Since the launch of Wikipedia in 2001, it has faced several controversies. Wikipedia's open-editing model, which allows any user to edit its encyclopedic pages, has led to concerns such as the quality of writing, the amount of vandalism, and the accuracy of information on the project. The media have covered controversial events and scandals related to Wikipedia and its funding organization, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Common subjects of coverage include articles containing false information, public figures, corporations editing articles for which they have a conflict of interest, paid Wikipedia editing and hostile interactions between Wikipedia editors and public figures.
The Seigenthaler biography incident [2] led to media criticism of the reliability of Wikipedia. The incident dates back to May 2005, with the anonymous posting of a hoax Wikipedia article containing false and negative allegations about John Seigenthaler, a well-known American journalist. In March 2007, Wikipedia was again the subject of media attention with the Essjay controversy, which involved a prominent English Wikipedia editor and administrator, who claimed he was a "tenured professor of religion at a private university" with a "Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law" when in fact he was a 24-year-old who held no advanced degrees. [3] [4]
The 2012 scandals involving paid consultancy for the government of Gibraltar by Roger Bamkin, a Wikimedia UK board member, [5] [6] and potential conflicts of interest have highlighted Wikipedia's vulnerabilities. [5] The presence of inaccurate and false information, as well as the perceived hostile editing climate, have been linked to a decline in editor participation. [7] Another controversy arose in 2013 after an investigation by Wikipedians found that the Wiki-PR company had edited Wikipedia for paying clients, using "an army" of sockpuppet accounts that purportedly included 45 Wikipedia editors and administrators. [8] [9] In 2015, the Orangemoody investigation showed that businesses and minor celebrities had been blackmailed over their Wikipedia articles by a coordinated group of fraudsters, again using hundreds of sockpuppets. Controversies within and concerning Wikipedia and the WMF have been the subject of several scholarly papers. [10] [11] This list is a collection of the more notable instances.
The nature of Wikipedia controversies has been analyzed by scholars. Sociologist Howard Rheingold says that "Wikipedia controversies have revealed the evolution of social mechanisms in the Wikipedia community"; [10] a study of the politicization of socio-technical spaces remarked that Wikipedia "controversies ... become fully-fledged when they are advertised outside the page being debated"; [11] and one college discusses Wikipedia as a curricular tool, in that "recent controversies involving Wikipedia [are used] as a basis for discussion of ethics and bias." [12]
Despite being promoted as an encyclopedia "anyone can edit", the ability to edit controversial pages is sometimes restricted because of "edit wars" or vandalism. [13] To address criticism about restricting access while minimizing malicious editing of those pages, Wikipedia has also tried measures such as "pending changes protection" which allows open editing of contentious articles, with the caveat that an experienced editor must approve new users' edits before they become visible to the public. [14] [15]
Wikipedia, a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers known as Wikipedians, began with its first edit on 15 January 2001, two days after the domain was registered. It grew out of Nupedia, a more structured free encyclopedia, as a way to allow easier and faster drafting of articles and translations.
The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.
The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia.
The Russian Wikipedia is the Russian-language edition of Wikipedia. As of January 2025, it has 2,019,688 articles. It was started on 11 May 2001. In October 2015, it became the sixth-largest Wikipedia by the number of articles. It has the sixth-largest number of edits (142 million). In June 2020, it was the world's sixth most visited language Wikipedia. As of November 2024, it is the third most viewed Wikipedia, after the English and Japanese editions.
The Catalan Wikipedia is the Catalan-language edition of the Wikipedia free online encyclopedia. It was created on 16 March 2001, just a few minutes after the first non-English Wikipedia, the German edition. With more than 767,000 articles, it is currently the 20th-largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles, and the fifth-largest Wikipedia in a Romance language. In April 2016, the project had 582 active editors who made at least five edits in that month.
The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been criticized since its creation in 2001. Most of the criticism has been directed toward its content, community of established volunteer users, process, and rules. Critics have questioned its factual reliability, the readability and organization of its articles, the lack of methodical fact-checking, and its political bias.
Wikipedia is a free-content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history, and is consistently ranked among the ten most visited websites; as of December 2024, it was ranked fifth by Semrush, and seventh by Similarweb. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia has been hosted since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization funded mainly by donations from readers.
The reliability of Wikipedia and its user-generated editing model, particularly its English-language edition, has been questioned and tested. Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteer editors, who generate online content with the editorial oversight of other volunteer editors via community-generated policies and guidelines. The reliability of the project has been tested statistically through comparative review, analysis of the historical patterns, and strengths and weaknesses inherent in its editing process. The online encyclopedia has been criticized for its factual unreliability, principally regarding its content, presentation, and editorial processes. Studies and surveys attempting to gauge the reliability of Wikipedia have mixed results. Wikipedia's reliability was frequently criticized in the 2000s but has been improved; its English-language edition has been generally praised in the late 2010s and early 2020s.
Bomis, Inc. was a dot-com company best known for supporting the creations of free-content online-encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia. It was co-founded in 1996 by Jimmy Wales, Tim Shell, and Michael Davis. By 2007, the company was inactive, with its Wikipedia-related resources transferred to the Wikimedia Foundation.
Lawrence Mark Sanger is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined Wikipedia's name, and provided initial drafts for many of its early guidelines, including the "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules" policies. Prior to Wikipedia, he was the editor-in-chief of Nupedia, another online encyclopedia and the predecessor of Wikipedia. He later worked on other encyclopedic projects, including Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium, and Everipedia, and advised the nonprofit American political encyclopedia Ballotpedia.
The Uzbek Wikipedia is the Uzbek-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It was founded in December 2003. Articles in the Uzbek-language edition are written in the Latin script. In August 2012, a Latin-to-Cyrillic converter was added to allow users to view Uzbek Wikipedia's pages in both the Latin and Cyrillic scripts.
In May 2005, an unregistered editor created a hoax Wikipedia article about journalist John Seigenthaler. The article falsely stated that Seigenthaler had been a suspect in the assassinations of U.S. president John F. Kennedy and U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy.
On Wikipedia, vandalism is editing the project in an intentionally disruptive or malicious manner. Vandalism includes any addition, removal, or modification that is intentionally humorous, nonsensical, a hoax, offensive, libelous or degrading in any way.
Wikipedia has been censored by governments that occurred widely in countries including China, Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Venezuela. Some instances are examples of widespread Internet censorship in general that includes Wikipedia content. Others are indicative of measures to prevent the viewing of specific content deemed offensive. The duration of different blocks has varied from hours to years.
The Wikipedia community, collectively and individually known as Wikipedians, is an online community of volunteers who create and maintain Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Since August 2012, the word "Wikipedian" has been an Oxford Dictionary entry. Wikipedians may or may not consider themselves part of the Wikimedia movement, a global network of volunteer contributors to Wikipedia and other related projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:
Conflict-of-interest (COI) occurs when editors use Wikipedia to advance the interests of their external roles or relationships. The type of COI editing that compromises Wikipedia the most is paid editing for public relations (PR) purposes. Several policies and guidelines exist to combat conflict of interest editing, including Wikipedia's conflict of interest guideline and the Wikimedia Foundation's paid-contribution disclosure policy.
Wikipediocracy is a website for discussion and criticism of Wikipedia. Its members have brought information about Wikipedia's controversies to the attention of the media. The site was founded in March 2012 by users of Wikipedia Review, another site dedicated to criticism of Wikipedia.
Gender bias includes various gender-related disparities on Wikipedia, particularly the overrepresentation of men among both volunteer contributors and article subjects, as well as lesser coverage of and topics primarily of interest to women.
Volunteer editors of Wikipedia delete articles from the online encyclopedia regularly, following processes that have been formulated by the site's community over time. The most common route is the outright deletion of articles that clearly violate the rules of the website. Other mechanisms include an intermediate collaborative process that bypasses a complete discussion, and a whole debate at the dedicated forum called Articles for deletion (AfD). As a technical action, deletion can only be done by a subset of editors assigned particular specialized privileges by the community, called administrators. An omission that has been carried out can be contested by appeal to the deleting administrator or on another discussion board called Deletion review (DRV).
Politician | Editing undertaken | Sources |
---|---|---|
Marty Meehan | Replacement with staff-written biography | Congressional staffers edit boss's bio on Wikipedia |
Norm Coleman | Rewrite to make more favorable, claimed to be "correcting errors" | "Web site's entry on Coleman revised: Aide confirms his staff edited biography, questions Wikipedia's accuracy". St. Paul Pioneer Press(Associated Press). Archived from the original on September 29, 2007. Retrieved April 17, 2013. |
Conrad Burns Montana | Removal of quoted pejorative statements the Senator had made, and replacing them with "glowing tributes" as "the voice of the farmer" | Williams, Walt (January 1, 2007). "Burns' office may have tampered with Wikipedia entry". Bozeman Daily Chronicle . Archived from the original on December 14, 2019. Retrieved February 13, 2007. |
Joe Biden | Removal of unfavorable information | Congressional staffers edit boss's bio on Wikipedia |
Gil Gutknecht | Staff rewrite and removal of information evidencing broken campaign promise. (Multiple attempts) | In 2006 the office of Representative Gil Gutknecht twice tried to replace a section on his Wikipedia article – which referenced his promise to serve a maximum 12-year term, despite running for re-election – with a more flattering entry from his official congressional biography. ("Gutknecht joins Wikipedia tweakers" Archived August 21, 2006, at the Wayback Machine , Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, August 16, 2006. Retrieved August 17, 2006). |
The once-derided open-source encyclopedia is the closest thing the internet has to an oasis of truth. Now a single-user ban has exposed the deep rifts between Wikipedia's libertarian origins and its egalitarian aspirations, and threatened that stability.
Wikipedia tried to declare a cease-fire in the war of words by restricting its "Recession" page so that unregistered users couldn't edit it. At one point, the page claimed there was "no global consensus" on the definition of a recession. There is a rule of thumb, which is that two successive quarters of declining gross domestic product—such as the first two quarters of 2022—indicates a recession.
[...] a group of committed Wikipedia editors have been promoting a skewed version of history [...] Wikipedia's articles on the Holocaust in Poland minimize Polish antisemitism, exaggerate the Poles' role in saving Jews, insinuate that most Jews supported Communism and conspired with Communists to betray Poles (Żydokomuna or Judeo–Bolshevism), blame Jews for their own persecution, and inflate Jewish collaboration with the Nazis
Online encyclopedia bars 3 editors from working on articles related to Holocaust in Poland, but avoids stance on underlying dispute over Polish antisemitism and complicity
Associate Professor of History Shira Klein writes about how she learned about the potential for disinformation on the crowdsourced information site, and the viral response that followed.