Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia is planning to launch a new program on how people contribute to some of the pages. It will need to revise pages about living people and news about some organizations be approved by an editor which will be a radical shift in the website because currently it allows anyone to alter the contents of any of the pages. Mr. Mike Peel of Wikimedia said that there will be a two month trial starting in a couple of weeks even though it is bound to raise some controversies. However the trial was approved by an online poll of 259 users in favor of the trial which formed 80% of the users.
In January, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia proposed about this trial which was followed by a lot of protests from many Wikipedia users. During the two month trial any changes made by unknown persons will be verified by the site’s editors before it is published and while the changes are going on the users will be directed to the existing version of the article. This is because there has been many misleading information regarding some important persons which made the editors lock down their pages.
It’s interesting that you would say “the founder of Wikipedia” Jimmy Wales.
Wales was a “co-founder” of Wikipedia, and he didn’t even name it — the other co-founder, Dr. Larry Sanger, is the one who applied the name “Wikipedia”.
There is a bit of an intellectual scuffle over the purported lies that Wales continues to disseminate by claiming that he is the “founder”, or even more ridiculously, the “sole founder” of Wikipedia. See Sanger’s open letter to Wales and the media, if you care to see more.
It gives me pause to have a publicly-accused liar as the Chairman Emeritus of the foundation that oversees the “sum of human knowledge”. There’s some irony there, I guess, which is a bit humorous.