Wikipedia is famous for being the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Unfortunately, there are numerous examples of so-called "Wikipedia vandalism," where the reputations of people past and present have been blackened by bogus entries in their Wikipedia pages. And, to make matters worse, there are numerous methods that can be used to make these so-called "vandal edits" and other methods of messing with Wikipedia pages hard to track down.

To help reduce vandalism, Wikipedia is now experimenting with flagged revisions on its German Wikipedia site, which is apparently a hotbed of vandalism. When pages are changed, a checker must sign off on the changes to a page before they are posted. The requirements for checkers are apparently not too rigorous, though - a checker must have made 300 legitimate edits to Wikipedia pages.

Hot and heavy discussions of the the pros and cons of this new feature are available on this Wikipedia Talk page, and was also the subject of a presentation during this week's Wikimania 2008 conference. If the test is successful, flagged revisions will be used on other Wikipedia sites.

So, how about it? Have you been burned by Wikipedia vandalism? Do you think flagged revisions will help minimize vandalism? Will Wikipedia become boring? Let us know.
 

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Security, wikipedia, vandalism, information, Wikimania 2008

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