Proposal to flag, approve Wikipedia revisions provokes ire
When the Wikipedia pages for Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd both say that the men have died (when in fact they haven't) and the changes are reverted five minutes later, is it a public relations disaster for the online encyclopedia or triumph of the communal editing model?
Hardcore Wikipedians are currently working through the answer to that question, and the end result of the deliberations could be a new process for flagging revisions to contentious articles. Wikipedia is no stranger to article vandalism, and it's not as though the world isn't aware of that fact by now (see Stephen Colbert's attempt to rewrite the entry for "elephant," for instance, or last week's episode of 30 Rock). But the edits to the Byrd and Kennedy bios attracted national attention after the Washington Post ran a piece about the five minutes of inaccuracy.
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