After controversy surrounding the online biography of John Seigenthaler Sr., Wikipedia has altered its rules for creating new articles.

Seigenthaler discovered, while reading his own biography on Wikipedia, that it contained several factual errors about him, including an implication in both of the Kennedy assassinations.  Naturally he did what anyone would do and complained:

Upon discovery of the falsehoods, Mr. Seigenthaler contacted Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in October 2005, who undertook the unusual step of requesting that the false information be deleted from the article’s version logs—as a result, the unredacted versions of the article can only be viewed by Wikipedia administrators. The false statements had been present in Wikipedia since May 2005—a period of over 4 months. Several Wikipedia “mirror” sites (which are outside the editorial control of Wikipedia itself) continued to reflect the incorrect versions of the article in question for several weeks after. —Wk

Jimmy Wales, the site’s founder, enacted a publishing permissions change whereby users must register and login to create new articles.  However, users may still edit existing articles anonymously, including any acts of vandalism from inserting inane gibberish to blanking entire articles.  The hope is to cut down on the number of new articles so the volunteer editing staff has less to sift through:

While it would not prevent people from posting false information, the new process will make it easier, said Wales, for the site’s 600 active volunteers to review and remove factual errors, defaming statements and other material that runs afoul of Wikipedia policy.

Wikipedia visitors will still be able to edit content already posted without registering. It takes 15 to 20 seconds to create an account on the Web site, and an e-mail address is not required.

“What we’re hopeful to see is that by slowing that down to 1,500 a day from several thousand, the people who are monitoring this will have more ability to improve the quality,” Wales said Monday. “In many cases the types of things we see going on are impulse vandalism.” —CNN

Deep Thought’s take: Is this change really going to make problems better?  By nature Wikipedia is vulnerable to vandalism all the time, as well as factual errors and poor grammatic skills.  Requiring registration (which does not require a valid email address, no less) for new articles will not change the way people post content.  It may not even cut down on the amount of new content, since as the CNN article says, it takes mere seconds to create an account.  Articles will still be open to defamation or inaccurate editing; we do not see this move as particularly useful.