Editing Incubator escapee wiki:Help desk/Archive 7 (section)

== Quality of Articles ==


I hope this is the correct place to ask this question.  If not, please let me know where to ask it.

I am confused.  Is it really true that anyone can edit anything?  If this is true, what prevents a person with a political (or other agenda) from deliberately inserting non-factual material?  For example -- suppose John Doe is running for a politcal office, and a person writes false "biographical information" about him that says he was convicted of a crime and served time in prison.  Will this be checked in some way before it is allowed into the article, or does Wikipedia rely on fact checking by readers?

-- Andy Goldfinger

-- Baltimore

: Yes, it's really true that anyone can edit anything, and changes take effect immediately.  People can insert false information (or vulgarities, or nonsense...) into articles.  In theory and often in practice, such false information is quickly discovered and removed.  If there is a dispute over the accuracy of some information or the neutrality of an editor, other users may ask for sources to be cited.  We have a [[Wikipedia:Dispute resolution|dispute resolution]] process and a [[Wikipedia:Blocking policy|blocking policy]] for extreme cases.  It is unfortunately the case that some falsification is not discovered immediately and may remain on the site for some time.  Readers are well-advised to maintain a healthy degree of skepticism about information they read on Wikipedia, as they would on any other web site.  If you discover falsehoods in a Wikipedia article, please don't hesitate to remove them (ideally providing your reasoning or citing your sources as you do so!).  Each article has a discussion page on which you can raise questions about the veracity, neutrality, etc. of the article's content, and read previous discussions about it, so if you're unsure about something you read in an article, check its discussion page first to see if the issue has already been raised.

: I hope this addresses your question.  For more detailed discussions on this subject, see [[Wikipedia:Neutral point of view]], [[Wikipedia:Vandalism]], and [[Wikipedia:Replies_to_common_objections]] (specifically [[Wikipedia:Replies_to_common_objections#Partisans]]).  [[User:Triskaideka|<nowiki></nowiki>]]&mdash;[[User:Triskaideka|Triskaideka]] 18:17, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)