Hold On A Second, Says Jimmy Wales

Say That Again

from the woah-tiger dept

We reported a few days ago about how a German newspaper had an article quoting Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales as saying the online encyclopedia was trying to decide how to implement stricter controls on some of its content. Sounds good, except Wales says he never said anything about locking or freezing pages, and that his conversation with a reporter about creating a “stable” version of Wikipedia — focused more on identifying its best work rather than changing how it works — got misconstrued in being translated from English to German, back to English and then in to Slashdot. He says that any changes to Wikipedia will come through community consensus, rather than any top-down declaration. Well, if nothing else, it just proves that even standard, professional media (ie Reuters, that published the translation back to English) aren’t infallible. There doesn’t appear to be a correction, either — does that make Reuters unaccountable and therefore untrustworthy?