What happens if i change wikipedia

A network of organisations across the world, such as RIPE , maintains the database of which addresses is used by whom. The site will do the rest for you. While you personally cannot prove which person made the entry, what the Liverpool Echo is relying on is the knowledge that all good network engineers that manage large networks, such as those run by the UK government, keep an accurate internal track of which IP addresses are being used by which computers within their systems.

While the newspaper can only go so far as to identify the IP addresses used to make the offensive comments on the Hillsborough page, the networking experts who run government systems can go further.

Many routers, proxy servers and firewalls do keep a log of all traffic entering and exiting the network. Knowing the date, time and IP address, makes our job considerably easier when commencing our detailed search. Assuming that the network experts do keep accurate system logs of who does what on their system, it will only be a matter of time before they track a login to a computer that made the Wikipedia entry on the specific date and time.

While they may need to gather other forensic evidence to prove or disprove who was on the computer in question, the case against users will be pretty strong. Andrew Smith does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

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All rights reserved. The Open University is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority in relation to its secondary activity of credit broking. Skip to content Study with The Open University. The site has several tens of thousands of volunteer editors who update the site regularly each month, and this would seem like enough to head off any biased edits.

And on top of that, the ranks of volunteer editors are dwindling, leaving fewer and fewer people to maintain a growing site. Heilman, too, has come to a similar conclusion after conducting a study of his own, which was published this spring in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. He and his co-author, Andrew West, found that between and , the number of Wikipedia editors who focused on medical topics decreased by 40 percent.

For this reason, he likes the policy—in that it has created business for him. So they give up. My website. All of this is troubling only if one sincerely believes that the information on Wikipedia is read at face value. No high school teacher would knowingly accept it as a source, and Wikipedians are fond of saying that research can start on Wikipedia, but it should never end there. But the way people answer their everyday questions today means that a lot of research does end on Wikipedia.

Google has even started embedding excerpts from Wikipedia pages alongside its search results. Fifty to 70 percent of physicians have been found to consult it as a source of medical information—a testament to its reliability.

Some of the text on Wikipedia looked eerily similar to the text in the book—a lazy Wikipedia editor had copied from the Oxford textbook, he guessed. He saw that the section was co-written in by two users, Rhys and ChyranandChloe, and that it was updated in He jumped back over to the textbook and saw that it was published in Lloyd did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The plagiarism was barely concealed.

In that sense, the Oxford textbook did not simply contain plagiarized text from Wikipedia; it appeared to make it less reliable. Nowadays, the estimated prevalence of paid editing changes depending on whom you ask. She points out that Wiki-PR, the furthest-reaching paid-editing operation yet discovered, only made a few thousand edits. It's just one of those things where, probably, everyone speeds a little bit.

Those who consult on editing Wikipedia frame things a little differently. However, Taylor is convinced that most of these edits actually improve the site, and that conflicts of interest are rooted out fairly efficiently.

Don't pretend you don't know. It's the not-for-profit multilingual online encyclopaedia co-founded by Jimmy Wales and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. The English-language version of the Wiki contains nearly five million articles and has an estimated 25 million users. Anyone can - it's open to all and can be modified and edited by anyone. However, Wikipedia's administrators protect some pages from direct editing if they believe they are regularly subjected to "vandalism" - the addition of abusive language or falsehoods.

Wikipedia is self-policing and relies on its community of volunteer editors to improve the quality and accuracy of the pages over time. It's the "wisdom of crowds" principle in action. Writers are encouraged to back up factual statements with verifiable references and authoritative sources as often as possible. Wikipedia has rules - lots of rules. One obvious one is not being dishonest. Another is avoiding opinion and sticking to verifiable facts. But it is possible to set up a user account with a pseudonymous username to allow you to edit anonymously.

However, using anonymous accounts for blatant misrepresentation and puffery - known as sock puppetry - is often spotted and the offending content challenged or removed by other editors.