Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-168424-20181204174047/@comment-9605025-20181204201109

You know, I never really gave it much thought before but it is true that Wikipedia has become a major source of information. All this despite the fact that it is still vulnerable to vandalism due to the nature of community-based wikis. I have always known to be cautious of outright believing everything on it, but I never thought specifically about vandalism.

It makes one wonder about the best way to ensure quality information. After all, Wikipedia is not the only community wiki used for other applications. At one point (if not currently), the Wikia's Yu-Gi-Oh wiki was used as a card database for one of the popular electronic playing platforms (YGOPro, I think. Don't quote me on that.). When I found out, I thought, "So all you have to do to mess with the game platform is sneak in some card vandalism on the wiki?". The article mentions that Siri and the like cache the data much longer than Wikipedia does, so here is a thought. What if the client platforms placed a waiting period. Instead of updating with the immediate version, wait until the some information has been in the last several versions. Assuming admins are relatively swift in removing vandalism, this would mitigate the risk of accidentally reposting the vandalized content.

I agree with the admins' concerns. In fact, that is the first thing that came to mind when I read the prior paragraph. Since admins can revert (albeit with difficulty) other admins' edits, I personally think it would be safer to have to deal with that until a bureaucrat demotes the hacked admin account. Sure, the risk of an admin mass lockout is unlikely, but the potential damage is so much more.

On an unrelated note, Wikipedia was out asking for donations last Tuesday like all the other non-profits. Since it is so critical to platforms such as Siri, which make money, perhaps it is time to implement a license change. Maybe it is time to start charging large companies for using their data. Do they do this already? If someone knows, please respond.