freewheeling collective creativity
I’m not sure this is a situation where a copyeditor wrote an overly simplistic headline or the reporter herself is sensationalizing a story, but I lean toward the latter. The New York Times has a story titled “Growing Wikipedia Revises Its ‘Anyone Can Edit’ Policy” that discusses a refinement to its policies on page protection. The news of the story is that the project has created a for particular article. “Semi-protected” articles are locked to users whose accounts registered for fewer than four days. Wikipedia has had full protection of articles since before the presidential election, when adminstrators were locking articles about presidential candidates. However, the story doesn’t make the distinction the old page protection and the new semi-protection policy.
If anything, the new semi-protected status is more open than the old approach. A protected page could only be edited by a few administrators, while the rest of the Wikipedia community was locked out. With the new semi-protected status, anonymous users and users who have only created accounts to vandalize a page or disrupt the editing process are locked out. A few new users may be legitimately locked out of making good-faith edits, but, compared to the number of new, hostile users that could be drawn to an article through a critical blog post or astroturf campaign, it seems like a small slice of potential users. I can see how someone like Nick Carr could say that this undermines the “Anyone Can Edit” spirit, but Wikipedia doesn’t say that anyone can edit any page. Compared to many sites, Wikipedia is pretty reluctant to implement hard-and-fast rules and this rule seems to nurture article quality at the expense of users who have shown little commitment to the project.
