Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that contains thousands of band profiles and is updated unmoderated by users, looks set for a drastic format change.The new proposals would see all updates moderated by editors.
The change would mean that updates would need to be monitored and approved by a member of the Wikipedia team before they go live.
The move, proposed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on his Wikipedia blog, has met with some opposition from editors for the site, who claim it would make the backlog of updates requiring moderation unmanageable.
Following an online poll Wales wrote, "To the Wikimedia Foundation: per the poll of the English Wikipedia community and upon my personal recommendation, please turn on the Flagged Revisions feature as approved in the poll."
One editor hit back at the proposal, writing, "We barely have enough people handling flagged new articles. The backlog is almost a month long. Flagged revisions will suffocate under their own weight."
Wales responded by challenging those who oppose the move to come up with a better plan. He asked for "an alternative proposal within the next seven days, to be voted upon for the next 14 days after that".
The site has become particularly popular with fans maintaining updated band biographies, with the likes of The Beatles being among the top ten most looked at articles.
1 comment:
I find it rather ironic that a topic whose focus is "reliability" of information, would describe Jimmy Wales as "founder" of Wikipedia. Who is Dr. Larry Sanger? Is it accurate to say that a project might have a "founder" and a "co-founder"? Is it the author's position that Larry Sanger was not a co-founder of Wikipedia, even though he brought the wiki idea to Nupedia, and gave Wikipedia its name, and acted as the "editor in chief" of the project for its first important year?
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