Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Wikipedia and Oversight
The article “Know it All: Can Wikipedia Conquer Expertise” mentions that Wikipedia has an “oversight” function by which some admins can purge text from the system. I wonder if other wikis have a similar function. It seems to me that this goes against the main goal of a wiki: open collaboration in which everyone can see what is added, removed and edited. I guess that I can understand removing personal/private information that gets posted, but I think that there should be a note indicating that this information has been deleted on the “Recent Changes” page. I believe that Wikipedia should publicly document when they use the “oversight” function; however, they do not. As Schiff notes: “even the history page bears no record of [deleted information] ever having been there” (Schiff). I wonder if most people are even aware that this function exists. As only a select few admins (28 as of February 2007) have the authority to use the “oversight” key, the general public may have no clue. This does not seem right. Wales says that this measure if rarely used, but how do we know if this is true? Does anyone else see a problem with this “oversight” function?
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2 comments:
Interesting, I don't know how I feel about the 'over-sight' option. In a library environment where we are dealing with different groups it may be beneficial to have an option to delete something if it slanders another group. Graffiti is graffiti, right? How do you feel about that?
I understand deleting graffti, but the "oversight" function seems to me like a slippery slope.... It's a tricky issue. I'm not sure exactly how I feel.
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