wikipedia is founded, edited and sustained by humans, therefore it has cracks and holes there and there. as long as it is free and full of valuable information, please take your guns anywhere else. apeak against microsoft, or apple, for example.

have a nice day :)

Semi-protection should normally not be used as a purely pre-emptive measure against the threat or probability of vandalism before any such vandalism occurs, such as when certain pages suddenly become high profile due to current events or being linked from a high-traffic website.

@Ian, the owner just emailed his entire team saying why don’t we just lock all the important articles for the meantime, for simplicity’s sake? or something to that effect.

Do you know what semi-protection is? It means you must have an account to edit, and the account can’t have been created in the last 96 hours. It prevents drive-by vandalism, not serious collaboration.

Regardless, I don’t think the fact that it’s more difficult to edit highly important and controversial articles really takes away from Wikipedia being a contributor-driven site). Nor does it somehow put the lie to their slogan.

I think it’s interesting to compare the Wikipedia quotes to your interpretations. They say “anyone can edit, correct or improve information throughout the encyclopedia.” You complain that not anyone can “just edit stuff,” and you say they’re claiming to be a “free-for-all.”

In the e-mail you link to, Jimmy Wales suggests that semi-protection is an acceptable tool for vandalism-prone articles “because the threshold to editing is still quite low for anyone who seriously wants to join the dialogue.” You turn this into “So much for being ‘written collaboratively by people from all around the world.’”

You’re using very, very strong language here — “death sentence,” “can’t be farther from the truth,” etc. If your only argument is that there are some barriers against drive-through edits on “entries of controversy or higher importance,” then you’re making a fool of yourself. Is there some other point that I’m missing?

At any rate, I’m not complaining. And if I were, it woudn’t be because they’re trying to maintain a balanced view. They always have, and this is perfectly acceptable!

But they’ve always done the editions post-fact, meaning if someone posts some crappy edition to one entry, the editors would promptly revert to the more acceptable state, or edit accordingly.

This time, though, they’re blanket-banning IPs from certain locations from making any editions, and they’re blanket-protecting certain articles such that they cannot be edited outright.

It’s a myth, all right, and this is as good as the myth of DIGG’s being a fully reader/contributor-driven site. :P

Here’s what I think about this “myth” in general.

The benefits of Wikipedia is that it’s a large, open repository of information built from the community. That doesn’t imply that everyone’s opinion or ideas on a subject gets (or deserves) equal space in an entry. It means the cream of the crop of information gets on the page. The most informative, balanced information out there, which almost by definition means a hierarchy of control in the site. There has been a shroud of myth circling around about Wikipedia being an anarchist experiment, but to say that because this isn’t the case all of a sudden the value of the information on Wikipedia has dropped doesn’t make sense.

@Corsarius, yes it stil serves as a great resource for me. Though the idealism in me has waned, sadly.

@Ahmer, about the “power pyramid,” let me put it this way. If I were the owner of Wikipedia, I could edit certain articles to my advantage. Say, I’m an advocate of a certain ideology, I could rewrite or lock articles to have a slant or bias towards that ideology.

Or if not the owner, maybe there could be a rogue higher-level editor that can control things as such.

@Monsolo, that’s a good point. Wikipedia had been subject of several lawsuits already. Perhaps it also needs to wash its hands clean of liability, or probably protect itself from the possibility of people putting in defamatory writeups.

@Ian, the owner just emailed his entire team saying why don’t we just lock all the important articles for the meantime, for simplicity’s sake? or something to that effect. That, I believe, is simply too drastic a move, and against Wikipedia’s supposed ideals at that.

@Borko, well, I still do consider Wikipedia as a great resource of information.

@Dan, try editing “George W. Bush.” :P I agree that with the lesser-controversial or minor topics, it’s usually a trivial matter to edit articles. But for the entries of controversy or higher importance, then that’s where it gets a bit more complicated.

Everybody can EDIT wikipedia. It just gets checked. Also wouldn’t you want to be incharge of a site that YOU are responsible for?