http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:156.33.241.5

That's more telling than anything...

Quote from: Joe Hone on January 06, 2013, 12:57 AM

Seven years ago at dinner, I mentioned something I had read on wikipedia and my 12-year-old piped up and said, "I edit postings there all the time!" And after dinner he proved to me that he did. He is 19 now and I just asked him if he remembered that incident and he just snickered and walked away. Just sayin'.

If he was anything like I was at the age of 12, the quality would have been top notch and quite reliable.

Wikipedia Fights Back Against Socking

from the sock-it-to-them dept

The idea that Wikipedia is dying has become one of the Internet's recurrent stories. Because something used by so many people every day is completely free and dependent on the selfless dedication of relatively few individuals, there is perhaps an underlying fear that it will disappear, and it will be our fault for not supporting it better. However, alongside major issues like the need for an influx of new contributors from more diverse backgrounds, one of the lesser-known challenges Wikipedia faces is the rise of "socking", or sock puppetry. Here's how Wikipedia defines the term:

The use of multiple Wikipedia user accounts for an improper purpose is called sock puppetry (often abbreviated in discussion as socking). Improper purposes include attempts to deceive or mislead other editors, disrupt discussions, distort consensus, avoid sanctions, or otherwise violate community standards and policies. The term comes from sock puppet, an object shaped roughly like a sock and used on the hand to create a character to entertain or inform. In Internet terminology it is an online identity used for deception.