Circulating the Wikipedia community is a blog post about an editor and administrator who allegedly spent an immense amount of time on Wikipedia manipulating the system to promote their biases.
The author of the blog argues that over a twenty-year period, the accused editor relentlessly used the reliable sources policy on Wikipedia to deprecate sources they didn’t like and prop up the ones they did like.
This editor would then, it is alleged, use these sources to defame people.
In one such case, the editor is said to have fed information to a news outlet that published content drawn from Wikipedia articles in what is known as conflict-of-interest editing. The Wikipedia editor was subsequently reprimanded for doing so.
The takeaway message is summed up by another Wikipedia editor:
‘…that anyone who edits a lot and has opinions is going to inevitably end up pushing those opinions one way or another. This is probably a bad thing but cannot really be fixed: the most we can do is take care of the more egregious episodes.’
As much as I want to agree with the above sentiment, it becomes harder and harder to trust the Wikipedia community to take care of its internal problems.
Wikipedia has its own page titled, Why Wikipedia is not so Great, which highlights its lack of transparency, restrictions on freedom of speech, increasingly complicated rules with a hierarchy of privileged users who enforce them, and a culture of conflict rather than cooperation which pushes new editors to basically not want to edit.
To an outsider, Wikipedia editing is riddled with laborious wiki jargon. People do not want to read through essays of talk pages on why one sentence is better than the other. For example, take the newly created page Attempted Assassination of Donald Trump and a talk page section below. The section is some 700 words all about how many times Trump’s ‘raised fist’ is mentioned in the article.
Source: Wikipedia
That is just one section of one article. There are now over fifteen sections on this page and growing fast. To an editor in the depths of Wikipedia, these wiki talk pages are the everything of the internet. They are the result of an editor’s immense dedication of time, specific interests, and relentless debate. This is what determines what millions of people read every day on the site. For a Wikipedia editor, they know what it means to have their edit stick.
This takes me back to a Wikipediaocracy post on why people contribute to Wikipedia.
If you have never heard of Wikipediaocracy, it’s a forum for editors and administrators to talk about Wikipedia – the tag line: Because you can’t talk about Wikipedia’s flaws on Wikipedia. Actually, you can, at the Village pump, The Signpost, Administrators noticeboard, Reliable sources noticeboard, and the multiple talk pages on articles themselves. And if you don’t want to discuss it on any one of the numerous Wikipedia pages, there’s always the r/wikipedia subreddit – one of the largest on reddit.
But I digress.
Considering Wikipedia’s ‘Google footprint’, Wikipedia is a significant platform to influence public opinion that has a strong anonymous username policy. Editors are not required to list their real name, email address, personal identity, or any unique identifier to connect an editor to someone outside of Wikipedia.
Other than an IP address, which only administrators known as ‘checkusers’ can see, there is no way of knowing who sits behind the computer editing the internet’s most read encyclopedia unless the editor discloses it as such (which some do).
An old reddit thread entitled Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People argues how most internet users are passive – scrolling pages, clicking randomly, and never contributing – whilst those creating the content range from 1-3 per cent of internet communities.
Some Wikipedia editors spend up to 16 hours per day creating hundreds of edits. It has been pointed out that this is an ‘insane’ amount of time to devote, especially when compared to the general population of editors. This figure alone raises important questions about the quality of the content, its biases, and distortions.
Back to the editor accused of being one of these Wiki power users… Do I think that some of the claims are fabricated or false? Probably not. Do I think the editor in question is a super bad guy? Likely they are not any worse or any better than any other editor. Do I think that Wikipedia is a politically driven encyclopedia with no hope for improvement? Of course not.
The point is that no matter how robust the rules of Wikipedia’s neutral point of view and good-natured ethos of volunteer editing, it is only as a good or as bad as its community.
This is perhaps why more people should edit Wikipedia, contribute hours, learn the rules (even though they rarely matter), and put in effort to improve the encyclopedia.
