Review of changes

Although changes are not systematically reviewed, the software that powers Wikipedia provides
tools allowing anyone to review changes made by others. Each article's History page links to
each revision.[note 4][82] On most articles, anyone can undo others' changes by clicking a link on the
article's History page. Anyone can view the latest changes to articles, and anyone registered may
maintain a "watchlist" of articles that interest them so they can be notified of changes. "New
pages patrol" is a process where newly created articles are checked for obvious problems.[83]

In 2003, economics Ph.D. student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of
participating in a wiki created a catalyst for collaborative development, and that features such as
allowing easy access to past versions of a page favored "creative construction" over "creative
destruction".[84]

Vandalism

Main article: Vandalism on Wikipedia

Any change or edit that manipulates content in a way that deliberately compromises Wikipedia's
integrity is considered vandalism. The most common and obvious types of vandalism include
additions of obscenities and crude humor; it can also include advertising and other types of spam.
[85]
Sometimes editors commit vandalism by removing content or entirely blanking a given page.
Less common types of vandalism, such as the deliberate addition of plausible but false
information, can be more difficult to detect. Vandals can introduce irrelevant formatting, modify
page semantics such as the page's title or categorization, manipulate the article's underlying code,
or use images disruptively.[86]

American journalist John Seigenthaler (1927–2014), subject of the Seigenthaler incident

Obvious vandalism is generally easy to remove from Wikipedia articles; the median time to
detect and fix it is a few minutes.[87][88] However, some vandalism takes much longer to detect
and repair.[89]

In the Seigenthaler biography incident, an anonymous editor introduced false information into
the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler in May 2005, falsely presenting
him as a suspect in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.[89] It remained uncorrected for four
months.[89] Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of the
Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Wikipedia co-founder
Jimmy Wales and asked whether he had any way of knowing who contributed the
misinformation. Wales said he did not, although the perpetrator was eventually traced.[90][91] After
the incident, Seigenthaler described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool".[89]
The incident led to policy changes at Wikipedia for tightening up the verifiability of biographical
articles of living people.[92]

In 2010, Daniel Tosh encouraged viewers of his show, Tosh.0, to visit the show's Wikipedia
article and edit it at will. On a later episode, he commented on the edits to the article, most of
them offensive, which had been made by the audience and had prompted the article to be locked
from editing.[93][94]

Edit warring

Wikipedians often have disputes regarding content, which may result in repeated competing
changes to an article, known as "edit warring".[95][96] It is widely seen as a resource-consuming
scenario where no useful knowledge is added,[97] and criticized as creating a competitive[98] and
conflict-based[99] editing culture associated with traditional masculine gender roles.[100]