The good news is that Wikipedia actually offers a broad range of options for correcting inaccurate or negative entries, and even better, all are easy to use and take little time to implement. The most serious problem occurred in the second paragraph. According to the Plain Dealer story:. The exact text as it appeared in Wikipedia was:. LaTourette was roughly removed by the Secret Service. The really damaging aspect of that allegation is how it bears a tangential resemblance to the truth.
There actually had been a student disturbance when Prince Charles visited that law school. LaTourette was enrolled at the time but had nothing to do with the incident. Wikipedia and its volunteers do care about edit vandalism and the Biographies of Living Persons policy makes this problem a special priority. Watchlists alert active editors of changes to particular pages.
These are among the most powerful tools for combating vandalism. But examples of Wikispam, as it's sometimes called, are "speedily deleted" according to the website. You don't need to log in to the site to read or edit articles, but setting up an account and registering allows you to create your own pages, upload content and edit without your internet protocol IP address - the number that identifies a mobile phone or computer on a network - being visible to the public.
The Wiki administrators, who number around 1,, can usually identify the IP address of someone editing articles and this can be tracked to a rough location, enabling them to spot suspicious patterns of behaviour.
Offending accounts can be suspended, without individuals necessarily being identified. If the IP address is different - you use a different computer or phone than the one you used before and, if you're being really sneaky, move location to do your editing - there's no reason why you can't set up another anonymous account and carry on as before. And there are plenty of services allowing internet users to hide their IP addresses anyway, for example, by using an encrypted virtual private network.
Someone going to great lengths to hide their IP address is sometimes enough to arouse suspicion among the site's administrators. And patterns of behaviour - from the adoption of similar usernames to a focus on specific topics and types of edit - can reveal a lot about motivations and personality.
Multiple accounts can often be tracked to one individual - we're never as anonymous as we like to believe. But everything else you see on Wikipedia has been put there voluntarily.
That is the collaborative nature of Wikipedia; someone, somewhere, has an interest or expertise in the most obscure of subjects, and they are willing to spend their time putting what they know online just in case you ever want to know, say, a full list of every single member ever of the Justice League of America, the scores in every final of the English Football League Trophy since , or the names of all the volcanoes in Indonesia.
But anyone with an internet access and a free website creator programme, which abound on the internet, can do that. Because behind those who are putting all this data online purely because they want to is another wave of volunteers who are constantly questioning, demanding verification for and keeping in check this tsunami of information. Those numbers are links to citations, or primary sources that back up the information, and the more of them that a Wikipedia entry has, the better.
One is marked Edit, and that brings the collaborative nature of the project right home. Then you can click on this tab, and quickly and easily change the entire page. Want to send comics fans into a tailspin by editing that Justice League of America page to replace all the DC comics characters with superheroes published by rival company Marvel?
Go right ahead. If your page has been vandalized, read here about what you can do. Can I see who edited a Wikipedia page? The name of the editor appears next to each change, right after the date. Click on that name, and you will find out anything the editor has chosen to share with the public.
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