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MyLine:ColumnComment: Wikipedia experiments support argument that it's closely monitored Date published: 3/4/2008
Want your say? Students in grades eight to 12 are invited to submit guest columns to BY HIGH SCHOOL, I've always fought these claims with the argument that monitoring the edits on Wikipedia is something that the site's staff members get paid to do 24-7. Recently, I decided to clear up once and for all whether "the free encyclopedia" was to be trusted or not. My first test was to create a random page about myself. It read "Gordon Phillips is the best thing ever, hands down." I added the page to my account's "watch list," which notifies the user of any change made to the page. Within moments--I'd say less than a minute later--the page was deleted under the reason "G1: Patent nonsense, meaningless, or incomprehensible." The staff obviously wastes no time in removing any article that does not fully cite sources or that is completely irrelevant. For my second test, I thought I'd change a fairly well-used, popular page. After adding it to my watch page, I edited the "Early Life" section of the Hillary Rodham Clinton page to include "Hillary was always the fastest kid on the playground and was never picked last when it came to Red Rover." This edit lasted an impressive 31 seconds by the Wikipedia clock until it was completely removed by the Wikipedia administration. The more popular pages seem to be under close watch for any kind of editing.
Your method isn't very scientific. If you created an account, made 100 normal edits and then tried the last thing you did on edit 101 but made it less fictitious, it would have stayed. People have created 100's of articles with rubbish on them in Wikipedia and they've added thousands of bits of rubbish information. Creating a new article and editing a very famous person is no good as most new articles are vetted and people are on the lookout for changes to Hilary's page.
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