You, me, everybody have rights to edit Wikipedia. You don’t need to be exclusively elected as an author or anything of that sort to edit Wikipedia. That’s the concept behind people’s encyclopedia.
There is good side and a bad side to this:
Good side is that a lot of information is shared and the bad side, spamming. Spamming because of back links. Back links from an authority source like Wikipedia is very valuable and the any-one-can-edit culture makes it inviting for spammers to go ahead and put links on Wikipedia. Also at times the content that goes in is “biased”, far from actual truth.
It was very hard for to stop spammers this and until a geek came up with an online solution to track Wikipedia edits. An online scanning tool http://www.wikiscanner.virgil.gr came into existence, which tracks every single edit on Wikipedia :).
Some interesting edits were caught, like there were IPs that referred to the FBI reported to have edited pages relating to Guantanamo Bay, some church groups were caught editing reportage about sex scandals 🙂 ..
Watch on to find more interesting, more importantly anonymous edits.
best site of all the sites