In august, the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia changed its editing policy. This new policy change concerns mostly biography pages on the site. Under the new policy, anonymous users will be able to edit these biography pages. However, these changes will not be visible to the general public until experts who were Wikipedia employees approved them. This change is supposed to make the site a more reliable source of information. People such as Jimmy Wales say that this change is itself an error. He says that the site will instead adopt a flagged protection protocol for a small number of pages. This plan is still under development, and will not go through as much of a change as previously thought.
For a while, such controls have been on pages such as Barrack Obama, George Bush, and other famous celebrity. Anonymous users cannot edit these pages. The flagged protection will likely only apply to these pages. Most of the biography pages would be still open to editing by anonymous users. Unser the new rules, the site will likely become more open, allowing people to actually edit pages of celebrities, instead of never having their changes approved.
Policies in the Wikipedia foundation are made by a group of volunteers who may not be apparent to the foundation that actually make the site go. Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the nonprofit said that this was the first that he’s heard about the new policies. This policy is still in the dark for the most part, however, as with Wikipedia, the truth comes out.
Appeared on CNN.com/TECH this week.
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