Wikipedia May Filter Anonymous Edits

Posted 01/26/2009 at 8:33am | by Paul Lilly

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Following a recent false entry in Wikipedia's pages claiming Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd had died after an inaugural luncheon last week, the social encyclopedia is considering clamping down on anonymous user edits, CNet says. Dubbed 'Flagged Revisions,' only registered, trusted users would be able to publish changes immediately. For everyone else, edits would wait in a queue until being approved by one of Wikipedia's trusted editors.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is in favor of the idea, saying on his public discussion page "This nonsense would have been 100 percent prevented by Flagged Revisions." And unlike the German version of Wikipedia, which has been using the system since last August, Wales contends that delays would typically be less than 1 week "because we will only be using it on a subset of articles, the boundaries of which can be adjusted over time to manage the backlog."

According to Wales, 60 percent of users who responded to a poll are in favor of the move. Are you? Hit the jump and post your thoughts.

Image Credit: Wikipedia