wikinconveniences

So I was all set to play around on Wikipedia. I'd set up an accounht and everything, thought I was really getting the hand of this...

...when it tells me I'm blocked. Apparently someone from the library's IP address thought it tremendous fun to vandalize the Terri Schiavo wikipedia entry with unprintable smut. As all the staff computers have the same IP address, this means that none of the computers in the back room at this branch can edit Wikipedia entries.

This is one of the downsides to Wikipedia's "editable by everyone" policy. If you can edit a page without a username, then all you give is an IP address. This means that instead of your account being punished, everyone at that IP address is punished. As Wikipedia don't have a way of telling who at a particular IP address did the vandalism, everyone suffers for the actions of a few.

And this is why we can't have nice things.