In an effort to discourage vandalism, Wikipedia will soon begin to freeze pages with “stable contents … whose quality is undisputed.” Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia, revealed his plans in an interview with a German newspaper, reported in turn by Computerworld.
Wales’ comments focus on the issue of credibility, a reasonable concern, although it should be noted that his plans trade one form of credibility for another. As it now stands, Wikipedia’s credibility rests in part on the commitment of those who combat the vandalism, fix the pages, and contribute to its content. That form of credibility, however, relies on some fault tolerance and patience among users. If one encounters vandalism on a page and is annoyed, as Wales fears, Wikipedia’s credibility does suffer for a moment, but the larger credibility of a culture working together to fix broken windows is not necessarily impaired. On the other hand, if the contents of a page are frozen, one will always find the page in a credible state, but that credibility no longer testifies to the larger faithfulness of the culture that supports the experiment.
It’s a classic dilemma. I’m not surprised Wikipedia has at last decided it needs to pull back on its openness. But I am disappointed, especially that it’s come so soon, and I hope that there are no commercial factors driving Wales’ decision.
If they do this, will they add an editable field underneath for legitimate (or even vandalistic) additions? If they don’t, we’re back to square one: something ‘carved in stone’ which may be out of date, supplemented by a second source which someone has started somewhere else (and which may itself become frozen and suppemented!). Although I don’t think wikipedia has yet taken off as a mainstream educational tool, a plethora of possible entries could kill off that possibility through sheer confusion.
Yes, these are some of my concerns as well. Frankly, I’m not sure why vandalism has become a pressing concern here, as it’s been a fact of life for Wikipedia for some time. The focus, though, has been on clean-up, not prevention. They already have good processes in place for disputes and getting to neutral points of view. I suspect there’s more to the story than has yet emerged.
Pingback: Gardner Writes » Blog Archive » More on the Wikipedia controversy