Wikipedia's spell over us wanes
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Wikipedia, the fifth-most-visited Web site on earth, held a conference in August to discuss their plans to rule the world -- but they won't succeed.

The conference, held in Buenos Aires, Argentina and appropriately named Wikimania, pitted the just over 20 Wikimedia Foundation employees against a small percentage of the people who live and die trying to save Wikipedia from inaccuracies.

A new program specially designed for Wikipedia, called "flagged revisions," was unveiled at Wikimania. The program will show edits on any page immediately after they're made -- potentially prompting a more accurate Wikipedia.

But it won't matter how many editors scour Wikipedia for mistakes, using the latest and best programs to do it -- Wikipedia will always remain a resource, not a source for those looking to cite accurate information.

There's one problem with the new program: "It's completely wrong," Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder, said. The program works on a case-by-case basis to prevent errors within articles, but they're still working out the kinks, he said.

Wikimedia hopes to adopt the editing program soon to help out the site's over 200 million articles in 250 languages, according to Jay Walsh, spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia.

Currently, if everyone can add to the site and edit it, what's stopping everyone from getting things wrong?

Everyone else stops it, Walsh said.

But too many editors clogging up the Web site, trying to separate truth from inaccuracy, is actually adding to the site's problem.

Since its inception in 2002, there are currently over 100,000 edit requests-per-second on the site's pages, and the number of editors range in the hundreds of thousands, according to Walsh.

Not even the Wikipedia community could save the global media from being defiled last March when Dublin University student Shane Fitzgerald posted a phony poetic quote on French composer Maurice Jarre's Wikipedia page hours after his death as part of a sociology experiment.

Almost every major media outlet ran the quote verbatim, prompting a retraction list a mile long, according to a May 12 MSNBC article.

"I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up," Fitzgerald told MSNBC last May.

Fitzgerald hadn't added any negative words about Jarre, which Wikipedia editors would have picked up quickly -- just misinformation, the scariest kind of vandalism and ultimately Wiki's Achilles' heel.

The "flagged revisions" program hopes to erase these problems within Wikipedia, but it won't stop them from happening because of its democratic nature. The solution to making the online encyclopedia completely accurate would be counterintuitive to its purpose.

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