In Search of an Online Utopia

Wikipedia has been criticized because of inaccurate entries, revisionist history and malicious comments. You also came under fire when you started to lock users out of pages.

The media got some of that wrong. For the entire history of Wikipedia, we’ve had the power to lock pages temporarily. If things flared up, or entries were persistently vandalized, then we would lock [a page]. But we never liked that. So we came up with a form of semiprotection. Instead of locking it so that no one can edit, we decided only to allow people on if they’d had an account for at least four days. That was actually opening it—not locking it as before.

What’s so magical about four days?

I think it was fairly arbitrary. But it’s all about slowing down the bad people.

How do you decide what’s acceptable when it comes to sensitive subjects?

The [Wikipedia] community decides. On an unmoderated message board, if someone behaves in an irritating way, no one can come in and do anything about it except yell at them. In a wiki, the social customs are very different. If somebody comes in and posts something very mean and hateful, other people will just delete it. Everything is very transparent and accountable so you can always see who deleted what, so if you do something like that you better be prepared to back up why you’ve deleted it. There’s a process of mutually assured destruction [if entries are too partisan].