Wikipedia: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 19:06, 2 December 2025

Wikipedia is a digital encyclopedic platform which was founded in 2001 and is currently operated by American non-profit organization Wikimedia Foundation.

Consumer-impact summary

The encyclopedia is a major destination for consumers/readers to access information about any given topics, ranging from natural sciences to political fields. Theoretically, the encyclopedia is open for editing by anyone, meaning that consumers/readers can become producers/editors at any time.

Monopoly

Although Wikipedia formally enshrines the right to fork contents from them in order to start a new encyclopedia, it has been reported that Wikipedia effectively operated as a de facto monopoly among online encyclopedias for a long time, and Wikipedia had received privileged positions by various search engines such as Google on their search results. Social media service TikTok included similar information from Wikipedia in their search results. Besides that, Wikipedia is one of the top sources for AI chatbots.

Consequently, Wikipedia's monopoly had generated significant downstream effects where Wikipedia had played crucial roles in shaping medical decisions, economic outcomes, scientific publications, and perhaps judicial rulings. Wikipedia is even included among longtermist knowledge preservation initiatives such as the Arch Mission's The LEO (Low Earth Orbit) library, The Lunar Library I on the failed Beresheet lunar lander, The Lunar Library II on the failed Astrobotic Peregrine lander, The Galactic Legacy Archive on a successful Intuitive Machines moon lander mission, and The Pyramid Library on the successful Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander mission.

Incidents

This is a list of all incidents, especially those related to consumer protection, that this platform is involved in.

Hostility against newcomers

According to a 2016 VICE News article, Wikipedia is reportedly being notorious for being an unwelcome place for newcomers while having a dizzying list of guidelines, principles, and rules that are disproportionately applied across the site. Many individuals who edited Wikipedia shared the concern, including Kevin Forsyth who reportedly quitted the site due to "constant harassment from his fellow editors and lack of consequences for those who were openly combative on the site." Because of that, there was even a suicide attempt which was averted thanks to interventions by the authorities.

Deletionism

Wikipedia has been reported by some sources as being grappled by deletionism, causing the absence of coverage of many obscure and niche topics and a decline of participation activities among experts and high-value editors.

"Name and shame" pages

On Wikipedia, there are publicly-visible "name and shame" pages such as "Sockpuppet investigation" casepages (SPI) and Long-term abuse pages (LTA) whose ostensible aims are for assisting anti-vandalism purposes. Pages in the latter category often contain personally-identifiable attributes of users who're branded as "long term abusers" (LTA) for supposedly engaging in disruptions against the Wikipedia over a long period, including IP addresses, full legal names. In at least one case where a user accused of being an LTA is an apparent juvenile, no special measures to consider their privacy rights (i.e. hiding LTA pages to only audiences with Wikipedia accounts) are apparently observed. Such practices may risk violating GDPR as there's also a case where scientific researchers based in Czech Republic and Slovakia were doxxed that way due to accusations that they had engaged in self-promoting edits on Wikipedia. At a glance, little to no fact-checking and quality checking processes were observed in the LTA page creation process, which may mean that some or all accusations in some if not all of LTA pages may be inaccurate and could therefore constitute defamation/libel.

Orangemoody scandal

On September 2015, Wikipedia was hit by the Orangemoody blackmail scandal, as it came to light that hundreds of businesses and minor celebrities had faced demands for payment from rogue editors to publish, protect or update Wikipedia articles on them.

Scots Wikipedia scandal

On August 2020, a Reddit user publicized that a prolific Scots Wikipedia administrator did not speak the Scots language; tens of thousands of articles were in fact English with eye dialect spellings to suggest a Scottish accent, or word-by-word machine translations of articles from English Wikipedia. Wikimedia users debated recruiting fluent speakers of Scots to repair the articles, reverting all edits from the administrator in question, or – as the latter would entail removing nearly half the articles in the encyclopedia – even deleting and restarting Scots Wikipedia afresh. The Guardian attributed the problem to systemic issues in Wikipedia culture, suggesting that some administrators are afforded effectively unchecked power based on sheer volume of edits (rather than the quality of their work). Robyn Speer, chief scientist at Luminoso, expressed concern that artificial intelligence corpora which used Wikipedia for language-training data had been corrupted by the pseudo-Scots.

Recession debate

In 2022 an edit war broke out at the Wikipedia page about recession, causing the page to be locked.

Alleged Chinese interference on the English Wikipedia and ensuing responses by Anonymous

In September, an editing war broke out over Anonymous member Cyber Anakin's English Wikipedia article, where it was reduced to a few paragraphs with reasons given for alleged POV (Point of view) policy violations, "failed verification" and "unreliable source" information. However, one of the editors behind the deletions was accused of being a "sock puppet" account of another individual, which refers to a user posing as someone else for manipulation purposes. Although both accounts were found to have edited many of the same topics and intermittently used proxies, a Wikipedia administrator later decided that they were probably two different people and unblocked the first. One remains blocked because IP evidence had shown that the account owner had been abusing multiple accounts.

The hacker collective suspected that such changes, as well as the change of Taiwan's status from country to "partially recognized country" by another user, were part of a Chinese influence operation exploiting the biases of the existing system on Wikipedia. Anonymous also suspected that the user might be a malicious user, such as a "fifty-center" or "fellow traveller" supporting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In retaliation, Anonymous hacked into the systems of the Ministry of Emergency Management of the People's Republic of China as well as those of the private Chinese commercial satellite company "Mino Space". There, they uploaded content including images of the Anonymous emblem, the Taiwanese flag, Queen Elizabeth II, Mahsa Amini, Central Visual and St Louis Central Visual and Performing Arts school shooting victims Alexzandria Bell and Jean Kuczka, a teddy bear caricature of Xi Jinping, an allegedly corrupt official from Inner Mongolia, and the Tibetan flag. In addition, the uploaded content contained a portrait of Xi Jinping, Li Wenliang and altered photo of Yuri Gagarin, an article from Newsweek and the alleged assault of Chinese diplomats on a Hong Kong protester at the Chinese Consulate General in Manchester.

In addition, Anonymous also included a manifesto, which begins, "Bet you thought you could get away with defiling Wikipedia articles on the idea of Anonymous with fellow travelers for the 和谐, didn't you Wiener the Pooh?" while including photos of the mausoleums of Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-Kuo. Criticising Wikipedia, the collective wrote that it is "treated by deletionists/puritanists as a toy like TikTok" instead of being or becoming a "great thing" in archival science. They lamented that, far from being a collegial environment, if someone wants to impose an unpopular change, they can "simply call in a minority gang to isolate or swarm any dissenting users, to the point where the narrative and interpretations of the rules are distorted and they end up receiving Hu Jintao treatment by administrators or moderators, with tribalism reigning supreme."

A deputy researcher Wu Zonghan from the Taiwanese Cybersecurity Institute of the National Defense Institute said, "A supporter of the free Internet should show solidarity when there is such a global attempt to control the information monopoly or when people are oppressed, as was the case last year when they attacked Chinese cultural centers (abroad). Taiwan's Legislative Councilor Wang Dingyu implicitly applauded the anonymous operation, saying that he wanted to collect the screenshot of the defacement containing President Tsai Ing-Wen's photo as a souvenir.

A few days later, the decentralized collective hacked a United Nations website where it included images of Taiwan's national flag and president, the Taiwanese national emblem, and scores of the Taiwanese anthem. Other images included flags representing Taiwanese independence, Tibet, East Turkestan, Kosovo, and Somaliland, as well as the Somaliland emblem, Taiwanese political party logos, and Taiwanese and Somaliland political emblems. Five pages of manifesto text were posted, including a link to a resignation letter from former Wikipedia administrator Pratyeka, who wrote that he was leaving the site because "it seems to be populated by deletionists, paid shills, and policy thumpers." In his letter, he added that "common decency has evaporated" and lamented that "Wikipedia has lost its way."

In addition, allegations of sexual harassment by a Wikipedia administrator have come to light, and Anonymous said that administrators and editors are "constantly being driven away by Wikipedia's deletions and systemic corruption, while the bad ones remain." The manifesto also addresses topics such as mass school shootings, missing student Deven Phuong, and the collective's hatred for fascists and "tankies." Finally, the hacker collective presents a guide for the Chinese Communist Party on how to "wash away the shame of letting COVID-19 get out of control." Calls for Elon Musk to acquire Wikipedia and establish a "Wikipendium" (Wiki + Compendium) were made. The manifesto ends with a link to a forum post that criticizes the work of a Wikipedia administrator who has allegedly been accused of sexual harassment.

On early December 2022, Anonymous hacked into an Iranian hajj website to post Taiwanese flag photos along with that of the state flag of Iran that flew in the nation from 1964 to 1979, and Mahsa Amini. There the hacking collective included an image showing Wikipedia's burgeoning revenue in recent years and accused the organization of "suckering and hoarding up money by pretending that it's under existential danger." while including a link to a request for comment on the appropriateness of the banners used by Wikipedia's December 2022 fundraising campaign. Wikipedia was accused of having a "growing cancer," and linked to a page by a Wikipedia user who displayed a revenue chart allegedly showing the free online encyclopedia's "runaway spending growth." Reportedly they also accused the encyclopedia of being "dominated by deletionists and policy thumpers," and included a link to a former Wikipedia editor Stephenb, who claimed to halt work for the organization due to "Deletionists."

Saudi Arabian influence of Wikipedia

Human rights organizations DAWN and SMEX revealed in 2022 that Saudi Arabian government has reportedly been successful in infiltrating Wikipedia, by having its operatives and supporters to gain adminship positions in Arabic Wikipedia, while putting two Wikipedia editors in jail. As a result, those people have been banned by the Wikimedia Foundation.

@@ Line 5: / Line 5: @@
 ===Monopoly===
-Although Wikipedia formally enshrines the right to fork contents from them in order to start a new encyclopedia, it has been reported that Wikipedia effectively operated as a ''de facto'' monopoly among online encyclopedias for a long time, and Wikipedia had received privileged positions by various search engines such as [[Google]] on their search results. Social media service [[TikTok]] included similar information from Wikipedia in their search results. Besides that, Wikipedia is one of the top sources for AI chatbots.
+Although Wikipedia formally enshrines the right to fork contents from them in order to start a new encyclopedia, it has been reported that Wikipedia effectively operated as a ''de facto'' monopoly among online encyclopedias for a long time, and Wikipedia had received privileged positions by various search engines such as Google on their search results. Social media service TikTok included similar information from Wikipedia in their search results. Besides that, Wikipedia is one of the top sources for AI chatbots.
 Consequently, Wikipedia's monopoly had generated significant downstream effects where Wikipedia had played crucial roles in shaping medical decisions, economic outcomes, scientific publications, and perhaps judicial rulings. Wikipedia is even included among longtermist knowledge preservation initiatives such as the Arch Mission's The LEO (Low Earth Orbit) library, The Lunar Library I on the failed Beresheet lunar lander, The Lunar Library II on the failed Astrobotic Peregrine lander, The Galactic Legacy Archive on a successful Intuitive Machines moon lander mission, and The Pyramid Library on the successful Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander mission.
@@ Line 25: / Line 25: @@
 ===Scots Wikipedia scandal===
 On August 2020, a Reddit user publicized that a prolific Scots Wikipedia administrator did not speak the Scots language; tens of thousands of articles were in fact English with eye dialect spellings to suggest a Scottish accent, or word-by-word machine translations of articles from English Wikipedia. Wikimedia users debated recruiting fluent speakers of Scots to repair the articles, reverting all edits from the administrator in question, or – as the latter would entail removing nearly half the articles in the encyclopedia – even deleting and restarting Scots Wikipedia afresh. ''The Guardian'' attributed the problem to systemic issues in Wikipedia culture, suggesting that some administrators are afforded effectively unchecked power based on sheer volume of edits (rather than the quality of their work). Robyn Speer, chief scientist at Luminoso, expressed concern that artificial intelligence corpora which used Wikipedia for language-training data had been corrupted by the pseudo-Scots.
+===Recession debate===
+In 2022 an edit war broke out at the Wikipedia page about recession, causing the page to be locked.
+=== Alleged Chinese interference on the English Wikipedia and ensuing responses by Anonymous ===
+In September, an editing war broke out over Anonymous member Cyber Anakin's English Wikipedia article, where it was reduced to a few paragraphs with reasons given for alleged POV (Point of view) policy violations, "failed verification" and "unreliable source" information. However, one of the editors behind the deletions was accused of being a "sock puppet" account of another individual, which refers to a user posing as someone else for manipulation purposes. Although both accounts were found to have edited many of the same topics and intermittently used proxies, a Wikipedia administrator later decided that they were probably two different people and unblocked the first. One remains blocked because IP evidence had shown that the account owner had been abusing multiple accounts.
+The hacker collective suspected that such changes, as well as the change of Taiwan's status from country to "partially recognized country" by another user, were part of a Chinese influence operation exploiting the biases of the existing system on Wikipedia. Anonymous also suspected that the user might be a malicious user, such as a "fifty-center" or "fellow traveller" supporting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In retaliation, Anonymous hacked into the systems of the Ministry of Emergency Management of the People's Republic of China as well as those of the private Chinese commercial satellite company "Mino Space". There, they uploaded content including images of the Anonymous emblem, the Taiwanese flag, Queen Elizabeth II, Mahsa Amini, Central Visual and St Louis Central Visual and Performing Arts school shooting victims Alexzandria Bell and Jean Kuczka, a teddy bear caricature of Xi Jinping, an allegedly corrupt official from Inner Mongolia, and the Tibetan flag. In addition, the uploaded content contained a portrait of Xi Jinping, Li Wenliang and altered photo of Yuri Gagarin, an article from Newsweek and the alleged assault of Chinese diplomats on a Hong Kong protester at the Chinese Consulate General in Manchester.
+In addition, Anonymous also included a manifesto, which begins, "Bet you thought you could get away with defiling Wikipedia articles on the idea of Anonymous with fellow travelers for the 和谐, didn't you Wiener the Pooh?" while including photos of the mausoleums of Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-Kuo. Criticising Wikipedia, the collective wrote that it is "treated by deletionists/puritanists as a toy like TikTok" instead of being or becoming a "great thing" in archival science. They lamented that, far from being a collegial environment, if someone wants to impose an unpopular change, they can "simply call in a minority gang to isolate or swarm any dissenting users, to the point where the narrative and interpretations of the rules are distorted and they end up receiving Hu Jintao treatment by administrators or moderators, with tribalism reigning supreme."
+A deputy researcher Wu Zonghan from the Taiwanese Cybersecurity Institute of the National Defense Institute said, "A supporter of the free Internet should show solidarity when there is such a global attempt to control the information monopoly or when people are oppressed, as was the case last year when they attacked Chinese cultural centers (abroad). Taiwan's Legislative Councilor Wang Dingyu implicitly applauded the anonymous operation, saying that he wanted to collect the screenshot of the defacement containing President Tsai Ing-Wen's photo as a souvenir.
+A few days later, the decentralized collective hacked a United Nations website where it included images of Taiwan's national flag and president, the Taiwanese national emblem, and scores of the Taiwanese anthem. Other images included flags representing Taiwanese independence, Tibet, East Turkestan, Kosovo, and Somaliland, as well as the Somaliland emblem, Taiwanese political party logos, and Taiwanese and Somaliland political emblems. Five pages of manifesto text were posted, including a link to a resignation letter from former Wikipedia administrator Pratyeka, who wrote that he was leaving the site because "it seems to be populated by deletionists, paid shills, and policy thumpers." In his letter, he added that "common decency has evaporated" and lamented that "Wikipedia has lost its way."
+In addition, allegations of sexual harassment by a Wikipedia administrator have come to light, and Anonymous said that administrators and editors are "constantly being driven away by Wikipedia's deletions and systemic corruption, while the bad ones remain." The manifesto also addresses topics such as mass school shootings, missing student Deven Phuong, and the collective's hatred for fascists and "tankies." Finally, the hacker collective presents a guide for the Chinese Communist Party on how to "wash away the shame of letting COVID-19 get out of control." Calls for Elon Musk to acquire Wikipedia and establish a "Wikipendium" (Wiki + Compendium) were made. The manifesto ends with a link to a forum post that criticizes the work of a Wikipedia administrator who has allegedly been accused of sexual harassment.
+On early December 2022, Anonymous hacked into an Iranian hajj website to post Taiwanese flag photos along with that of the state flag of Iran that flew in the nation from 1964 to 1979, and Mahsa Amini. There the hacking collective included an image showing Wikipedia's burgeoning revenue in recent years and accused the organization of "suckering and hoarding up money by pretending that it's under existential danger." while including a link to a request for comment on the appropriateness of the banners used by Wikipedia's December 2022 fundraising campaign. Wikipedia was accused of having a "growing cancer," and linked to a page by a Wikipedia user who displayed a revenue chart allegedly showing the free online encyclopedia's "runaway spending growth." Reportedly they also accused the encyclopedia of being "dominated by deletionists and policy thumpers," and included a link to a former Wikipedia editor Stephenb, who claimed to halt work for the organization due to "Deletionists."
+===Saudi Arabian influence of Wikipedia===
+Human rights organizations DAWN and SMEX revealed in 2022 that Saudi Arabian government has reportedly been successful in infiltrating Wikipedia, by having its operatives and supporters to gain adminship positions in Arabic Wikipedia, while putting two Wikipedia editors in jail. As a result, those people have been banned by the Wikimedia Foundation.
 ==References==
@@ Line 55: / Line 78: @@
 * https://web.archive.org/web/20200826132225/https://inews.co.uk/news/scotland/scots-wikipedia-language-articles-native-speaker-mistakes-610689
 * https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/
+* https://www.npr.org/2022/07/29/1114599942/wikipedia-recession-edits
+* https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4703442
+* https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2022/11/02/2003788129
+* https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/Xinwen/6-10312022161737.html
+* https://news.ltn.com.tw/news/world/paper/1549263
+* https://www.rti.org.tw/news/view/id/2149129
+* https://www.mikrobitti.fi/uutiset/anonymous-hyokkasi-kiinaan-syyna-muokkaussota-wikipediassa/4afe83d3-4178-4e75-bb29-d027c69ee0c9
+* https://www.itworldcanada.com/post/anonymous-hacks-chinas-emergency-management-website
+* https://news.cts.com.tw/cts/international/202211/202211012105137.html
+* https://www.msn.com/zh-tw/news/national/%E5%8C%BF%E5%90%8D%E8%80%85%E5%A0%B1%E5%BE%A9%E4%B8%AD%E5%9C%8B%E9%A7%AD%E9%80%B2%E5%AE%98%E7%B6%B2%E8%B2%BC%E8%94%A1%E7%B8%BD%E7%B5%B1%E7%85%A7-%E7%B6%B2%E5%96%8A%E6%AD%B7%E5%8F%B2%E4%B8%80%E5%88%BB/ar-AA13B87V
+* https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4707834
+* https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4737193
+* https://dawnmena.org/saudi-arabia-government-agents-infiltrate-wikipedia-sentence-independent-wikipedia-administrators-to-prison/

Wikipedia: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 19:06, 2 December 2025

Contents

Consumer-impact summary

Monopoly

Incidents

Hostility against newcomers

Deletionism

"Name and shame" pages

Orangemoody scandal

Scots Wikipedia scandal

Recession debate

Alleged Chinese interference on the English Wikipedia and ensuing responses by Anonymous

Saudi Arabian influence of Wikipedia

References

Navigation menu

Page actions

Page actions

Personal tools

Navigation

Search

Orientierung

Seminar/Organisation

Studium

Fach/Forschung

Tools