Remember the tragedy of the commons? One of the problems was that nobody wants to clean up common areas. Sometimes, the work falls on an individual–like this guy who has been watching Hillary Clinton’s Wikipedia entry during the election season:
Schilling is the man who protects Hillary’s online self from the public’s hatred. He estimates that he spends up to 15 hours per week editing Wikipedia …
The fact that Schilling is married to a librarian who, he laments, “never recommends anybody use Wikipedia” (no one, no one, hates Wikipedia as much as librarians) does not diminish his vigilance. “You constantly have to police [the page],” he says, recalling the way Rudy Giuliani’s Wikipedia article declined in quality after its protectors lost interest. “Otherwise, it diverts into a state of nature.”
This makes me wonder: when can we trust a communally edited source like Wikipedia? How many people would trust an article that was on a controversial issue or one that was likely to be frequently updated because of breaking news? Can an article’s stability be measured, and might this be a function of how reliable the informaiton is?
More questions than answers on this issue… but I at least had to share the line about librarians 🙂