Wikipedia Might Limit User Edits

Saturday, January 24th, 2009
by Jeff

So much for my thought to edit Ryan Seacrest’s Wikipedia page to say he was once spotted drunk in Los Angeles wearing a sombrero screaming lines from ¡Three Amigos!

Wikipedia is thinking about having edits approved by registered, trusted editors. Not a bad idea, but that does take a lot of the fun away from Wikipedia when you try to find the funny edits on pages before they get removed.

Being anonymous makes people confident that they can trash a Wikipedia page, but sometimes you’re not as anonymous as you might think. When the WJBQ Wikipedia page was vandalized, it was a pretty simple matter for me to trace the IP address of the edit and find out who did it. That was fun!

Actually, I think the real reason that Wikipedia is limiting edits is because of what Frank did on 30 Rock: