The volunteer editors of Wikipedia take their custodial role very seriously. And we should be thankful that they do. They are what keep Wiki at a safe distance from the sexually-repressed and anonymous hordes that populate the comment sections and Urban Dictionarys of the world.
Of course, as a smart ass, I also have a soft spot in my heart for the vandals and pranksters of the Wikiverse. Their digital defilements are like crude drawings scrawled on the wall of a hallowed university library. Always good for a cheap laugh–as long as they remain rare.
In my younger days even I would occasionally take to open source, log-in free venue of Wikipedia to add my cheeky two cents for the entertainment of myself and my friends. Usually, these jackassisms were found and removed in short order. But some edits stayed for months. For all I know, there may still be some stray forgotten “facts” of mine that remain part of the vast (and high search-engine ranking) Wiki knowledge bank.
As a fairly heavy user of Wikipedia, I never found myself getting too discouraged by the occasional deliberate misinformation on the site, because I know the keepers of Wiki
will be there to clean house sooner or later. And they do a fairly good job. But they can’t be
everywhere.
But there may soon be an end to the wild world of crude and salacious Wikipedia edits. Recently, the PAN 2010 Lab in conjunction with CLEF held a competition that invited teams to submit methods to detect different forms of wikivandalism. There was even a €500 prize supplied by Yahoo! Research. Slashdot reports that the winning approach utilized rule-based bots that are programmed to scan for suspicious changes and updates. The bots were able to detect 20% of vandalism without misclassifying any legit posts. However the system could also be adjusted to detect 95% of vandalism, but would then misclassify 30% of regular edits. Either setting is far from perfect and would still require the judgment of a human editor. But nonetheless, if implemented, they would be a valuable aid to the sentinels of Wikipedia in their ongoing war against smart asses.
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