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Checks and balances

One of the issues that Wikipedia that has constantly had to deal with is the balance between freedom given to contributors and controls put in place to ensure accuracy and reliability. While the policy of letting just anyone edit any article has been questioned in the past, most recently the website came under fire from many sections of the media for introducing a new measure called semi-protection, where articles cannot be edited by anonymous users or those registered with the site for less than four days.

Although Wales repeatedly insisted this was a move towards softer instead of firmer controls, the website still came under attack for what was popularly perceived as a move towards exclusivity.

New control system

In an effort to quell criticism on both sides of the divide, Wikipedia is introducing a new system of control called flagging in its German edition. Now, articles that are intact and reliable will be marked non-vandalised. When edits are made to such articles by new or unknown contributors, they will be added to a queue and will be checked for errors or vandalism before appearing on the page, thus ensuring that only accurate, reliable material appears on the website.

Wales does admit that even this isn't the best system the website can adopt. "Even if a new contributor makes a good edit, it will not go live for a while. That may discourage newcomers from posting edits. If there's too much of a barrier to entry, then that becomes a problem."

With the community working on ways to overcome this problem, though, Wales is optimistic that the new system is a step in the right direction.

R.M.

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