An article from Technology Review discusses an important question many people bring up about the quality of articles on wikipedia. It also discusses the relatively small number of dedicated editors who play a fundamental role in the community. Due to the small number of editors and authoritative contributors to many of the articles on Wikipedia, the article also discusses that an algorithm that assesses the quality of Wikipedia articles could reassure visitors and help focus editors on entries that need improving. The computer scientists (Xiangju Qin and Pádraig Cunningham) have developed automated editorial tool that may reduce the workload that remains for the volunteer workforce.
This is the automatic tool that uncovered and erased Jonathan's test edit and probably Erin's too -- it's called STiki. It's not actually all the way automatic, though -- the page says "STiki is not a Wikipedia bot: it is an intelligent routing tool that directs human users to potential vandalism for definitive classification." So basically someone somewhere was probably spending some time looking through possible vandalism edits and decided not to keep some of the ones our class submitted.