A Virginia Tech graduate student hit save on her overview of the state workers’ compensation commission one spring day, but before her professor could take a look at it, someone else began deleting entire sections, calling them trivial and promotional.

It wasn’t a teaching assistant on a power trip — it was a Wikipedia editor known only as “Mean as custard.”

“I had worked on it for almost an entire day,” said Amy Pearson, a public administration master’s student. “It was kind of shocking.”

I've asked this before, but never received any answer at all. I'll give it a try here, since Washington Post is such a hard-hitting journalism dynamo. The public policy initiative described above was launched by the Wikimedia Foundation thanks to a $900,000+ grant from the Stanton Foundation. We heard how "ambassadors" would be recruited on campuses, to work (for free, as volunteers) as tutors to help college students learn how to do something that literally hundreds of thousands of editors on Wikipedia (even some as young as 11 or 12 years old) somehow managed to teach themselves to do, without any "ambassador" holding their hands. All of these news stories featuring the public policy initiative seem to portray these college students as weak, timid, easily-frightened little kids. And not one news story EVER explains why it takes $900,000 to coordinate a few VOLUNTEER ambassadors on a dozen or so college campuses. In fact, I see no money whatsoever being spent on the program, but I do see Wikimedia Foundation executive director receiving an unprecedented 37.2% increase in her compensation package. Are both college professors and news journalists unable to perceive a con game?