Good thing the people sentenced to death by a thousand edits in this case were already dead.
From Spiked Online we learn:
News that civil servants in Whitehall hacked the Wikipedia entry for the Hillsborough disaster and inserted gratuitous insults about the men and women who died in the worst football-ground disaster in British history was greeted with predictable anger last week. This anger was directed at the anonymous vandals who posted the edits, rather than the organisation and website that facilitated the defamation. But, it must be said, Wikipedia is not blameless in this. It allows misinformation to flourish and provides it with a cloak of respectability. It is under-resourced and is unable to police itself adequately.
The main problem is that the people who use Wikipedia do not care whether it is false or true. Perhaps a losing battle in typical unionized school systems.
Wikipedia has been a massive success but has always had immense flaws, the greatest one being that nothing it publishes can be trusted. This, you might think, is a pretty big flaw. There are over 21million editors with varying degrees of competence and honesty. Rogue editors abound and do not restrict themselves to supposedly controversial topics, as the recently discovered Hillsborough example demonstrates.
If anything, it would actually be easier to write cruel and misleading nonsense about a non-controversial topic or person.
Attempts to tighten up procedures by introducing more arcane and complicated editing processes and rules have themselves been criticised. Kat Walsh, a chair of the Wikimedia foundation, said ‘It was easier when I joined in 2004… Everything was a little less complicated…. It’s harder and harder for new [Wikipedia editors] to adjust.’
It is not a rules issue. It is an ethics issue. The hardest type to police.
We’ve written about Wikipedia in the past. As long as all people want to say is that they consulted The Source Everyone Else Uses, it can just wiki on regardless.
Follow UD News at Twitter!