Page:E-government 2.0 - Improving Innovation, Collaboration, and Access.pdf/27

 they have proven their worth over a period of time in terms of being good writers, thoughtful editors, kind and helpful to others, the kinds of values that we look for in an administrator.

And the administrators have the ability to do things like temporarily lock pages. We can do that in a couple of different ways. One of the ways that has been very successful is what we call to semiprotect a page, which means anyone can edit that page as long as they have been around and had an account at Wikipedia for 4 days, a very low threshold for entry into participation. But this really helps us in cases where a particular article has been highlighted in a news story or something like this and there are a lot of newcomers coming in and things like that.

Certain articles on very controversial topics tend to be semi-protected pretty much all of the time. An example would be George W. Bush, for example.

Chairman. Right. Let me understand, this is really interesting. The administrator is empowered to essentially make a judgment call if the administrator thinks that a page may be subject to piling on or any thing else, because it is controversial?

Mr. . That is right. And a lot of times we try to keep this to be something of a cooling off period. In other words, something has been in the news, we will semi-protect it for a few days until everybody relaxes a little bit. And there are over a 1,000 active administrators in the English Wikipedia. And of course, they have conversations and discussions and disputes amongst themselves over whether things should be protected or unprotected.

Occasionally some brave soul will say I think we should unprotect the George W. Bush article, they unprotect it, and say I will watch and make sure there is no vandalism. And usually about 6 hours later they are exhausted and protect it again and go to sleep.

So there are some areas of high potential for pranksters and people like that, that end up semi-protected most of the time.

We also have the ability to block IP numbers. So if there is some form of misbehavior and where it is coming from—the typical case would be a high school, a parliament building, this sort of thing. That’s a joke, actually, although it has happened.

We will see some sort of juvenile behavior. And normally what we do in a case like that, is we just simply block that IP number from editing Wikipedia for 24 hours or so. Hopefully that will just calm them down. So that is another sort of tool in our pack.

We have things like recent changes, so there are people who monitor every change that is coming in. Individual users have personalized watch lists. So if you are a particular expert on birds, for example. I met a scientist at Cornell University who is an ornithologist. He monitors a lot of the bird articles. He does not have time to do it personally everyday, but about once a week he said he comes in and checks out a lot of the bird articles. And he can quickly look at the change, just the change in the article. Rather than him to reread the whole thing from scratch, he can quickly see what has changed since the last time he has been there to make sure it seems suitable to him.

So all of those kinds of tools are important, but probably one of the most important tools of all is that the entire history if every