Can the Germans fix Wikipedia?

A new plan from some German engineers aims to prevent vandalism of Wikipedia …

How bad things have things gotten at Wikipedia? It's common knowledge that the site suffers from hoaxsters, inaccurate information, and a vandalism problem that might be funny if it weren't so pervasive. Even the vandalism page has now been vandalized.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told CNET in an interview that the Germans are coming—and they have a plan to save Wikipedia. The German-language version of Wikipedia will get an experimental overhaul in the next few weeks designed to cut down on vandalism, edit wars, and misinformation. How will it work? Through the magical power of trust.

In the German system, any user will still be allowed to make edits to any article. Those edits won't show up in the live version of the site, though, until a registered user with a certain level of time and experience approves the changes. It's a simple change, but one that could prevent the most juvenile forms of vandalism from ever appearing on the main site, which should do much to remove the appeal of vandalizing articles.

The feature probably won't deter more committed defacers and political operatives, but it should bring a stability to the site that Wikipedia currently lacks. If the pilot program is successful, the idea could eventually be incorporated into other Wikipedia sites. While this seems like an obvious step in the right direction, it only deals with Wikipedia's vandalism problem—accuracy issues are not addressed.

The move comes in response to a German court decision early this year that ruled against Wikipedia for publishing the name of a deceased hacker whose family was involved in a court case over his death. The new protections should make it easier for German editors to spot material that might get the site into Heißwasser; simply claiming that "but anyone can edit, your honor!" isn't going to cut it anymore.

Now that Wikipedia a has exploded in size and attracted worldwide interest, finding people willing to do edits and write content for free is no longer Wikipedia's biggest challenge. Now the concern is to find some way to keep the content more stable, so that users who visit a Wikipedia article on three separate days don't find three dramatically different versions of the same article. Wales would like to develop "Wikipedia 1.0," a frozen version of the encyclopedia's contents where a user could "pull Wikipedia articles and be pretty sure you're not going to get a giant penis picture," but he concedes that the material is not yet that polished.

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