December 17, 2005
Wikipedia Makes New Strides Towards Protecting Highly Vandalized Pages
Wikpedia has instituted a Semi-protection policy that, when activated for specific pages, will not allow edits from anonymous users and will not allow relatively new users to edit the page. The idea is to prevent edits to pages that are highly vandalized.
This is all part of Wikipedia's latest scheme to position itself to be a credible source. Still, there are some large components missing, mainly the inability of readers and fact-finders to verify "facts" in articles. It would help so much if articles cited their sources. This is where the sister projects of Wikipedia, such as Wikisource, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and the future Wikidata projects have their potential. These sister projects exist for the sole collection of facts. In order to be certified, these facts should stand up to the scientific process. Then, articles in Wikipedia simply reference, or cite, these facts. Wikipedia hence ceases to become a pseudo fact source and becomes a cohesive presentation of facts.
Given a set of knowledge--of facts--it should be possible for anybody to write an article on Wikipedia. The disagreement over many articles on Wikipedia is a result over disputement of facts. Unfortunately, there is no power in place to judge the credibility of facts. Until every fact presented on Wikipedia can be verified, we have to be careful about what we accept as fact from Wikipedia.
The whole issue boils down to trust. We trust commercial encyclopedias to do their homework and to cross reference every fact. We accept their words as fact. Some read Wikipedia and accept the content there as fact. Unfortunately, to the educated person seeking to write a paper, Wikipedia is no more credible than asking a group of friends about a subject. Your friends may be correct, but they don't have the expertise and certification to be stating their knowledge as absolute scientific fact. If Wikipedia wishes to be a credible source, they have to establish a method for every fact presented on every page to be externally verified and upheld through the scientific process. This is no small challenge.
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