Brian wrote:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-11-29-wikipedia-edit_x....
Talk amongst yourselves.
Shrug, one more person discovers WP.
Although most days I'm irritated by anons in one way or another, requiring login creation doesn't change the equation that much; imagine everybody just creating logins named the same as each IP they use, and adding "-1", "-2", "-3" for reuses of an IP number. At most it would help in tracking groups of related changes.
The problem of unsourced libels is not unique to us, we share that with the blogosphere. We do have the mechanisms to fix it, but not enough knowledgeable people doing the watching - if I had been watching this guy's page, I might have let the addition go through, because it sounds plausible, includes a caveat that the claim might have been unfounded, and since 99% of additions don't include a source, it's not unusual that way either.
We could just get a lot more hardnosed about reverting suspect changes; since our last discussion about all this, I've personally taken a tougher line about instantly reverting poor changes, and so far no one seems to have protested my high-handedness. I wonder how it would go if I summarily reverted all unsourced edits??
Stan