What strategy can Wikipedia use to prevent false information from being published?
Since their database is so huge, its pretty difficult for everything to be accurate. To be honest, in my many years of using wikipedia, i have never come across false information. They do a great job with requiring sources for everything that is posted, but I suppose they would have to get a military of researchers to go through all of the newest pages to make sure they are accurate. But I doubt that will ever happen since I dont think it is that necessary.
There is a technical strategy all ready to go, called “Flagged revisions”, which would reduce deliberately false information by anywhere from 95% to 99%. The German Wikipedia implemented it years ago, to much success. However, the English Wikipedia refuses to implement it — even on a trial basis — because culturally, English-speaking Wikipedians enjoy having Wikipedia as a multi-player game and revenge platform, rather than a serious and reputable encyclopedia. You will note how the Wikipedia game is played, even off-site, when you see this very answer get “thumbs down” votes.
I doubt there is much that can be done to further the tools already used to prevent false information. Vandalism, such as typing “I LOVE MONKEYS” in the middle of an article on the Boeing 747, is often quickly reverted, as there are volunteers (myself included) that go through the Recent Changes page on Wikipedia, searching for vandalism such as this. There are even bots, programs, and scripts that make this even easier. Because of this, vandalism is easy to detect and clear. However, false information being added to an article is hard to detect…it isn’t obvious to the first look of the eye, and the only way someone would know if it’s false is it verify it using another site. No script or bot can be run to detect false information…it’s basically up to people to find it and clear it. However, even if you had a huge team of people in charge of this, the mass of Wikipedia and the amounts of edits made every second would make this a hard task to accomplish.
