Subtitles of the Movie

In this segment, let's discuss accountability. So why does the revision history on a wiki matter? Because it creates accountability. The revision history or the changes link on a wiki allows any user to view the revisions to a page and the user or IP address if applicable that made that change. Imagine if you would, if wiki articles were editable by anyone without accountability. What a mess that would be. Some users must have been unaware of this though. Recent controversies have stemmed from suspected corporate wiki mischief. Microsoft, DBold and other have been accused of changing their Wikipedia entries to cast them in a more favorable light. Another controversy that brought revision history into play was a edit to the article for John Seigenthaler. John Seigenthaler was a respected and well-known journalist who had his entry changed to reflect that he was somehow involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This was not true, of course, but this was not found in his article until months later. Because of these controversies, a tool called WikiScanner was released in August of 2007. WikiScanner is a publicly searchable database that links anonymous Wikipedia edits to the suspected organization that made the edit. The tool uses the IP address that is viewable on an anonymous edit on Wikipedia to cross reference to these suspected organizations. However, it can be sidestepped easily. So what is the point? Accountability is crucial to maintaining content that is unbiased and neutral. These are very important concepts to maintaining an accurate and reliable wiki. Wikipedia is not allowed as reference material in most educational institutions. Why is this? Because of the nature of the wiki being able to be changed at any point in time, the article that is referenced as a reference material in a research paper for example, it could not be true; it could not be factual. It might be biased and not neutral. So if you're relying on wiki to provide quality information, can you trust it? If you don't enforce or attempt to enforce accountability on your wiki, will your users stay and contribute? These are all things that you need to consider as you're trying to decide if you're going to enforce accountability and make sure that the articles or topics that are covered on your wiki are unbiased and neutral. Accountability is crucial to making sure that users come and stay at your wiki.