What stops people form simply going on to wikipedia and destroying all the good articles?

Question

its so easily done so how come there hasnt been troublemakers just deleting some of the more important articles

Answer 1

People have gone and destroyed the articles, but Wikipedia keeps a change log of all articles. When someone has destroyed or defaced an article, other wikipedia users can "rollback" the change. They do this often with any information that is not accurate, not socially acceptable, graffiti, vandalism etc.

Go to your favorite wikipedia article and at the top you will notice a tab called "history" this will show the history of changes to an article. Registered users can rollback articles to a time where it was considered proper.

Hope this information helps!

Answer 2

I'd like to believe that common sense and human decency prevents people from destroying good wikipedia submissions.

I would imagine though there have been cases where material had to be censored. I check out Wikipedia quite a bit as a reference source and I've seen a few things I think could've been considered "inflammatory".

I'd imagine in the near future, there'll be a bigger and better stop gap measure to protect fraudulent entries. And sadly, it'll probably either require a fee or so much registration and BS that most people will just forget about it,

Kinda like I feel it'll be only a matter if time before You Tube starts charging for submissions and for membership.

Answer 3

I don't know about *destroying*, but I was on there reading up on Gallagher (don't ask), and somebody wrote in a profoundly rude, scandalous, disgusting thing about him that is not only not true about him, but the award in question doesn't even exist. So! I think there *are* people in there doing things like that. On the other hand, that comment has since been removed. While some people are bound to write in false information, there will always be more people reading that information, recognizing it as false, and correcting it.

Answer 4

Since all the articles written are someone's opinion and none of the articles have been
authenticated how does someone determine which
articles/facts/information is real? Just give it
time and someone will I'm sure. I bet there have
been individuals that have editted articles and
put in false information just for laughs.

Answer 5

Generally, most pages have rabid editors that catch stuff fairly quick and do a revert back to what is was before.

I use wiki just to learn about some stuff and then go on from there. They can get real emotional over some entries (Global Warming, Islam issues) but generally its not bad.

Answer 6

I was wondering that, too. Maybe most people know that is just a really ******** thing to do.

Answer 7

good question.