From: Steve Bennett wiki@stevage.com Hi all, I've always had my bookmark set to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page, where it's prominently written "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". However, for any visitor who comes directly through www.wikipedia.org, this is not the case.
It's far worse than that. Mirrors usually do not say "edit this page," and frequently serve up Wikipedia content with titles such as "Encyclopedia article about thus-and-such."
And it's going to get even worse. As I noted elsewhere, dozens of news sources have published stories like one in Information Week. Their story title was "Wikipedia Tightens Rules For Posting" and their subhead was "After an article incorrectly linked the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy to a former administrative assistant, Wikipedia no longer accepts new submissions from anonymous contributors."
Now_we_ all understand that logged-in users are just as anonymous as unlogged-in users. And we all know that the headline is a bad summary, and that anyone that carefully reads Information Week's article will see that's not what Jimbo said. (He said "A person now has to register with the site before contributing an article. By doing this, site managers can at least determine whether a person associated with a specific user ID is submitting false information, and prevent articles from being submitted by that registrant.")
But I'll bet that's not what 99% of the people reading these news articles think. Just wait until the next Seigenthaler incident happens, and the victim finds that... as perceived by the outside world... Wikipedia says _again_ that it does not know who created the article, after the public thought it had said that promised that it would "no longer accepts new submissions from anonymous contributors."
Will the general public accept this as good faith? Yes, about as good faith as Clinton's statement that he never had sex with that woman Monica Lewinsky.