Wikipedia
October 27, 2011 at 3:17 PM
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog has a short article about Andrew West, a Ph.D. student, and Professor Insup Lee at the University of Pennsylvania who studied Wikipedia in 2010, to find out what motivates Wikipedia administrators to delete content permanently from the online encyclopedia: Alexandra Rice, What Wikipedia Deletes, and Why. The blog links to the 4-page text of the Penn researchers' findings, which contains some interesting data about who can delete Wikipedia content, under which circumstances, and how quickly. According to the authors, the approximately 55,000 permanent deletions during 2010 most frequently involved content displaying “characteristics of libel, copyright infringement, and privacy violations.“


