Greetings!
Wikipedia is a great tool, despite the fact that it is not considered a legitimate reference point by scholars. While all information on the site is not accurate, it is a great way to get an basic idea of what something is. If you had to write about a particular topic, but didn’t know a thing about it, Wikipedia would be the place to go to inform yourself before doing in depth research.
Originally Wikipedia was open to all people to edit freely, but it has since become necessary to set up and account with the site to become an editor. This is perhaps to deter those who just want to edit for a joke, rather than actually providing decent information.
I have edited Wikipedia, myself, twice. I have an account on Wikipedia, and it was very simple to sign up for it. The only thing I edited were small bits of information that were incorrect. I’ve never been the kind of person to intentionally ‘troll’ on the internet. Wikipedia itself describes a troll as “someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community.”
In Shachaf and Hara’s article on Wikipedia trolls, they quote Schwartz in his study of online trolls, “trolling will stop only when its audience stops taking trolls seriously” (Schwartz in Shachaf & Hara, 358-9). In his study he created an online discussion and introduced a troll. “The troll was successful in manipulating members’ ideologies into an intense conflict, which was one of the reasons that the members could not effectively ban the troll.”
Shachaf, P., Hara, N 2010, “Beyond Vandalism: Wikipedia Trolls”, Journal of Information Science, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 357 – 370.
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