He neatly demonstrates some of the problems that WP has - VestedContributor[1] and trusted reputation and a bunch of people circlejerking. But, really, his damage is a minor problem that can be fixed with existing WP policies - check the fucking sources when you're promoting an article to good or whatever status. What's worse is the way that WP deals with a slew of new users. Anon users (despite making most of the good edits on the site) are treated like shit. Registering a username is tricky with conflicting rules. Once you find you've broken a rule can very quickly find it escalating into a bunch of different warnings and blocks and harassment. And don't get me started on the kids running around with auto-tools (twinkle, huggle, rollback, etc) making very rapid, but bad, decisions about other people's edits. This is a more serious problem, and it's something that WP is only half-heartedly tackling.
I suppose It's time I stopped citing Wikipedia as fact. Surely, there was once a time when it really was a reputable source, but it doesn't have as much credibility any more. A pity, really. Then again, it wouldn't be impossible to just do a bit of citation-checking every now and then, and thus do your part to help improve Wikipedia.
I had the thought cross my mind today: Why doesn't Wikipedia upgrade its revision control system to something more along the lines of git or mercurial, where the database is held in a distributed manner, as opposed to a centralized repository with only one line of history. In this manner, the core content would be write-only by trusted staff. When users want to make edits, they pull the source of the page, modify it and commit their changes, and then submit a pull request to the trusted staff, who could then review and merge the changes into the main branch. To some extent, this exists through user pages, where the source of a page is cloned and modified within: wikipedia.org/username/wikipage, and then copied back to the original page when done, but it lacks the benefit of being able to merge other peoples' changes between when the cloning and copying back occurs. Going to ask my wikipedia-inclined friend about this...it's possible that it might generate too many edits for the staff to approve, but it could at least be held as a model for the more controversial pages.
Sure it is. They lock controversial pages regularly. This would just give people the chance to efficiently work on the pages while the locks are there and submit their changes for review while maintaining history and updates made between pulls....it's just not the wiki way to allow edits to be controlled by someone else.