User talk:65.40.152.95

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[edit] January 2008

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to make constructive contributions to Wikipedia, at least one of your recent edits, such as the one you made to United States Electoral College, did not appear to be constructive and has been automatically reverted by ClueBot. Please use the sandbox for any test edits you would like to make, and take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. If you believe there has been a mistake and would like to report a false positive, please report it here and then remove this warning from your talk page. If your edit was not vandalism, please feel free to make your edit again after reporting it. The following is the log entry regarding this warning: United States Electoral College was changed by 65.40.152.95 (c) (t) replacing entire content with something else on 2008-01-04T17:19:11+00:00 . Thank you. ClueBot (talk) 17:19, 4 January 2008 (UTC)


This is the last warning you will receive for your disruptive edits.
The next time you vandalize Wikipedia, as you did to United States Electoral College, you will be blocked from editing. delldot talk 17:21, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Monitoring

Hey, got your note. Was that you making the changes to pages? Were you testing to see whether they would "go live" without monitoring? The answer is yes, your changes are visible to everyone right away. However, to say that wikipedia is not monitored would be grossly wrong: there are thousands of editors who monitor changes made, dozens at any given time. In fact, that's what I was doing when I left you those notes. Someone from this IP address had made a bad change to a page and I reverted it. If you look at that link (a "diff", or difference within revisions), you'll see that the edit was reverted within a minute, probably more like 15 seconds. So that's how Wikipedia remains reliable despite being editable by almost anyone. But don't take it from me -- read some articles and decide for yourself whether the content is reliable. I think that if you compare a random wikipedia article to its counterpart in another encyclopedia, you'll find it to be more reliable. That's the effect of having a ton of eyes on each page. Hope this answers your question. Leave me a message on my talk page if you have any questions or want to discuss anything. Peace, delldot talk 17:43, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Ah, I see, smack him one for me ;) But really, he proved my point, not his own, didn't he? Yes, anyone can edit articles (with a few exceptions), but his edits were almost immediately undone; it's unlikely that someone loaded the page between when he edited it and it was reverted. That's because at any given time, there are more people that care about the project editing than there are people who want to mess it up.
About your accuracy question, we have a strict verifiability policy: all information must be backed up by reliable sources. Anything that's unsourced can be removed at any time, and this rule is especially strict for biographies of living people. So basically the info stands or falls on how well it's backed up by published sources (perhaps ironically, wikis don't count as reliable sources, because of exactly the vulnerability you're talking about).
But again, you should see for yourself; look around at some random stuff, whatever you know something about. I bet you find it to be accurate. I mean, everyone's initial reaction is "that would never work!" but remarkably, we have an incredible resource here, that was put together almost entirely by anonymous volunteers. Completely counter to everyone's intuition! That's not to say that you won't find any inaccurate information if you hit Special:randompage a couple times; it's a work in progress. But I think the work is working ;) That's just my take on it. Peace, delldot talk 18:12, 4 January 2008 (UTC)