For a couple months, I was a hard-core Wikipedia editor. Academic life was moving at a fairly slow clip for a bit, so I had plenty of guiltless free time. I was putting in major hours cleaning up awkwardly-phrased articles, reverting vandalism in near-real time, and so forth. My usual ability to spot typos and grammatical mistakes was in overdrive, and I was perpetually on guard against bias creeping into things. I’d have an assigned reading in a textbook and find an oddly-phrased sentence, or go to take a test and find the classic, “Explain…?” mistake, where the ‘question’ is actually a directive, but nonetheless carries a question mark. I’d often find myself correcting it on the test before realizing what I’d done, and that the professor most likely wouldn’t appreciate it. Over time, work picked up, and what was once an unhealthy obsession faded.

But errors still jump out at me. What I’ve noticed is that errors are practically universal. They exist not just in my late-night blog posts where I don’t proofread and when people post rants on forums, but they turn up in the middle of articles written by the Associated Press, and in headlines on the nightly news.

I often see Wikipedia bashed because the site lets anyone edit it, as if they were unaware that this is the site’s raise d’etre and that it’s a double-edged sword. The idiots of the world can come screw Wikipedia up, but obsessive-compulsive editors (like me) can just as easily clean things up. It’s almost a battle between good and evil, except a lot less dramatic. In my experience, good wins 95% of the time, but that 5% causes people to proclaim Wikipedia unreliable.

One of the major problems is disruptive editing. A lengthy article, potentially getting thousands of hits a day, might be edited by a sixth-grader, who replaces the whole page with the word “poop.” He is most likely unaware that Cluebot, one of the many user-run bots on the site, watches the Recent Changes feed for “bad words” and for major changes in page length, and that “poop” is, strangely, among the most common “bad words,” meaning that his change will be undone by a bot before any of us human editors can even click “Undo.”

The reason Cluebot exists is also the reason I don’t think we’ll see many “major” publications adopting a wiki model any time soon*. But one thing I’ve thought would be neat for a while was a sort of “moderated” wiki, where anyone could make changes, but they wouldn’t show up unless a moderator approved them. Thus, in theory, people like me, who spot errors in the AP, could have them corrected, while people who erase everything and type “poop” wouldn’t be able to bring anything down.

I still don’t see the AP, in particular, adopting this any time soon*. Print media like that doesn’t really have a, “Written in part by 75 different people” dynamic, and it’s probably not one that they’d be eager to implement right away. But I think the technology—a way to allow users to ‘suggest’ changes and have a moderator decide whether or not to apply them—could be useful all over the Internet, I think.

• Enormous tangent: I hesitated for a minute, wondering whether it was “any time soon” or “anytime soon,” but both terms have considerable usage from well-regarded, edited sources. I tend to think of “anytime” as meaning, “whenever,” or at an unpredictable time, and thus sticking the “soon” modifier on it seems strange: it could happen whenever, soon? “Any time soon” seems more pure. That said, I doubt that the difference one way or the other is significant.