Wikipedia is one of the most prominent cases for world collaboration and social media in action. Unlike the standard encyclopedia, often written by experts and sourced from the same, Wikipedia articles are entirely community-built, often without restrictions. If you can create an account, you can write and edit Wikipedia articles. It is that feature that as made it into one of the world’s most popular websites.

Now a core feature, perhaps a core principal, of “the free encyclopedia anyone can edit” is about to become restricted. According to The New York Times, editing articles about living people on Wikipedia will require approval from an experienced editor first.

Is this a fundamental shift to the Wikipedia philosophy, or a necessary step to assure that quality reigns over misinformation?

Flagged Revisions

The lengthy New York Times piece goes into detail about this plan. Or, as Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales called it, a test:

“It is a test. We will be interested to see all the questions raised. How long will it take for something to be approved? Will it take a couple of minutes, days, weeks?”

The new restrictions are called flagged revisions. Before any newbie or novice updates the Wikipedia page of a living person, a senior editor has to sign off on the change before it goes live. This will occur to the English edition of Wikipedia in the next few weeks. It’s been in testing already, as the German-language version already has this restriction on all articles.

Why the change now though? Wikimedia chairman Michael Snow had this to say to the NYT:

“We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks. There was a time probably when the community was more forgiving of things that were inaccurate or fudged in some fashion — whether simply misunderstood or an author had some ax to grind. There is less tolerance for that sort of problem now.”

Wikipedia Turns the Page

As Wikipedia’s influence has grown, so has the amount of reliance people have placed in the social media non-profit. People go to Wikipedia first for information on almost every topic. It has replaced the paper and binder encyclopedias of old, especially for the new generation.

However, adding misinformation and inaccurate edits is relatively easy, and those changes could stay up for hours, days, or even weeks in some cases. It’s been one of Wikipedia’s major drawbacks. The new flagged revisions feature is really the only effective way to address the issue of inaccuracy. We won’t be surprised if the change is imposed on all articles eventually.

Still, we can’t help but feel a bit sad that this change had to happen. Wikipedia was egalitarian in the spread and use of information, and it treated everyone as equal contributors of knowledge. While that may not necessarily be true in the real world, it still was the driving force behind the creation of 3 million articles, more than any other encyclopedia could ever hope to boast.

The move was necessary, but it does mark a new chapter in the Wikipedia information age and the end of an old one.

While there are many unofficial Wikipedia iPhone apps on the market (some of which work really well), there’s never been an official one from Wikipedia itself. That changed today as the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that runs Wikipedia, has launched an official iPhone application: Wikipedia Mobile [iTunes Link].

The free app does exactly what you’d expect it to do: access Wikipedia. The focus, according to the Foundation, is “on being very simple and very fast.” The entire thing is community-built and open-source, and in the nature of Wikipedia, they’re looking for more people to contribute.

The app itself is nothing to rave over; it is indeed simple, but unfortunately not particularly fast-loading. Still, it gets you the information you’re looking for, it loads images, and it is easy to read. What you can’t do is save favorite pages, edit pages, or even browse tables of contents – things other apps like Wikipanion [iTunes Link] can do too.

For now, it’s a more convenient mobile version of Wikipedia, but with community power, it should gain new features rather quickly. It’s worth the download, although you may want to keep using third-party Wikipedia apps for the time being.

Beate Marie Eriksen (born 19 October 1960) is a Norwegian actress and film director. She acts in Hotel Cæsar, a popular Norwegian soap opera. The article about her on Wikipedia is the three millionth article there; another important milestone in the history of the people’s encyclopedia.

This latest milestone was announced on the front page of the English Wikipedia, but searching Wikipedia for itself reveals other interesting stats (for even more stats, read about the history of Wikipedia). It has about 10 million registered users and over 17 million pages. For comparison, the oldest English language encyclopedia, Britannica, has 40 million words on half a million topics. And yes, I also found that on Wikipedia.

Although the growth of Wikipedia has slowed down somewhat in recent years, it is, without question, one of the most important sources of knowledge today. The number of articles will never grow as explosively as it did in the early days, for obvious reasons: so many topics have already been covered.

It is important to note that Wikipedia actually has 13 million articles, if you count the versions in other languages, which still have tremendous room to grow. Therefore, I’m sure that the largest online encyclopedia hasn’t will reach many more milestones in the future.