Folks,
The Sydney Morning Herald has an article featuring an interview with Jimmy Wales.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/wikipedia-wont-be-so-dicky/2007/03/27/1174761...
It foreshadows changes such as stable versions and credential checking.
*"One of those tools was an upcoming feature called "stable versions", which Wales said would "allow the community to flag particular versions of articles as being non-vandalised so that those would be shown to the public first in certain high-risk areas".*
*This would help to reduce the number of instances where blatant errors have passed through unchecked, many of which going unnoticed for weeks.*
*One of many to fall victim to false Wikipedia entries is the former governor-general of Australia, Peter Hollingworth.*
*Mr Hollingworth called in to the ABC radio program Australia Talks last week, as it was interviewing Mr Wales.*
*"I found an entry on me at one stage which I found offensive and inaccurate and it had been put on there by someone I had never heard of and I purely by accident found it when someone else told me that I should check it out," he said.*
*"Now I fully support the whole idea of the democratisation of knowledge ... [but there is still] the question how you balance this out with truth and accuracy."*
*Mr Wales said while many inaccuracies were picked up within minutes, one way to avoid them would be to, for particularly vulnerable articles, "make sure that new edits perhaps are reviewed by someone in the community before they go live".*
*He was considering adding this feature to future versions of Wikipedia, but stressed that control would remain in the hands of the community.*
*"We are not contemplating any kind of a system where there is going to be hundreds of editors in a building reviewing what the public's doing - that model makes no sense for us," he said.*
*The Wikipedia community was also "discussing the possibility of a voluntary credential verification process" for contributors.*
*Mr Wales would not give specific details on how contributors would be verified, but the idea arose after revelations this month that one of Wikipedia's most trusted editors, who claimed to be a professor, was actually a 24-year-old with no advanced degrees.*
*He said verifying professional credentials for certain contributors would not be particularly difficult."*
As noted earlier, this misleading content was based on media reports but I digress.
The other interesting thing is that the photo is from "Wikipedia Commons".
Regards
*Keith Old*