New restrictions at Wikipedia

According to the New York Times, "Wikipedia is now the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the world. As of Friday, it was receiving 2.5 billion page views a month, and offering at least 1,000 articles in 82 languages. The number of articles, already close to two million, is growing by 7 percent a month." But now, according to the Wikipedia web site, “only logged-in users may currently create pages in the main article namespace on Wikipedia. Other users will receive a message saying that they are not currently allowed to create a new page.” This policy change is a response to recent complaints by retired journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. that a biographical entry on Wikipedia falsely accused him of possible involvement in the assassinations of JFK and Bobby Kennedy. According to an editorial by Seigenthaler in USA Today, the “malicious” information written by an anonymous user lasted 132 days on Wikipedia until his complaints resulted in its removal. Seigenthaler and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales were interviewed by CNN on December 5^th and the transcript is available here.

Read it for yourself and let us know what you think. Does this incident support Seigenthaler’s assertion that, “Wikipedia is a flawed and irresponsible research tool”?