Wikipedia May Restrict Editorial Rights

Online Pool of Knowledge Wikipedia may enforce new changes soon which may prevent new users to make changes on certain articles and prevent potential acts of vandalism.

The issue arose after several users modified the wikipedia entries for Senators Edward Kennedy and Robert Byrd, writing that they had both died during the inaugural lunch of US President Barack Obama.

Wikipedia's Co-founder, Jimmy Wales, says that implementing so called "flagged versions" would reduce the probability of having inaccurate revisions on the site thereby improving accuracy and quality.

A "Flagged versions" article would only be editable by registered and trusted editors immediately with other amendments being queued up until further approval by Wikipedia's own team of editors.

The German version of Wikipedia has been testing this feature and showed very minimal delays. However, Wales' proposal of rolling it out across the whole of Wikipedia could cause serious ruckus with 40 percent of the community saying that they were against it.

He added that the conundrum facing Wikipedia management is that there was a breaking news story and that they wanted people to participate and even participate in good faith; which in both cases mean that protection and semi-protection would have been out of question.

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