Wikipedia: Autism Spectrum
The first Wikipedia page I looked at was the article titled Autism. I found it interesting because this article is actually “semi-protected”, meaning that only registered users who have been on the website for a certain amount of time and who have made a certain number of edits are allowed to change the article. This seems like a good feature because it prevents random people from going on and posting false information. Just from glancing through a couple of articles, it seems like a lot of serious topics are protected like the autism one is.
I took one of the links on the autism page to another titled Autism spectrum, which was not protected. In the section titled management, I added the fact that there is no known cure for autism. Even though I have seen this fact numerous times while doing research on the topic of autism, I did not provide a source, so I was expecting my edit to be taken down pretty quickly. However, I made the edit almost 24 hours ago and it is still up. My assumption is that the article for autism spectrum is probably visited less often than the article for autism, so serious editors probably double check it less often.
The key thing that I learned from my experience editing Wikipedia is to check articles to see if they are protected or not. Protected articles are probably much more likely to contain correct information with sources to back it up, while unprotected articles can be changed by anyone, whether they mean well or not. Sometimes people probably add information that they believe to be true, but this does not mean that it actually is. Others probably add facts that they know are false because they just like to mess with people. Either way, protected articles have to deal with these issues a lot less than unprotected articles do, so they are most likely more trustworthy.
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