Study shows that well-edited hometown wiki entry will attract tourists

But Wikipedia's organizational structure may provide an answer: almost all new content added to the Wikipedia Netherlands site is deleted within 24 hours, even forcing researchers to re-restrict the experiment to wikis in three other languages.

A senior editor on Wikipedia Netherlands discovered the ongoing experiment and understood the need to proceed with banning all updates made by the team. The wiki does not allow edit for commercial use, and such research is considered illegal.

This isn't the first paper to point out that the online encyclopaedia has an enormous influence. In another article cited by the researchers, they found that adding new scientific content to the encyclopaedia leads to changes in citations of hundreds of papers in relevant scientific journals. Even professional scholars consult Wikipedia and often cite the references listed on the site.

But Wikipedia can be easily tampered with, and in August it was revealed that an American teenager who had been involved in the Scottish version of the wiki's entries since the age of 12 had become one of the main editors of the Scottish version, even though he didn't actually speak the language.

The user who first discovered the fraud pointed out, "This person has probably done more damage to the Scottish language than anyone else in history."