pages into a ‘validated’ state (better name should be determined) and so on. Treating this as a major policy change is therefore a huge huge error being made by people who have no understanding of how Wikipedia works.–Jimbo Wales 16:00, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

This page is an official policy on Wikipedia. It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow. Feel free to edit the page as needed, but please make sure that changes you make to this policy reflect consensus before you make them.

Note: This policy is now official but it has yet to be implemented, so it is too soon to request that pages be semi-protected.

This article has recently (as of 11:21, 17 December 2005 (UTC)) been linked from Slashdot.org, a high-traffic Internet site.

All prior and subsequent edits are noted in the page history.

Semi-protection of a page prevents the newest X% of registered users and all unregistered users from editing that page. Semi-protection is only applied if the page in question is facing a serious vandalism problem. It is not an appropriate solution to editorial disputes of any kind since it may restrict some editors and not others. Administrators apply semi-protection in the same manner as current full protection against vandalism is applied - either on their own initiative or following an alert on an article’s talk page, requests for page protection, the administrator’s noticeboard or some other relevant page. Semi-protection is only to be applied as a response to serious vandalism and not as a pre-emptive measure against the threat or probability of vandalism, such as when certain pages suddenly become high profile due to current events. Only when there is evidence of a serious problem of vandalism should semi-protection be applied.

To request that semi-protection of an article be lifted, a simple note on the article’s talk page or the noticeboard should be sufficient, but the page protection request page can be used if necessary. Any administrator can lift a semi-protection.

Articles that are semi-protected are indicated with {{sprotected}} and listed at WP:PP in the same way as protections are at present.

Meanwhile, Wiki has been compared favourably - more than favourably, in fact - to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

An "expert-led investigation" by Nature magazine says Wikipedia and Britannica’s coverage of science are on similar levels.

"The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three," it states.

Also read:-
‘gag’ site - Wiki hoax post author apologises, December 12, 2005
compared favourably - Wikipedia versus Britannica, December 16, 2005

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 17th, 2005 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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