Wiki wonder

Last Friday in an interview with a German newspaper Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, said the Internet encyclopedia might start closing off some of its articles from editing. The idea is to create "stable contents," he said, to "freeze the pages whose quality is undisputed." For a project built around the idea of open revisions and continuous evolution of content, this is a very bad idea. \nIn case you missed it, Wikipedia is a free-content encyclopedia where anyone and everyone can create and edit articles. "Wikipedia is built on the belief that collaboration among users will improve articles over time," says the Wikipedia Web site, citing open-source software as an old success story of the same idea. As such, there are no administrators or editorial groups to guarantee quality, just the relentless criticism and editing from the thousands of people that stop by. \nEvidently the system works. Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has expanded to over 641,000 articles in English and almost a million articles in the other 204 supported languages. And people use it! The encyclopedia receives about 60 million hits a day, has been referenced in peer-reviewed journals such as "Science," and used as a source for numerous media stories. \nWith all growth, why does Wales want to starting freezing articles? Vandalism. Since anyone can edit, unscrupulous types often mix things up as a joke. Shortly after Joseph Ratzinger was named Pope, Benedict XVI's picture was replaced by the visage of the evil Emperor Palpatine from "Star Wars". Wales wants to end such pranks by restricting the ability to revise. \nBut Wikipedia doesn't need any formal regulation, because it's self-regulating. The Palpatine picture was online for less than two minutes before someone else removed it. There is a sizeable network of volunteers that search and correct for obvious vandals. And every article comes with a discussion page, which viewers can easily reference to see if there's any question as to the legitimacy of the text. \nIU professors William Emigh and Susan Herring recently completed a study about Wikipedia that determined, among other things, that as "post-production editorial control" went up, "the more formal and standardized the language of the collaboratively-authored documents becomes." Even with the possibility of rogue writers taking an article out for a spin, Wikipedia entries became more and more like print encyclopedia over time. \nBut now that Wikipedia is experiencing burgeoning growth and use, now that it is starting to gain some legitimacy compared to more "authoritative" encyclopedias like Encyclopedia Britannica, Wales wants to start shutting down the very thing that makes Wikipedia what it is. \nThere's nothing unique about a digital reference. Old-school encyclopedias have had online versions for some time now. But Wikipedia, up until now, has been an anarchic system producing an ordered product. It is the open-editing policy that is Wikipedia. Close this off, and there's no reason to go there over any other online reference. I won't.