Is Wikipedia Admitting Defeat?

Posted on 3rd October 2007 at 10:27 am by Chris Dugdale

Not happy with adding the NOFOLLOW attribute to all outbound links, Wikipedia, in its attempt to curb the tide of spam and vandalism, is to trial a system whereby edits require review from "trusted editors" in order to be published.

January of this year saw Jimbo Wales (co-founder of Wikipedia) adding the NOFOLLOW attribute on every outbound link on Wikipedia in response to an SEO contest (Globalwarming awareness 2007) that was filling the site with unwanted external links.

Whilst Wikipedia's army of editors is large enough to avoid the kind of manning problems that plague other projects, such as The Open Directory Project (or DMOZ), the fact that anyone can edit any Wikipedia page at any time, has resulted in trust issues. It's impossible to know if what is being read is accurate (as it is most of the time) or the result of a swift piece of graffiti or spam.

The rather drastic action of implementing NOFOLLOW on external links seemed to do little to stem the tide of spam either. It may have put-off the more seasoned and better-read spammers, but the wanton spammers and vandals were barely perturbed at all.

In response to this, last month saw Virgil Griffith running Wikiscanner through the IP addresses of anonymous changes with an eye to 'outing' spammers, but this doesn’t appear to go far enough for Wikipedia; the German site is about to trial a system where only edits which have been reviewed by a “trusted editor” will be published.

Whilst this appears, on the surface, to be the answer to the problem, the sheer scale of Wikipedia means that there will be huge swathes of “trusted editors” with a suddenly increased level of power; at least some of these will have their own motives and interests. Additionally, the self-correcting model which was at the heart of Wikipedia from the start will, to some extent, have been lost.

The extent of elitism and stagnancy that this policy generates also remains to be seen, and Wikipedia would do well to look to the OPD for some lessons from history. A group of “chosen ones” who are responsible for maintaining something as large as Wikipedia could well drown in the sea of all human knowledge, seeing the encyclopaedia date very quickly indeed.

As with the OPD, Wikipedia’s chosen few may also be infiltrated by the more serious and subtle spammers who will stifle impartiality in favour of their own agendas.

So it seems that, whichever way it turns, Wikipedia's success is doomed to lead to a loss of user-trust.

Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia) believes that the answer lies in unfettered editing but with the removal of anonymity. His new project, Citizendium, asks that all contributors identify themselves and leave short biographies before they can begin editing.

Sanger appears to be under no illusion that this will stop the spamming, but hopes that it will significantly reduce the problem and produce entries with more credence and reliability. Personally, I think this will lead to an entertaining array of creative biographies dreamed up by spammers to ease their way into a fresh source of spam. Maybe it is time to register funniest-citizendum-biographies.com.

File under: wikipedia nofollow spam citizendium

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