I checked out the open source web encyclopedia Wikipedia the other day and while the idea behind the webpage is admirable I can’t help but wonder what legal safeguards protect it from abuse. Since every visitor can edit every entry on it, I can make Franklin Roosevelt a world renowned octagenarian breakdancer in the blink of an eye without fear of reprisal. Am I missing something, or does Wikipedia have some safeguard against such abuses?
Shit. Sorry everyone. This is meant to be in GQ. I’ve notified the mods.
Looks like there is no way of stopping misinformation, exept for another user changing it back again. From the disclaimer section:
The general theory behind Wiki projects is that for every person who wants to screw up Roosevelt’s biography, there’s several out there who will immediatley correct it.
I guess the problem comes when libellous statements are published: even if changed soon after, they still stand as a published libel. I’ve no idea if there’s any protections with Wikipedia for this, other than a less-than-convincing disclaimer
I just want to say: thank you for not changing him to an octogenerian breakdancer. It’s bad enough it quotes him as saying ‘the only thing we have to fear is a large asteroid hitting Lake Michigan.’ at his inauguration.
made ya look. 
The more “creative” additions to Wikipedia tend to be removed by another user or administrator farily quickly. If it gets to be a real problem, user accounts and IP addresses can be banned, and a page can be temporarily locked, so it cannot be editted. There’s an archive of every version of every page, so it’s easy to revert back to an older version if an entry is vandalized. IANAL, but I don’t think that Wikipedia could be held responsible for a user posting libelous material, at least if they remove it when notified.
I realise none of this was exactly the question asked, but I thought it worth throwing in. Firstly, IME wikipeda works - in the (very few) areas where I have any specialised knowledge, it has been accurate, and haven’t been bitten relying on it elsewhere. Fingers crossed it’d stay that way.
Secondly, I don’t know why it hasn’t been overwhelmed with spam of commercial and non-commercial sort. I’d expect it to be eventually, though. OTOH, since it has a high reading/writing ratio, you could add hoops to the editing process without too much inconvenience (Say, typing in one of those ‘i am a human’ numbers, or having the article approved by at least x of y randomly chosen wiki-authors.).
I would say that it doesn’t entirely work. Areas I have knowledge about are invariably wrong… until I get upset enough about it being wrong to fix it myself. Then people come along later and change it to whatever they want. Obviously bad info gets weeded out pretty fast, but otherwise it’s a real gamble. I have certain pages I check every few weeks or so to change back if they get messed with in the meantime. As more people get involved and understand the process it’ll probably only get worse. Today I decided to give up and not even bother trying to fix a page that had been extensively changed since I last saw it because it’s too much trouble to go fix it all unpaid.
Just like newsgroups and other Internet features, sooner or later, without moderation it’s going to fall apart.
Dan Norder’s experience is atypical. Most people (and I include myself) rarely find known false information surviving long. Accuracy is Wikipedia is based on numbers; for every one person attempting to enter false information there are hundreds seeking to eliminate false information. In real world terms, a third party review of the sight reported that every example of false information they found in Wikipedia was removed within two hours of being posted.
One important feature of a wiki implementation is some sort of underlying archival to retrieve earlier versions of documents, as noted by cheddarsnax. Often, they are being managed by some version control system like CVS. It is generally recognized as necessary for recovery from inadvertantly botched editing and clashing edit sessions (if nothing else, you could recover and manually merge them). It also provides a mechanism for dealing with abuse, if it doesn’t get TOO rampant.
Interestingly, login and access control is something that was not included in a lot of early wiki implementations. Like a lot of collaborative freeware for the internet, it was intended for use by a well behaved community of moderate size. In fact, Wikipedia is still functioning wide open, apparently.
I’m also amazed that Wikipedia has gotten to the size it has without getting excessively messed about with. Other factors besides the concientiousness of the participants that may have something to do with it:
[ul]
[li]It isn’t that obvious to the casual reader that they CAN edit the page. Somebody who stumbles on a Wikipedia page through a google search may very easily not look very closely at what is obviously standard header, footer and sidebar text, since what they immediately want is the article content. They might simply not notice the “edit this page” links, or the description of what the Wikipedia is.[/li]
[li]Wiki has its own specialized markup, which some would say is idiosyncratic (some wiki implementations allow HTML, but the original idea was to create a “minimal” markup for common layout functions). I would guess that a lot of would be vandals stop because they don’t wish to learn the wiki markup in order to do “clever” things to the pages. Other people have commented on this - a seemingly user unfriendly interface serves the purpose of controlling casual abuse to some degree.[/li]
[li]Lack of feedback gratifying the vandal. On a message board like this or a blog, when somebody does something that antagonizes everybody, it causes a lot of visible flack, and their original handiwork is usually preserved. No matter how many times somebody tries to say DNFTT, that is precisely what happens, and is probably what the poster wanted. When somebody deliberately messes about with a Wikipedia article, and it is simply quietly replaced with no acknowledgement that the screwed up version ever existed, it doesn’t provide a lot of gratification. Basically, the relative anonymity of the authorship helps. Messaging systems are “anonymous” in the sense of not knowing who somebody really is, but there is a prominently displayed screen name, so that individual identities are preserved. This is ideal for calling attention to oneself by being a nuisance, or maintaining some outrageous online persona, without having to publically announce who you are IRL.[/li][/ul]