Wikipedia tweaks permissions

Created by Stuart Yeates (University of Oxford) on December 8, 2005

After an embarrassing incident in which an obviously incorrect article lay unnoticed and uncorrected for many months, Wikipedia has tweaked it's permissions system to prevent anonymous users from creating new articles.

The change is a very, very, minor one, but it tightens up a perceived loophole in the review of content. Normal practice when creating a new Wikipedia page is to link to it from several other pages and link to other pages from within the new page. These links make a new page part of the fabric of Wikipedia, and ensure that readers browsing Wikipedia will occasionally visit an article and notice any patent nonsense. There are several ways for readers to flag nonsense once spotted even if they aren't up to editing the content, including talk pages and IRC channels. However, if an obviously incorrect article is created which no other page links to, readers can never browse to the page, so the chances of it being found and corrected are dramatically lowered. The change to requiring users to have an account to create a new page raises the bar slightly and hopefully helps avoid these problems in the future.

Most obviously incorrect and/or malicious content is found and dealt with immediately. As I write this, an incident is being automatically discovered and manually checked in the English language portion of Wikipedia about every ten seconds. Most of the incidents involve pages covering topics about which people have ferverent beliefs: George W. Bush, Adolf Hitler, Wayne Gretzky and Natural selection; or are blatant attempts at defacement: Wikipedia:Introduction and Bus. Even if an incident on one of these pages slipped through unnoticed, it would be soon found by browsing readers, but obviously incorrect and/or malicious content on pages which are low traffic is significantly more problematic if it is allowed to slip through.

Wikipedia's policies and guidelines (which are social, editorial and interpretative in nature), along with the under lying permissions model (which is technical and computational in nature) have evolved continuously, as the wiki has grown in size, in scope and in stature. This is not the first and unlikely to be the last change.

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		Wikipedia tweaks permissions Created by Stuart Yeates (University of Oxford) on December 8, 2005 After an embarrassing incident in which an obviously incorrect article lay unnoticed and uncorrected for many months, Wikipedia has tweaked it's permissions system to prevent anonymous users from creating new articles. The change is a very, very, minor one, but it tightens up a perceived loophole in the review of content. Normal practice when creating a new Wikipedia page is to link to it from several other pages and link to other pages from within the new page. These links make a new page part of the fabric of Wikipedia, and ensure that readers browsing Wikipedia will occasionally visit an article and notice any patent nonsense. There are several ways for readers to flag nonsense once spotted even if they aren't up to editing the content, including talk pages and IRC channels. However, if an obviously incorrect article is created which no other page links to, readers can never browse to the page, so the chances of it being found and corrected are dramatically lowered. The change to requiring users to have an account to create a new page raises the bar slightly and hopefully helps avoid these problems in the future. Most obviously incorrect and/or malicious content is found and dealt with immediately. As I write this, an incident is being automatically discovered and manually checked in the English language portion of Wikipedia about every ten seconds. Most of the incidents involve pages covering topics about which people have ferverent beliefs: George W. Bush, Adolf Hitler, Wayne Gretzky and Natural selection; or are blatant attempts at defacement: Wikipedia:Introduction and Bus. Even if an incident on one of these pages slipped through unnoticed, it would be soon found by browsing readers, but obviously incorrect and/or malicious content on pages which are low traffic is significantly more problematic if it is allowed to slip through. Wikipedia's policies and guidelines (which are social, editorial and interpretative in nature), along with the under lying permissions model (which is technical and computational in nature) have evolved continuously, as the wiki has grown in size, in scope and in stature. This is not the first and unlikely to be the last change. Open Content \| Wiki \| Wikipedia \| wikis Stuart's blog Login or register to post comments 3752 reads
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