Wood has set up his own website, and scores of other Wikipedia editors-for-hire await on freelance websites such as Elance. Wood started editing Wikipedia pages about seven years ago. But as he looked around, he noticed a growing number of ads looking for people to edit Wikipedia pages. In , he returned to contributing regularly to the site, this time as a paid editor. During his hiatus, Wood says, the tenor of the site had changed.
Veteran editors used to patiently help out new ones. The result was that the burden of proof became even heavier on newcomers, and, Wood says, even valid information was getting rejected out of hand by seasoned editors. The site has several tens of thousands of volunteer editors who update the site regularly each month, and this would seem like enough to head off any biased edits.
And on top of that, the ranks of volunteer editors are dwindling, leaving fewer and fewer people to maintain a growing site. Heilman, too, has come to a similar conclusion after conducting a study of his own, which was published this spring in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. He and his co-author, Andrew West, found that between and , the number of Wikipedia editors who focused on medical topics decreased by 40 percent.
For this reason, he likes the policy—in that it has created business for him. So they give up. My website. All of this is troubling only if one sincerely believes that the information on Wikipedia is read at face value. No high school teacher would knowingly accept it as a source, and Wikipedians are fond of saying that research can start on Wikipedia, but it should never end there.
But the way people answer their everyday questions today means that a lot of research does end on Wikipedia. Google has even started embedding excerpts from Wikipedia pages alongside its search results. Fifty to 70 percent of physicians have been found to consult it as a source of medical information—a testament to its reliability.
Some of the text on Wikipedia looked eerily similar to the text in the book—a lazy Wikipedia editor had copied from the Oxford textbook, he guessed. He saw that the section was co-written in by two users, Rhys and ChyranandChloe, and that it was updated in He jumped back over to the textbook and saw that it was published in Lloyd did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The plagiarism was barely concealed.
In that sense, the Oxford textbook did not simply contain plagiarized text from Wikipedia; it appeared to make it less reliable. Nowadays, the estimated prevalence of paid editing changes depending on whom you ask. She points out that Wiki-PR, the furthest-reaching paid-editing operation yet discovered, only made a few thousand edits. It's just one of those things where, probably, everyone speeds a little bit.
Those who consult on editing Wikipedia frame things a little differently. However, Taylor is convinced that most of these edits actually improve the site, and that conflicts of interest are rooted out fairly efficiently. Moreover, plenty of people hold views for which they receive no compensation that would nevertheless render them inadequate editors.
For example, a volunteer Greenpeace activist might not be the most impartial steward of a page about the coal industry. These questions are as salient as ever now that Wikipedia has become not a place to go for information, but the place to go. To rely on Wikipedia without any skepticism is to act as though every editor is as relentless, principled, and stubborn as he is. Anyone can - it's open to all and can be modified and edited by anyone.
However, Wikipedia's administrators protect some pages from direct editing if they believe they are regularly subjected to "vandalism" - the addition of abusive language or falsehoods. Wikipedia is self-policing and relies on its community of volunteer editors to improve the quality and accuracy of the pages over time.
It's the "wisdom of crowds" principle in action. Writers are encouraged to back up factual statements with verifiable references and authoritative sources as often as possible.
Wikipedia has rules - lots of rules. One obvious one is not being dishonest. Another is avoiding opinion and sticking to verifiable facts. But it is possible to set up a user account with a pseudonymous username to allow you to edit anonymously. However, using anonymous accounts for blatant misrepresentation and puffery - known as sock puppetry - is often spotted and the offending content challenged or removed by other editors.
Blatant self-promotion is frowned upon by the community and viewed as a conflict of interest. Anyway, as you don't control the page, less flattering information may soon be added by others.
But examples of Wikispam, as it's sometimes called, are "speedily deleted" according to the website. You don't need to log in to the site to read or edit articles, but setting up an account and registering allows you to create your own pages, upload content and edit without your internet protocol IP address - the number that identifies a mobile phone or computer on a network - being visible to the public.
The Wiki administrators, who number around 1,, can usually identify the IP address of someone editing articles and this can be tracked to a rough location, enabling them to spot suspicious patterns of behaviour.
Offending accounts can be suspended, without individuals necessarily being identified. If the IP address is different - you use a different computer or phone than the one you used before and, if you're being really sneaky, move location to do your editing - there's no reason why you can't set up another anonymous account and carry on as before.
And there are plenty of services allowing internet users to hide their IP addresses anyway, for example, by using an encrypted virtual private network. Someone going to great lengths to hide their IP address is sometimes enough to arouse suspicion among the site's administrators.
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