Wikipedia’s Administrators, What is their role?

I just a read an interesting blog by Andy Carvin, an author and educational technology expert, on “Identifying Best Practices for Student Wikipedia Projects.”  I am not going to sit here and write about what those are, I will let you read about them on his blog, however, what I found interesting is how Wikipedia handles new entries onto its site.

He basically discussed a presentation that was given by Martha Groom, a professor from the University of Washington-Bothell, about how she created a class project in which her students worked in collaborative groups to create a Wikipedia entry.  In the end her students found the assignment very rewarding, however, as I read Mr. Carvin’s blog he stated that “It didn’t take long for some Wikipedians to take issue with the students’ research. One article was deleted within 24 hours, while another four posts were removed after some debate on the website.” 

This bothered me as my graduate class was asked a few weeks ago to do some research about wikis in general, which meant to explore some articles about Wikipedia.  One article, in particular, from the NY Times  focused on how Wikipedia has had to change its policy on open-editing. 

The article describes how there are administrators who are volunteers, who are supposed to be editing content that is incorrect or abusive to the site.  However, the more I have researched the more I am finding that Wikipedia has become a small cult of know-it-alls that seem to jump at the chance to show off their intelligence and put down others for their efforts. 

According to Carvin, “Wikipedians occasionally responded rudely to students, and one debate escalated to the point that it required intervention by site moderators.”  He went on to say that he wasn’t surprised that the administrators responded rudely and that “Wikipedia  is a quirky place, and if you dig into it, you’ll soon find yourself surrounded by its politics, personalities and intellectual turf wars.” 

Now, I understand that there are people that put things on Wikipedia that are profane and inappropriate just for the fun of it, and there does need to be some watchful eyes otherwise the sites intention will be compromised.  But I think there needs to be some protocol for how things are edited and who decides what stays and what goes.  If there is, it seems then their way of handling the situation is also inappropriate and could be adjusted. 

As Professor Groom’s project seemed like a success, from a teacher’s point of view, I would be disgruntled if I were promoting a website in my class and then have the administrators of that site scold my students for what they think is useful information.  Not a very good publicity move from Wikipedia’s perspective in my humble opinion.