Always a controversial source of information, Wikipedia.org is trying to clean up its act.
There have recently been a number of unfortunate and factually incorrect revisions to various Wikipedia articles, including two recent examples -- claims that elderly senators Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) had died.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said he wants to implement a policy which would prevent such unregulated changes from occurring. Paradoxically, the decision is not his to make; he has virtually lost control of his creation precisely because of its very nature. And in wake of these proposals, Wales has been harshly criticized for his position, which many believe would cause the encyclopedia to lose its user-edited, balanced nature.
College students make up a large chunk of the web traffic on Wikipedia, and many Jumbos disapprove of the prospect of change.
"I don't think it's a good idea, because it takes away the spirit upon which Wikipedia was founded," Tufts freshman Kevin McDonald said. "And also, it removes the ability of experts in obscure fields to spread their knowledge. And, let's face it, who doesn't use Wikipedia for obscure things?"
Freshman Nathan Beaton agreed, noting that Wikipedia's unique nature makes it useful in ways that typical encyclopedias are not.
"I think that it's important for Wikipedia, as it moves away from ease of access [to] not lose what [makes] Wikipedia unique. Because if I was looking exclusively for something that I knew was already researched and fact-checked, those resources already exist," Beaton said. "There are encyclopedias out there."
Wikipedia was started in 2001 as a spinoff from a different project, which was ironically a slow-growing, peer-reviewed encyclopedia, intended to be written only by experts. Wikipedia, however, is intended to be a free encyclopedia.
In terms of the popular site, "free" has two meanings. While visitors can use the site as much as they want without having to pay any kind of fee, users can also post any information, regardless of their qualifications in the field about which they are writing. But just as content can be generated by anybody, it can also be removed by anybody. Patrons find this function useful because they can add newer, richer content and delete older, ambiguous or inaccurate content. For the vast majority of articles, this policy creates few if any problems.
In some cases, however, the site's structure can cause a great deal of contention, especially because many look to Wikipedia's information as factual. In some recent cases, political partisans have been accused of trying to skew articles about public figures to reflect their own views. Workers for U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) as well as Vice President Joe Biden and former senators Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) and Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), allegedly edited their employers' Wikipedia pages to remove potentially embarrassing information.
These types of violations are usually caught by a team of registered Wikipedia users who review edited articles for policy violations. But the team cannot edit every article as soon as an error is input. Obscure or esoteric articles may sit for days, weeks or even months with false information or vandalism until a dedicated Wikipedia user changes the article.
Wales' proposed policy, however, seeks to streamline and automate this process. It would set up a system in which only registered users would be able to see their edits reflected immediately on a Wikipedia page. Anonymous users would have their changes flagged and inspected by a registered contributor of higher standing.
This plan has already been implemented in stages on the German-language version of the site, and so far the results are not particularly promising. The German version of Wikipedia has experienced as much as a three-week backlog on the approval of changes to some articles.
Still,Wales believes that the new policy will work, noting that the new system would be employed at first on only a small group of articles and would be adjusted over time to manage the backlog.
While there is currently no fixed timeline on this sweeping policy change, it is likely that it will end up happening, as a recent poll conducted by Wikipedia showed that 60 percent of users are in favor of flagged revisions.
But even if the proposed policy plays out, it is unlikely given the site's past reputation that Tufts students will be able to use it anytime soon as a source for research.
Still, the policy could have its benefits. "I never edited things on Wikipedia to begin with, so this policy change would just make me trust Wikipedia more," freshman Margaret Belchic said.
