On its 20th birthday, is Wikipedia the safest place online?
THE WORLD’S LARGEST ONLINE ENCYCLOPAEDIA HAS LEARNT LESSONS FROM FIGHTING MISINFORMATION FOR TWO DECADES
Wikipedia is a thing that shouldn’t work, but somehow does. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers, without pay, collectively trying to document every corner of human knowledge, including history happening in real time.
On Wednesday, the online encyclopedia’s strengths and quirks were on full display as hundreds of volunteers furiously worked to create a page for the Capitol riots as events unfolded. As it transitioned from a protest to something more violent, Wikipedia’s volunteer editors added key details while debating the article title, as shared by editor Molly White. Was it a protest, an insurrection or a riot? It ended up the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol. Hundreds of people were working on the ballooning document at a time, which has now been touched by nearly 1,000 editors, is more than 10,000 words long and has been viewed nearly 2 million times.
Dispassionate facts
Like most Wikipedia articles, it will continue to change, a fluid draft of history meant to stick as closely to dispassionate facts as possible while regularly swatting off attempts to insert opinions and disinformation.
“I think the large number of editors helps to make sure different viewpoints are considered,” said White, who has put in 12 hours of editing on the page and related wikis since last week.
Wikipedia turned 20 years old on Friday, and in the midst of heightened concerns about the spread of disinformation and misinformation, its pages on controversial topics or current events can be a balm.
Ad-free site
Founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia is an ad-free site edited by volunteers and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It is one of the 20 most popular sites on the internet, and its pages are regularly the top results for Google searches. Anyone interested in changing an article is allowed, and people with more experience can gain more privileges. Editors follow a few basic tenets, including that posts should have a neutral point of view, they should treat each other with respect and that there are no firm rules.
They’ve had a busy year. Like many other sites, Wikipedia saw an increase in use during the pandemic, especially the early months.
History of revisions
Many conversations happening between Wikipedia’s editors reflect what’s happening inside news publications and tech companies, but are being played out largely in public. You can see a history of revisions for each story and some of the back and forth between people editing it under the
Talk pages, which show discussions between editors.
What’s most striking about Wikipedia is its sheer size. Like the number of posts (55 million), the number of volunteers (270,000 active editors a month) and even the number of edits that have taken place (it just passed a billion).
“It is a somewhat radical act to be able to write your own history, and in many places in the world this is not a thing people take for granted,” said Katherine Maher, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Hidden pranks and hoax entries
Wikipedia still has its share of errors and incorrect information, though it says most “vandalism” is removed within five minutes. There’s a rich history of hidden pranks and hoax entries; partisan protest edits, like the repeated deletion of Donald Trump’s entry; and angry vandalism, like when Beyonce’s fans attacked Beck’s page when he beat her out for a Grammy. Last year it was discovered that an American teenager had created nearly half of the Scots language Wikipedia pages, without actually knowing the language. Screenshots of these temporarily altered entries can go viral and be seen long after the pages are fixed. Given its size, smaller errors can go undetected for years. The site has also struggled with diversity among its editors, who skew largely white and male for Englishlanguage entries. Wikipedia says that less than 20 per cent of its editors
Last year it was discovered that an American teenager had created nearly half of the Scots language Wikipedia pages, without actually knowing the language.
identify as women, and a 2018 survey conducted by Wikimedia found 14 per cent of editors had experienced some form of harassment.
Ever-changing internal rules
But it doesn’t face the same kinds of issues with disinformation that the big tech companies do. Everyone from Facebook and Twitter to Snapchat have struggled with moderation, attempting to balance a desire for not wanting to be seen as censoring users with an overwhelming volume of problematic, violent and racist user-generated content. Moderation is largely handled by paid workers who review posts flagged by people or automated systems and follow everchanging internal rules to determine what stays up.
Facebook has had to hire tens of thousands of moderators and has built custom AI systems which now detect more than 94 per cent of the hate speech that is removed from the site. And most recently, all the big social media sites, from Facebook to Pinterest, banned or suspended President Trump’s accounts after the Capitol riots.
Keeping articles clean
While also populated entirely with content from users, Wikipedia has a number of things on its side when it comes to moderation. One of its key advantages is that there is only one page for each subject, and duplicates are removed by editors, meaning it is not set up in a way that lets things go viral. While thousands of misleading articles about the November election results might circulate on Facebook, there is only one main story to tend to on Wikipedia.
It also has a number of tools meant to keep articles clean. There’s the ability to protect and lock down pages, limiting the ability of new editors to change them. People who frequently make false edits can be banned. Editors follow policies meant to keep out anything untrue, such as requiring sources for all claims.