Since the launch of Wikipedia in 2001, it has faced several controversies. Wikipedia's open-editing model, under which anyone can edit most articles, 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]
A report by The Times of London alleged that the Iranian government was consolidating its presence in Farsi Wikipedia through revisions deleting text related to human rights violations. [370] Justice for Iran has reported the Iranian regime pursued a user after his identity was compromised at a Wikipedia event, and also criticized sysops on Farsi Wikipedia connected to Iranian Islamic Republic regime ministries. [371]
April 2024 Wikimedia foundation office banned one of the fawiki sysops. [372]
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 January 15, 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.
The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia.
The Catalan Wikipedia is the Catalan-language edition of the Wikipedia free online encyclopedia. It was created on March 16, 2001, just a few minutes after the first non-English Wikipedia, the German edition. With more than 748,000 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.
Jimmy Donal Wales, also referred to as Jimbo Wales, is a British-American Internet entrepreneur, webmaster, and former financial trader. He is a co-founder of Wikipedia and the for-profit wiki hosting service Fandom. He has worked on other online projects, including Bomis, Nupedia, WikiTribune, and WT Social.
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. Concerns have also been raised about systemic bias along gender, racial, political, corporate, institutional, and national lines. Conflicts of interest arising from corporate campaigns to influence content have also been highlighted. Further concerns include the vandalism and partisanship facilitated by anonymous editing, clique behavior, social stratification between a guardian class and newer users, excessive rule-making, edit warring, and uneven policy application.
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; it has been generally praised in the late 2010s and early 2020s.
Bomis (, from Bitter Old Men in Suits, 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.
On Wikimedia Foundation projects, an Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) is a binding dispute resolution panel of editors. Each of Wikimedia's projects are editorially autonomous and independent, and some of them have established their own ArbComs who work according rules developed by the project's editors and are usually annually elected by their communities. ArbComs generally address misconduct by administrators and editors with access to advanced tools, and a range of "real-world" issues related to harmful conduct that can arise in the context of Wikimedia projects. Rulings, policies and procedures differ between projects depending on local and cultural contexts. According to the Wikimedia Terms of Use, users are not obliged to have a dispute solved by an ArbCom.
Lawrence Mark Sanger is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who was the editor-in-chief of Nupedia, an online encyclopedia, and co-founded its successor Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name 'Wikipedia', and wrote many of Wikipedia's early guidelines, including the "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules" policies. Sanger later worked on other encyclopedic projects, including Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium, and Everipedia, and advised the nonprofit American political encyclopedia Ballotpedia.
In May 2005, an unregistered editor posted a hoax article onto Wikipedia 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.
Censorship of Wikipedia by governments has 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.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and a topical guide to Wikipedia:
Conflict-of-interest (COI) editing on Wikipedia occurs when editors use Wikipedia to advance the interests of their external roles or relationships. The type of COI editing of most concern on Wikipedia is paid editing for public relations (PR) purposes. Several Wikipedia policies and guidelines exist to combat conflict of interest editing, including Wikipedia:Conflict of interest and Wikipedia:Paid-contribution disclosure.
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 critical of Wikipedia.
The COVID-19 pandemic was covered in Wikipedia extensively, in real-time, and across multiple languages. This coverage extends to many detailed articles about various aspects of the topic itself, as well as many existing articles being amended to take account of the pandemic's effect on them. Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects' coverage of the pandemic – and how the volunteer editing community achieved that coverage – received widespread media attention for its comprehensiveness, reliability, and speed. Wikipedia experienced an increase in readership during the pandemic.
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 . 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). |
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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.
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