This, folks, is big news.
Officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit in San Francisco that governs Wikipedia, say that within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.
The new feature, called “flagged revisions,” will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved — or in Wikispeak, flagged — it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia’s servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.
Wikipedia is, for all the criticism it takes, a relatively reliable source of information. In is, in fact, a compendium of received wisdom. If someone alters a wikipedia entry to say something that differs significantly from what the majority of people hold true, it will be corrected. So I suppose the big difference is that in a traditional encyclopedia a scholar or small group of scholars synthesize received knowledge and set it down in concise form in big books or databases that are revised every few years. In wikipedia, everyone who has knowledge is constantly revising.
Still the problems that led to this change do exist, so what is to be done?
via Wikipedia Will Limit Changes on Articles About Living People – NYTimes.com.