What is my favorite encyclopedia Wikipedia telling us when founder Jimmy Wales announces that there may be some more editorial review and the possibility of freezing submissions that have reached a point of "stability?" I thought the beauty of a constantly evolving knowledge source was that it could, well, constantly evolve.
I understand where Mr. Wales is coming from. Yes, there are credibility issues inherent for a knowledge base where any prankster can jump in and swap out the picture of the current Pope with a headshot of the Emperor from Star Wars (regardless of how funny it was). Admittedly, I can't count the number of times when I've relied on a Wikipedia article (say, for a pub quiz, for example) only to discover later that the facts I relied upon were either incomplete, grossly biased, or utterly and totally WRONG in every objective sense of the word. Nor am I the first person to suggest that wikipedia has had errors on occasion. On the other hand, that suggestion hasn't stopped me from using wikipedia virtually every day that I'm online. Still, the prospect of having a stronger or more formal review board is not necessarily a bad one.
The idea of freezing pages that are deemed stable is what really concerns me, however. I get the gist of the argument (either hydrogen has an atomic number of one, or it doesn't), but the specifics of it elude me. Who decides when content is fixed enough to be frozen? What are the criteria? Does the criteria for freezing content change depending on the subject matter (e.g ancient civilization vs. current celebrities)? How does a page unfreeze (say, for example, if scientists discover that hydrogen really had an atomic number of 47 all along, and whoops, aren't we embarrassed)? Someone needs to explain how an entire article could ever be frozen without fear of it becoming more inaccurate through dust and neglect than if the occasional bored ne'er-do-well jumps in and decides to add a factually suspect allegation of a romantic tryst between Jerry Falwell and Tinky-Winky. I'd be interested if anyone out there can come up with some strong counter-examples to help ease my mind.
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