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Conclusion

Part 1 has identified that Wikipedia faces persistent threats; these threats have contributed to a social environment that discourages new participation. Part 2 will explore how these barriers to participation threaten Wikipedia. I also consider some ways that Wikipedia might overcome the barriers.

Endnotes

  1. See, for example, Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks (2008), and the many commentaries of Benkler’s book.
  2. Examples include countless BBSs, Usenet groups, dormant or dead email lists, message boards, MUDs, online games and websites, and even popular UGC websites such GeoCities, theglobe.com and JuicyCampus. For a post-mortem case study of a once-vibrant online community, see Amy Bruckman and Carlos Jensen’s “The Mystery of the Death of MediaMOO, Seven Years of Evolution of an Online Community” in Building Virtual Communities 21 (Ann Renninger and Wesley Shumar eds., 2002).
  3. See James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations (2004).
  4. See Cass R. Sunstein’s Infotopia 151–52 (2006) (arguing that Wikipedia succeeds because “so many minds are involved”); Daniel R. Cosley’s Helping Hands: Design for Member-Maintained Online Communities 6–7 (July 2006) (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota), available at http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~cosley/ thesis/final.pdf (discussing the benefits of community-maintained sites); cf. Eric S. Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar, http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ (“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”).
  5. Cf. Jonathan L. Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (2008) (discussing the tension between “generative” systems that facilitate user innovations and “appliancized” systems that provide greater security but sacrifice generativity). Zittrain treats Wikipedia as a laudatory example of a generative system that he apparently thinks can avoid becoming appliancized. See id. This article explains why I think Wikipedia will become more appliancized and less generative.
  6. Posting of Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales to Wikipedia-l, http://lists.wikimedia.org/ pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-March/020469.html (March 8, 2005, 19:16 UTC).
  7. This article focuses on Wikipedia’s English-language version, although its analysis generally applies to other Wikipedia versions as well.
  8. See “Alexa Top 100 Sites,” http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US (last visited August 31, 2009) (ranking Wikipedia as the number 7 site, ahead of eBay, AOL, and Amazon.com). See also “comScore Media Metrix Ranks Top 50 U.S. Web Properties for November 2008” (December 16, 2008), http://ir.comscore.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=354584 (ranking Wikimedia Foundation websites as the number 9 property).
  9. Wikipedia: Statistics, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics (last visited July 26, 2009).
  10. Jim Giles’s “Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head,” 438 Nature 900, 900–01 (2005). But see “Press Release, Encyclopedia Britannica Rips Nature Magazine on Accuracy Study” (March 24, 2006), available at http://corporate.britannica.com/press/releases/nature.html.
  11. See, for example, Simson L. Garfinkel’s “Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth,” Tech. Rev., November – December 2008, http://www.technologyreview.com/web/21558/ (“Wikipedia’s articles are the first- or second-ranked results for most Internet searches.”); Nicholson Baker’s “The Charms of Wikipedia,” 55 N.Y. Rev. Books 4, 6 (2008) (“[I]t’s very often the first hit in a Google search.”). See also Michaël R. Laurent and Tim J. Vickers’s “Seeking Health Information Online: Does Wikipedia Matter?,” 16 J. Am. Med. Informatics Assoc. 471 (2009) (showing the high ranking of Wikipedia entries for health-related search queries).
  12. For example, Google could change its algorithm to reduce Wikipedia’s prominence in its search results. Indeed, there is some speculation that Google’s “Caffeine” project does exactly that. See posting of Nathania Johnson to SearchEngineWatch.com, Meet the New Google. “Not That Much Different from the Old Google,” http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/090810-232027 (August 10, 2009, 23:20). Any dramatic decrease in Wikipedia’s traffic could have uncertain effects on this article’s analysis; it would abate some of the spam and vandalism incentives, but it may also reduce some contributors’ interest in participating.
  13. “A Wiki allows a group to edit text together. Wikis might be open, meaning that anyone can elect to write. Others require permission and a password. Still others allow some people to post and others only to edit.” Beth S. Noveck’s “Wikipedia and the Future of Legal Education,” 57 J. Legal Educ. 3, 4 (2007); see also Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations 111–12 (2008).
  14. “Welcome to Wikipedia,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (last visited September 23, 2009). But see, for example, posting of Joseph Reagle to Open Communities, Media, Source, and Standards, Goldman on Wikipedia’s Failure (i.e., “Labor Squeeze”), http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/social/wikipedia/goldman-labor-squeeze (September 11, 2009) (free editability is a means to Wikipedia’s end, not central to its identity).
  15. See generally Paul Duguid’s “Limits of Self-Organization: Peer Production and ‘Laws of Quality,’” 11 First Monday 10 (2006), http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/ index.php/fm/article/view/1405/1323 (discussing how to measure UGC’s “quality”).
  16. See Lior Strahilevitz’s “Wealth Without Markets,” 116 Yale L.J. 1472, 1493–97 (2007) (discussing “The March of the Trolls”); Phoebe Ayers et al., “How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can be a Part of It” 143–44 (2008).
  17. Wikipedia: Vandalism, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vandalism (last visited July 3, 2009) [hereinafter Wikipedia: Vandalism]. Like the definition of wiki-spam, vandalism has multiple definitions. Compare Ayers’s supra note 16, at 209 (“Vandalism is, by definition, a change made to Wikipedia with the malicious intention of having a negative effect on the content.”) with John Broughton’s “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual” 121 (2008) (“Vandalism—the destruction of content or the addition of useless or malicious content.”).
  18. Wikipedia: Vandalism, supra note See generally Posting to Best Colleges Online, 25 Biggest Blunders in Wikipedia History, http://www.bestcollegesonline.com/blog/ 2009/02/10/25-biggest-blunders-in-wikipedia-history/ (February 10, 2009, 01:39) (cataloging some prominent examples of Wikipedia vandalism).
  19. Wikipedia: The Motivation of a Vandal, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Wikipedia:The_motivation_of_a_vandal (last visited September 23, 2009); Ayers’s supra note 16, at 122 (“[S]ome of the very best and most heavily trafficked articles on Wikipedia receive the most vandalism, simply because they are so visible…”).
  20. Wikipedia: WikiProject Vandalism studies/Study1, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Vandalism_studies/Study1 (last visited December 29, 2008) [hereinafter Vandalism Study]. Another survey estimated that 42 percent of errors were corrected before any readers saw the erroneous information, rendering those errors inconsequential. See Reid Priedhorsky et al., “Creating, Destroying and Restoring Value in Wikipedia” (November 2007) (unpublished paper), available at http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~reid/papers/group282-priedhorsky.pdf.
  21. Vandalism Study, supra note However, a small sample size (only 31 incidents) may limit this finding’s robustness.
  22. See Howard T. Welser et al., “Finding Social Roles in Wikipedia” (2008) (unpublished paper), available at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~danco/research/papers/wp-roles-welser-asa2008.pdf (“[A] large and organizationally important class of Wikipedian is the vandal fighter (counter vandalism editor).”).
  23. See Priedhorsky’s supra note 20 (discussing the challenges posed by small rates of vandalism across a large volume of edits, and estimating the labor required to combat the problem).
  24. Broughton’s supra note 17 (“For editors, fighting vandalism reduces the amount of time available to improve articles.”).
  25. See Bongwon Suh et al., “The Singularity Is Not Near: Slowing Growth of Wikipedia,” WikiSym 2009, http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~echi/papers/2009-WikiSym/wikipedia-slow-growth-ASC-PARC.pdf (top 1 percent of Wikipedia editors make 55 percent of edits); Felipe Ortega et al., “On the Inequality of Contributions to Wikipedia,” Proc. 41st Haw. Int’l Conf. on Sys. Scis. (2008), http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/HICSS.2008.333 (discussing the steep power law of user contributions); Katie Hafner’s “Growing Wikipedia Revises Its ‘Anyone Can Edit’ Policy,” NY Times, June 17, 2006, at A1; Priedhorsky’s supra note 20 (discussing the steep power law of user contributions); Posting of Aaron Swartz to Raw Thought, “Who Writes Wikipedia?,” http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia (September 4, 2006, 12:17) [hereinafter Swartz, Who Writes] (quoting Jimmy Wales as saying that “[Fifty percent] of all the edits are done by just .7 percent of the users… 524 people… And in fact the most active 2 percent, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4 percent of all the edits.”); cf. Sarah Perez’s “The Dirty Little Secret About the ‘Wisdom of the Crowds’: There is No Crowd,” ReadWriteWeb, September 17, 2009, http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_dirty_little_secret_about_the_wisdom_of_the_crowds.php (describing how many online communities exhibit a strong power law phenomenon among contributors).
  26. Cf. Elinor Mills, “The Big Digg Rig,” CNET News, December 4, 2006, http://news.cnet.com/2100-1025_3-6140293.html (discussing how websites like Digg.com attract spammers as the sites’ traffic grows).
  27. Posting of Brad Patrick to WikiEN-l, http://markmail.org/message/ 3pwmvw3w4krfin6g (September 29, 2006, 09:52); see also Ayers’s supra note 16, at 350 (In 2007, “outsiders were increasingly using Wikipedia for promotional ends by writing about themselves and their ventures.”).
  28. Wikipedia: Spam, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Spam (last visited June 11, 2009).
  29. Marketers like masquerading because readers may assign more credibility to editorial content than advertising. See Eric Goldman’s “Stealth Risks of Regulating Stealth Marketing,” 85 Texas L. Rev. See also 11 (2007) (reviewing Ellen P. Goodman’s “Stealth Marketing and Editorial Integrity,” 85 Tex. L. Rev. 83 (2006)).
  30. See Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s “L’Industrie Pharmaceutique Manipule Wikipédia,” Rue89.com, Apr. 7, 2009, http://www.rue89.com/2009/04/07/l-industrie-pharmaceutique-manipule-wikipedia.
  31. See Eric Goldman’s “Search Engine Bias and the Demise of Search Engine Utopianism,” 8 Yale J. L. & Tech. 188, 204–05 (2006).
  32. For example, on October 20, 2009, the Wikipedia English home page had a Google toolbar PageRank of 8 out of “Welcome to Wikipedia,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (last visited October 20, 2009) (screen shot on file with author). Interior pages can also have a high PageRank. For example, on October 20, 2009, the Wikipedia page for George W. Bush had a Google toolbar PageRank of 7 out of “George W. Bush,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_w_bush (last visited October 20, 2009) (screen shot on file with author).
  33. Posting of Brion Vibber to WikiEN-l, http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/ 2007-January/061137.html (January 20, 2007, 09:30).
  34. Posting of Matt Cutts and Jason Shellen to The Official Google Blog, “Preventing Comment Spam,” http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html (January 18, 2005, 16:28).
  35. See Zittrain’s supra note 5, at 153–54, 177–78.
  36. See Katherine Mangu-Ward’s “Wikipedia and Beyond: Jimmy Wales’ Sprawling Vision,” 39 Reason 19, 22 (2007).
  37. See Broughton’s supra note 17 (“[A]s Wikipedia becomes more widely read, the temptation grows to add links in the hopes that someone will click them, generating traffic for the spamming Web site.”); Ayers’s supra note 16, at 154 (discussing Wikipedia’s blacklist of oft-spammed external links).
  38. Wikipedia: Your First Article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_a_page (last visited August 15, 2009).
  39. Wikipedia: Requests for Arbitration/Scientology, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Scientology#Final_decision (last visited August 10, 2009); see Noam Cohen’s “The War of Words on Wikipedia’s Outskirts,” NY Times, June 8, 2009, at B3; Cade Metz’s “Wikipedia Bans Church of Scientology,” The Register, May 29, 2009, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/29/wikipedia_bans_scientology/.
  40. A CAPTCHA is an automated challenge posed to users to “ensure that a human is making an online transaction rather than a computer.” Definition of: CAPTCHA, PC Mag. Encyclopedia, http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,,t=captcha&i=39272,00.asp (last visited August 18, 2009).
  41. Wikipedia: User Access Levels, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:User_access_levels (last visited August 17, 2009) [hereinafter Wikipedia: User Access].
  42. See generally Ayers’s supra note 16, at 143–44.
  43. “The precise requirements for autoconfirmed status vary according to circumstances: For most users on en.wiki, accounts which are more than 4 days old and have made at least 10 edits are considered autoconfirmed.” Wikipedia: User Access, supra note
  44. Wikipedia: Protection Policy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protection_policy (last visited August 18, 2009). Wikipedia also enables “creation protection” (to prevent the repeat creation of an unwanted article) and “move protection” (to restrict article renaming). Id. In rare cases, Wikimedia staff may also make incontestable changes/protections to articles, such as to delete copyright-infringing works. Wikipedia: Office Actions, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Office_actions (last visited August 18, 2009).
  45. As of October 15, 2009, there were less than 30 non-redirect indefinitely fully protected articles. Wikipedia: Database Reports/Indefinitely Fully Protected Articles, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_reports/Indefinitely_fully_protected_articles (last visited October 15, 2009) (screen shot on file with author).
  46. Ayers, supra note 16, at 143.
  47. See id. at 144 (“Semi-protection… compromises the purist wiki principle of anyone can edit anything, but protection has been necessary essentially because of Wikipedia’s own prominence.”). Dirk Riehle,How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko,” in Proc. 2006 Int’l Symp. on Wikis 3, 6 (2006), http://dirkriehle.com/computer-science/research/2006/wikisym-2006-interview.pdf (Wikipedia administrators acknowledged that “[t]he biggest challenge is to maintain what made us who and what we are: the traditional wiki model of being openly editable. There are temptations to lock things down in order to placate the media who tend to focus on the inadequacies of the site.”)
  48. Wikipedia: Flagged Revisions, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions (last visited August 11, 2009).
  49. Wikipedia: Flagged Revisions, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FlaggedRevs (last visited October 27, 2009).
  50. See Posting of Noam Cohen to NY Times Bits Blog, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2009/01/23/wikipedia-may-restrict-publics-ability-to-change-entries/ (January 23, 2009, 17:46 EST).
  51. For example, due to Flagged Revisions at the German Wikipedia site, editors review more than 95 percent of new contributions, causing up to a three-week delay before articles are approved for general publication. Id.
  52. Wikipedia: Flagged Protection and Patrolled Revisions, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection_and_patrolled_revisions (last visited November 17, 2009). In August 2009, the New York Times (and many other sources) erroneously reported that the English-language Wikipedia planned to adopt Flagged Revisions for all living people’s biographies. See Noam Cohen, “Wikipedia to Limit Changes to Articles on People,” NY Times, August 25, 2009, at BWikimedia’s blog post in response did not successfully correct the error. See Posting of Erik Moeller to Wikimedia Blog, A Quick Update on Flagged Revisions, http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/26/a-quick-update-on-flagged-revisions/ (August 26, 2009, 02:55). For example, that blog post concludes “we hope to be able to deploy Flagged Revisions in production use on the English Wikipedia within 2-3 months” when the post elsewhere tried to clarify that only Flagged Protection and Patrolled Revisions were being rolled out. Id. Further, Wikipedia representatives may have been less than clear in its terminology elsewhere. See Farhad Manjoo, “Jimmy Wales Quietly Edits Wikipedia’s New Edit Policy,” TIME, September 30, 2009 (“In several interviews, including many with TIME, officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that manages Wikipedia, explained that the user-edited online encyclopedia would soon impose restrictions on articles about living people.”). However, the English-language Wikipedia currently plans only to implement Flagged Protection and Patrolled Revisions for now. See id.
  53. Wikipedia: Flagged Protection, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_protection (last visited July 17, 2009).
  54. See Moeller, supra note 52.
  55. Wikipedia: Patrolled Revisions, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Patrolled_revisions (last visited August 1, 2009). In a partially related development, Wikipedia is also evaluating WikiTrust, a tool that color-codes entries to reflect an automated assessment of each word’s credibility. See Wikipedia: WikiTrust, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiTrust (last visited November 1, 2009); Hadley Leggett, “Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text,” Wired, August 30, 2009, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/wikitrust/.
  56. Ayers, supra note 16, at 196 (“Many newly submitted articles are deleted every day on Wikipedia: approximately one every minute.”); id. at 218 (“[A] great deal of content is also deleted—hundreds or thousands of articles are deleted from Wikipedia every day.”); Suh et al., supra note 25 (a quarter of all new pages are deleted, and the deletion rate increased from 2005 to 2007); “The Battle for Wikipedia’s Soul,” Economist, March 6, 2008, at 3 [hereinafter “Soul Battle”]; Hafner, supra note 25 (one Wikipedia editor said that half of newly created pages are good candidates for deletion); see generally Wikipedia: New Pages Patrol, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_pages_patrol (last visited August 18, 2009). An entire site, DeletionPedia, is dedicated to republishing deleted Wikipedia articles. See Deletionpedia Home Page, http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page (last visited September 21, 2009).
  57. See Broughton, supra note 17, at 123 fig.7-1 (showing a rapid growth in the “percentage of edits that are reverted”); Jim Giles, “After the Boom, Is Wikipedia Heading for Bust?,” New Scientist, August 4, 2009, http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17554-after-the-boom-is-wikipedia-heading-for-bust.html (citing research by Ed Chi that occasional editors have 25 percent of their edits reverted); Suh et al., supra note 25 (showing a steady growth in the reversion rate from 2005 to 2008, although the overall rate remains relatively low); Posting of Aaron Swartz to Raw Thought, Who Writes Wikipedia?—Responses, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowritescomments (September 5, 2006, 12:42) [hereinafter “Swartz, Responses”]. Naturally, several factors could explain the rise in quick reversions, including more spam or vandalism or better anti-threat work. Wikipedia is notorious for “edit wars” where two Wikipedia users repeatedly revert each other’s contributions. Wikipedia: Edit War, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_warring (last visited August 17, 2009).
  58. See posting of Aaron Swartz to Raw Thought, Making More Wikipedians, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/morewikipedians (September 11, 2006, 17:17) (discussing how Richard Stallman decided not to fix a problem he saw in a Wikipedia article because “it would take an enormous amount of his time and the word would probably just get reverted”).
  59. See Giles, supra note 57; Katherine Panciera et al., “Wikipedians Are Born, Not Made,” in Ass’n for Computing Machinery, Proc. ACM 2009 Int’l Conf. on Supporting Group Work 51, 59 (2009) (“60 percent of registered users never make another edit after their first 24 hours.”). Panciera et al. offer two possible hypotheses to explain this group: (1) they only registered for a single purpose; or (2) they were scared away by their experiences. Id.
  60. See Suh et al., supra note 25 (describing the “growing resistance to new content especially when contributed by occasional editors”).
  61. See Ayers, supra note 16, at 288 (“Wikipedia articles are created in a hostile environment.”); Garfinkel, supra note 11 (“There was no way for Wikipedia, as a community, to know whether the person revising the article about Jaron Lanier was really Jaron Lanier or a vandal. So it’s safer not to take people at their word…”); see also Wikipedia: No Vested Contributors, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_vested_contributors (last visited July 25, 2009) (“[S]ome long-term contributors may begin to feel a sense of entitlement and superiority over less prolific editors…”). As a partial recognition of these tendencies, the Wikipedia community has an announced philosophy to “assume good faith” on the part of other contributors. Wikipedia: Assume Good Faith, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith (last visited August 14, 2009). Obviously, this philosophy is not universally followed. See Ayers, supra note 16, at 332 (“Assume Good Faith is a good place to begin, but practicing it can be difficult.”). Some reversions reflect contributors’ resistance to having their own contributions revised. See id. at 195–98.
  62. Wikipedia: Signatures, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_your_posts (last visited August 8, 2009); Ayers, supra note 16, at 116 (“Always sign comments on talk pages…! This is one of the golden rules of Wikipedia; not doing so is considered very bad form.”).
  63. See Ayers, supra note 16, at 3“Accord” Broughton, supra note 17, at 124 (“The red link means that no one has ever posted to the editor’s user talk page, which in turn indicates that there have been few or no other edits by this IP address, which means few or no constructive edits. In this case, you don’t need to do any further research before reverting. If you see a questionable edit from this kind of user account, you can be virtually certain it was vandalism.”); Farhad Manjoo, “Is Wikipedia a Victim of Its Own Success?,” Time, September 28, 2009, at 50.
  64. The 2007 “Essjay” controversy, involving college dropout Ryan Jordan, reinforced how contributors without actual credentials could achieve significant authority in the Wikipedia community. See Brian Bergstein, “After Flap over Phony Professor, Wikipedia Wants Some Writers to Share Real Names,” USA Today, March 9, 2007, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2007-03-07-wikipedia-credentials_N.htm. Despite the Essjay controversy, the Wikipedia community has repeatedly rejected initiatives to verify contributors’ credentials. See Wikipedia: There Is No Credential Policy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Credentials (last visited July 29, 2009) [hereinafter “Wikipedia: There is No Credential Policy”].
  65. See Ayers, supra note 16, at 315 (“[N]ot editing your user page will not inspire confidence in your commitment to Wikipedia.”).
  66. See id.; Baker, supra note 11.
  67. See Ayers, supra note 16, at 116 (“Posting a preliminary comment on the talk page before making a change acts as a kind of insurance policy… If you discuss first and then edit, you should not come under suspicion of high-handed behavior.”).
  68. Ayers, supra note 16, at 383–404; David A. Hoffman and Salil Mehra, “Wikitruth Through Wikiorder,” 59 Emory L.J. (forthcoming 2010); Brian Butler et al., “Don’t Look Now, But We’ve Created a Bureaucracy: The Nature and Roles of Policies and Rules in Wikipedia,” Proc. Twenty-Sixth Ann. SIGCHI Conf. on Human Factors Computing Sys. (2008), http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1357227; Baker, supra note 11.
  69. Ayers, supra note 16, at 332.
  70. Baker, supra note 11 (“There are some people on Wikipedia now who are just bullies, who take pleasure in wrecking and mocking peoples’ work…”).
  71. See Lawrence W. Sanger, ”The Fate of Expertise After Wikipedia,” 6.1 Episteme 52, 65 (2009) (“Wikipedia might be best described as having a rule of the most persistent.”); Suh et al., supra note 25; Swartz, Responses, supra note 57.
  72. See Baker, supra note 11 (“[R]elatively few users know how to frame their contribution in a form that lasts.”); Sanger, supra note 71, at 52, 71 n.29; Bobbie Johnson, “Wikipedia Approaches Its Limits,” The Guardian, August 13, 2009, at

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Pearson does not rent or sell personal information in exchange for any payment of money.

While Pearson does not sell personal information, as defined in Nevada law, Nevada residents may email a request for no sale of their personal information to NevadaDesignatedRequest@pearson.com.

Supplemental Privacy Statement for California Residents


California residents should read our Supplemental privacy statement for California residents in conjunction with this Privacy Notice. The Supplemental privacy statement for California residents explains Pearson's commitment to comply with California law and applies to personal information of California residents collected in connection with this site and the Services.

Sharing and Disclosure


Pearson may disclose personal information, as follows:

  • As required by law.
  • With the consent of the individual (or their parent, if the individual is a minor)
  • In response to a subpoena, court order or legal process, to the extent permitted or required by law
  • To protect the security and safety of individuals, data, assets and systems, consistent with applicable law
  • In connection the sale, joint venture or other transfer of some or all of its company or assets, subject to the provisions of this Privacy Notice
  • To investigate or address actual or suspected fraud or other illegal activities
  • To exercise its legal rights, including enforcement of the Terms of Use for this site or another contract
  • To affiliated Pearson companies and other companies and organizations who perform work for Pearson and are obligated to protect the privacy of personal information consistent with this Privacy Notice
  • To a school, organization, company or government agency, where Pearson collects or processes the personal information in a school setting or on behalf of such organization, company or government agency.

Links


This web site contains links to other sites. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every web site that collects Personal Information. This privacy statement applies solely to information collected by this web site.

Requests and Contact


Please contact us about this Privacy Notice or if you have any requests or questions relating to the privacy of your personal information.

Changes to this Privacy Notice


We may revise this Privacy Notice through an updated posting. We will identify the effective date of the revision in the posting. Often, updates are made to provide greater clarity or to comply with changes in regulatory requirements. If the updates involve material changes to the collection, protection, use or disclosure of Personal Information, Pearson will provide notice of the change through a conspicuous notice on this site or other appropriate way. Continued use of the site after the effective date of a posted revision evidences acceptance. Please contact us if you have questions or concerns about the Privacy Notice or any objection to any revisions.

Last Update: November 17, 2020