New York (NY) -In a bid to prevent famous people from shuffling off this mortal coil ahead of their time, online repository of questionable facts, Wikipedia, is to block changes to articles on the living.
Wikipedia plans to assign an ‘experienced editor’ to monitor changes to articles on living people, confirming a report yesterday in the New York Times. Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh said the ‘flagged revisions’ feature is already active on its German site, but needs ‘more work’ before it goes live on the English site.
Earlier this year, Wikipedia reported that Ted Kennedy had died and had to publish a rapid correction.
Walsh says the idea is to prevent vandals from killing celebrities and that any changes made to articles about the living will remain unpublished until cleared by an editor. It is not known if the scheme will become a permanent feature of the encyclopedia that almost anyone used to be able to edit.
Wikimedia also failed to comment on who would monitor the editors who have made what can only be called some singular editorial decisions in the past and turned Wikipedia into an elite club where only approved contributors get a look in and decide which articles should live and die.
