What prevents anyone from deleting Wikipedia articles?

[aychamo]

Hey guys

I just discovered (lol) Wikipedia the other day.. What stops anyone from going in and just destroying all the articles?

 

[dduardo]

They probable have a CVS type system implemented. That means that all changes are noted and the admins can roll back to good version if things go bad.

 

[PRodQuanta]

dduardo said: They probable have a CVS type system implemented. That means that all changes are noted and the admins can roll back to good version if things go bad.

That's exactly right.

aychamo, you should look at the latest issue of Pop. Science. It has an article: What is a wiki? It explains your question.

Paden Roder

 

[Dagenais]

http://hprog.org is also a pretty good wiki. It was actually the first wiki I ever used and one of the first I've ever encountered.

They simply have a button that reverts the page to it's old version if someone has vandalized the page.

From what I've read, most administrators believe that the larger number of users that care will revert the page back if it is ever vandalized. Since the amount of users that care will outweigh the ones there to cause trouble.

That means that all changes are noted and the admins can roll back to good version if things go bad.

Can't anyone roll back to the good version @ wikipedia? Or is that an admin-only feature?

 

[chroot]

Anyone can roll back a page to a previous version on wikipedia. You're not actually deleting anything, however -- you're just creating a new version whose text is the same as some previous version.

- Warren