Amid the excitement of a new President’s inauguration, it seems natural enough that the deaths of veteran American senators Robert Byrd and Edward Kennedy were missed by the mainstream media. Fortunate, then, that the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia carried the news.
Only, of course, neither man was dead – it was a wiki-screw up and Wikipedia’s founder and “benevolent dictator”, Jimmy Wales (pictured), is furious about it.
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Though this sort of mistake happens often enough in newspapers (remember Mark Twain’s famous response to reading his obituary: “the report of my death was an exaggeration”) Wales has decided that anonymous editing of the site is to blame, and he has suggested restrictions on who can contribute.
Wales wants the English-language version of the sites to follow the German, which means anonymous changes will be vetted before they are put online.
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