In the German system, any user will still be allowed to make edits to any article. Those edits won’t show up in the live version of the site, though, until a registered user with a certain level of time and experience approves the changes. It’s a simple change, but one that could prevent the most juvenile forms of vandalism from ever appearing on the main site, which should do much to remove the appeal of vandalizing articles.
For the life of me, I cannot figure out why basic protections like this weren’t implemented a long time ago. Yes, I realize that Wikipedia wants to impose the lowest possible barriers to entry, but even such things as requiring users to create an account in order to make edits would reduce vandalism. This proposed system would reduce it even further.
The larger question in my mind is: will Wikipedia ever get to a point where it is authoritative? Or will it always be the transitional layer between cursory curiosity and a link to scholarly works? I admit that I use Wikipedia for a great number of things, but I don’t—and conceivably won’t ever—cite it in a bibliography. The academic world—take that with whatever gravitas you wish—has always been mutually masturbatory: you cite ’scholarly’ works and you get cited in return. I think that Academia will always inherently resist such a populist approach to knowledge, even if it may agree with it in principle (Academia, as you well know, leans Left and idealistic).
So I think Ars Technica’s title is misleading. Wikipedia isn’t broken in the sense that it’s a 22-volume Encyclopediæ Brittanica that lists “Richard Nixon” as “a type of beetle”; no, Wikipedia is different—fundamentally different—and I think that calling it an encyclopedia is doing it a disservice. Wikipedia is not scholarly. It can’t be, at least by any definition we accept today. Wikipedia is one of those new ideas that’s so bleeding-edge it resists categorization. It’s a bit like the biggest blog ever.
Will the Germans fix Wikipedia? The new system might reduce short-term headaches, though I am under the impression that the established procedures for dealing with random vandalism were efficient, but as Ars points out, the changes don’t fix the more insidious problem problem or deliberate sabotage, political operatives, or propaganda.