When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Wikipedia to begin accepting volunteer editors for entries

Wikipedia is, quite possibly, one of the most famous websites on the Internet; it's a great wealth of knowledge, with pages on nearly every single subject, though it comes with a catch... anybody can edit it. What that obviously means is that any random person can, quite easily, change an article to whatever they please, creating some problems. The organization hopes to put an end to this, and, according to CNN, they will soon be using volunteer editors from the Wikipedia community.

The volunteers will have the trust of Wikipedia, and they will be responsible for observing and approving changes made to certain articles regarding "living people." To begin, this will be tested on English language articles only, and will hopefully improve the quality of information on the website, preventing any uncouth edits. However, this isn't all well and good for some people. CNN stated that some people believe this is deviating from Wikipedia's core values, and in a way, defeats the purpose of the website. On the flip-side, others think that this nothing but a good thing, helping the ever-growing community to stay in check.

Some tech celebrities are all for the decision; Caterina Fake, who founded the popular photography website Flickr, said that, "It would basically be like a wall of graffiti in a bathroom. It's not going to be a very high level of discourse," referring to the lack of rules currently in place. In contrast to this, though, a man named Marshall Kirkpatrick (lead writer at ReadWriteWeb), said, "As things get more and more popular online, some of these experiments realize they need to temper some of their experimental nature and learn from more traditional forms because they're just not sustainable. It makes me shed a little tear, too, because presumably it will lead to a slowdown of new content creation, and it does seem like a departure from the essential nature of Wikipedia."

Whether this is a good or bad decision is purely up to the user, as it has both beneficial and depreciative effects. Hopefully, we'll start seeing greater accuracy in Wikipedia articles from now on, though it's unclear when the editors will be fully in place.

Report a problem with article
Next Article

Microsoft confirms Xbox 360 price drop in the US

Previous Article

Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy Micro-Expansion Announced

Join the conversation!

Login or Sign Up to read and post a comment.

17 Comments - Add comment