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As the online, communal encyclopedia becomes a standard tool for students and the curious all over the world, the good folks at Wikipedia are struggling to deal with vandalism. Since anyone is allowed to view and edit material on Wikipedia articles, this makes it difficult to police the accuracy and ensure the quality of content. With the German version of Wikipedia leading the way, the affiliated sites will begin testing an approval system for edits made by users.

Validation and vandalism has been a major bone of contention among Wikipedia users and founders for some time. At the Wikimania 2006 conference, talks were held about the best way to validate edits to Wikipedia articles. Some proposed a 3-step process for validating current articles:

1. A stable version of an article would be tagged as usable and unvandalized.

2. A validated version. The stable version would be fact-checked (using m:Wikicite?) by a team of subject experts, probably from the trusted members of the appropriate WikiProject. This might involve temporarily protecting the page from edits during the validation, or alternatively a short-lived fork would be needed. After the work is completed this version of the article would be made visible and tagged as an uneditable validated version. Any user could look at links from this validated version to see exactly what source was used to check a particular fact.

3. Independent review. An outside expert, with a reputation in the field, would check that the validated article was balanced, up-to-date and complete, then sign off to say that they approve of the article. See the Blessings project.

These steps could help stem the flow of vandalism to the site, increasing the accuracy and academic validity of the content. As the Wikipedia article about the proposal argues, “Even if we could just reach stage 2 [validated version] on a core of 1000-2000 articles, this would be a great step towards giving Wikipedia credibility among librarians and academics.” Indeed, many universities do not allow students to cite Wikipedia as a source on research papers because of the questionable quality of its user authors. An approval system, implemented by subject matter experts, could change this stance.

Wikipedia’s German site has been testing a validation process called “flagged revisions.” It acts as an extension to the software behind Wikipedia, and notifies administrators when a change is being made. A fact checker will verify that the new entry or change is accurate, then approve the changes. While this process is being done, users on the site will see the most recently verified version of an article.

According to a recent New York Times article, “Approximately 60 percent of the more than 750,000 German articles have been checked, and thus are under watch in the future. There are approximately 3,000 checkers, though Mathias Schindler, one of the administrators of German Wikipedia, says he expects the numbers to grow, since the only requirement is that someone have made a total of 300 edits, none of them vandalism.” Rather than hiring full-time fact checkers, the site will rely on expert users in good standing to verify changes.

If a similar validation system is put in place for the English-language site, Wikipedia has the chance to boost its reputation as an educational tool. By utilizing active, reliable users for fact checking, Wikipedia can maintain its user-generated feel without sacrificing the quality of its content.

Friday, August 8th, 2008 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

By Haley January Eckels