Moderation is a hot topic at Wikipedia. The New York Times published this article on June 17 about Wikipedia’s new rules with regard to content control.
Wikipedia moderation: Admin Tightening Control on Content
The website co-founded by Jimmy Wales has now taken steps in order to avoid mishaps such as the ones that were reported in this blog earlier this year or in 2005 (re Web 2.0 gone mad for instance).
The list of protected articles is no longer visible on the Times’ website but excerpts can be viewed on the ‘Sloppy Mermaid’ blog.
A follow-up of this article is to be found on Nicholas Carr’s blog who seems to have become addicted to blogging now after trying to play down the impact of Web 2.0 and Web collaboration.
Jimmy Wales admits in the Times that the number of contributors in Wikipedia is in fact very small. Barely 1000 writers overall. Carr argues that this makes Wikipedia a rather ordinary type of online reference documentation, the main difference being that its contributors are not being paid. Mind you, this is a pretty big difference after all.
