a wikipedia question

[rafiki55]

What prevents some malicious person from going and deleting every/some entries from wikipedia?

[SK79]

when people look something up and its not there or is screwed up then they just retype it. simple

[rafiki55]

so it's a sheer numbers thing? There are more people writing than erasing?

[SK79]

yeah and when people do the erasing nobody cares cause its probably something that nobody would care to look up i guess

[SK79]

but i guess theres always those crotchety old geezers who change everything so theyr perfect

[gesteves]

In the normal operations of Wikipedia, several hundred articles are deleted each day. While it is possible for any user to blank a page, the original content will still be available in the page history for others to view and put back if they wish. When pages are deleted, this removes not only the current version but also all previous versions.

Only administrators have the ability to delete and undelete pages within the system. With our current deletion system administrators necessarily must use their best judgment in making this decision. You can expect administrators to follow the process detailed below to aid them in their judgment.

Deleted pages can be restored, by administrators, if and only if there is support on Wikipedia:Votes for undeletion, or the page was speedily deleted out-of-process. If deletions are made too casually, it is easy to lose track. Hence, the decision to permanently delete an article is not taken lightly, and the deletion process is followed. See Wikipedia:Undeletion policy for the guidance on undeletion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipediaeletion_policy

[SK79]

yeah that sounds pretty much right

[rafiki55]

oh thanks!

now my second question is ..anyone know of a free/really cheap script that will allow me to have a similar system on my site?

[admedia]

http://www.wikiweb.com/

choose download

*nevermind... i thought it was free this might be the wrong link...

[admedia]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/wiki/

There are some others in here as well... search on wiki.

[nordberg]

that's the beauty of wiki - there is a history of every version of every page. so cool.

i've been experimenting with the free instiki wiki , which runs locally on ruby ...it's been fun.
i'm really trying to see how wiki can help my team, my company, and eventually our clients.

[rafiki55]

excellent thanks! I didn't know that wiki exsisted....I just knew of wikipedia.

[SK79]

aye

[rafiki55]

nvm figured it out

[azwaldo]

if you are at all curious about the dynamics of a wikipedia article, here is an interesting screencast by Jon Udell (narrated screen capture video) exploring the history of the Heavy Metal Umlaut article at wikipedia; Mr. Udell is a web-programming guru, and toward the end you'll see a great example of how wiki-vandalism gets handled