Whoever would've thunk it?

I think the whole idea of "anyone can edit" is lost. Yes, you will always get idiots changing pages, but on the other hand, locking down and using flags is against the very ideals that wiki was founded on. Its turning into JAE - Just Another Encyclopaedia.

... the collective conscious of humanity can't be relied on for accuracy after all, and it in fact takes a more experienced and careful real person to vet the outpourings of our hive-mind.

Well paint me purple and call me Sally. What a shock revelation.

I once announced the death of Fred Flinstone on Wikiwhacky.

The posting lasted for months.

Everyone knows that Fred is alive and well, living in Floria with Wilma.

are these guys "undead" now?

... wikisalting for fun and profit?

There does seem to be a competition amongst Wikipedia editors to write up the death of famous people before anybody else; it's like a feeding frenzy. Someone should find a way to automatically detect when someone has added the date of a famous person's death - perhaps by searching for e.g. "- TODAY'S DATE" in the first line, or something smarter - and then send a special award to the person who set the edit. Make it so that a bot automatically does this for everybody, perpetually. It would soon shame them.

My bets this year are on Christopher Lee and - leftfield choice - Adam West. West is relatively young, but he has led a hard life. I hope to be the first person to edit their date of death into Wikipedia, and thus grab the glory.

Thinking about it, couldn't someone add the date of death in right now, flag it as a non-public revision, and then unflag it when the celibrity dies? This would "cue up" their death. It would be quicker than having to type it in live.

So wikipedia are starting to realise that "anyone can edit" does not an authoratative 'encyclopaedia' make.

That's only a few years after everyone else realised that.

Is that the new name for Jimbo?

I was playing wikissassination (How long an you kill someone for?) with friends recently, and the Powers That Be do seem to be getting quite fast as spotting murders. I suspect they are filtering "died", because with some care it's possible to keep people dead for quite a long time.

I don't know who Reg is, but he's dead.

"Is that the new name for Jimbo?"

I would have thought it would be wikitard.

It's funny that people keep saying that WP uses the OSS approach when it allows anyone to edit. It doesn't. Most OSS projects are very careful about who can commit changes. The "commit bit" is a sought after prize in some circles. The key here is that the project name has mindshare. To get your code into the project with a given name (LedgerSMB, Linux (kernel), Bash, or whatever) needs the blessing of a core team member.

Applying the OSS approach to WP would mean that someone who disagreed with the approach of WP could take the encylopedia content and start their own project. This is indeed possible (sans most images) but has rarely been done due to the amount of ground work involved.

Each article remained vandalised for 3-4 minutes before it was corrected. Boo hoo. Move on, nothing to see.