A Wiki War on Vandals
By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 5/1/2006
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows virtually anyone to edit or add to its entries, is continually vulnerable to vandals, who wreak havoc with information on the site or intentionally insert errors. On occasion, these vandals have been traced to schools.
One of Wikipedia’s solutions to thwart young pranksters is, basically, to pull the plug. While access to the site is never shut down, the ability to edit from a specific IP address is blocked, writes Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales in an e-mail. Meanwhile, Wikipedia is seeking to improve the way it identifies edits by newer visitors, as opposed to “trusted, experienced users,” writes Wales. “But there are no plans to cut participation by new users.”
The online encyclopedia’s ability to fix mistakes is at the heart of criticism by numerous educators, who question Wikipedia as a reliable source of information for students. Nevertheless, as Wikipedia has claimed in the past, mistakes are quickly fixed as soon as they are reported.
The first course of action, when Wikipedia discovers a vandal, is usually a warning, with a suggestion that the user visit Wikipedia’s sandbox, where newcomers can experiment with editing, says Wales. If that doesn’t succeed, the user’s IP address is then blocked for a couple of hours to “hold them off until they get bored,” says Wikipedia spokesperson Wayne Saewyc, referring to students who may be playing a prank. Blocks can be extended for longer periods, which happened at one school where a student was eventually identified as a Wikipedia vandal and expelled from the site, says Saewyc, who would not name the school. “We then lifted the block,” he adds. Another case involved a high school in San Francisco, which Saewyc says contacted Wikipedia and asked to be permanently blocked from editing privileges.
But in the land of wikis where anything can be changed, no one is blocked forever. “Nothing is permanent,” assures Saewyc. “Things can always be reversed.”
