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Wikipedia, the first stop of research on the Internet for many, has long been both praised and jeered because of its open-source nature.  Many love the fact that it allows for anyone to change articles fro the most up-to-date information.  Meanwhile, others (notably those in the teaching profession), essentially hate it for the same reason.  There’s some changes coming to some articles, however that may begin to appease both sides.

Wikimeida, the non-profit behind Wikipedia, has announced that the English version of the site will be adding limits to changes made to articles about living people.  What that means is any time anyone changes an article about a living person, those changes are flagged.  The flagged changes are invisible to end users until one of the approved volunteers approves the changes.  The change is meant to decrease the number of vandalized pages and has already been enacted to the entirety of the German version.  There’s no word on how many of these approved editors there will be, but it will most likely be more than the 7,500 volunteers the German Wikipedia has to approve every article.

Adding some credibility to Wikipedia is definitely a good move.  However, the biggest draw of the website is the collaborative nature that doesn’t need to filter through anything to pass.  While that does allow for some information to be not exactly accurate, it’s easy to tell given the citations what information is worthwhile.  It’s definitely a good idea the limitations are being used only on a section of the articles and arguably the ones that need the most protection.  Pushing the changes to every article could prove difficult to manage if it comes to that, but for now we’ll have to see how these limits change the site, if at all.

Read [NY Times]