Wikipedia

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Wikipedia is an open source, free-to-edit online encyclopedia launched in 2001 by capitalist Jimmy ("Jimbo") Wales and his employee Larry Sanger. Sanger had the idea to apply the "wiki" concept to the encyclopedia format, allowing any user to edit and link pages easily, and the resulting project quickly took off in popularity. By January 2007, Wikipedia was one of the top ten most visited sites,[1] a ranking it still holds as of May 2023.[2] Wikipedia's version of the wiki format has since been widely imitated, and it continues to exercise major influence on the dissemination of knowledge. Its impressive growth and stability since the early 2000s has sparked discussions about decentralization, anarchic forms of administration, and the potential of the Internet and the Web.

History

Jimmy Wales and Bomis

Jimmy Wales worked as a financier at Chicago Options Associates starting in 1994. He had a talent for options trading, betting on interest rates, and foreign currency speculation;[3][4] after just six years, he had "earned enough to support himself and his wife for the rest of their lives".[5] In 1996, he used some of his money to co-found Bomis, a dot-com company best known for its "BomisBabes" page featuring softcore pornography. Bomis's advertising director later estimated that "99% of the [user] searches had to do with naked babes".[6] In March 2000, with funding from Bomis, Wales hired his friend Larry Sanger to begin work on a for-profit,[7] online encyclopedia with peer-reviewed content written by experts. On account of its stringent peer-review process, however, Wales and Sanger quickly lost faith in the project and were looking for alternatives when Sanger, inspired by the collaborative programming site WikiWikiWeb, had the idea to create a companion page that would allow for users to submit raw content to be vetted by the review board.

Against their expectations, however, the new WikiPedia quickly outlived its predecessor, outgrowing Bomis's capacity to fund it. Wales initially considered adding advertisements to the site[8] but decided against it; instead, he opted to make it part of the new nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, hiring his old co-chairs at Bomis to serve with him as its inaugural Board of Trustees.[a] Wales quickly gained personal notoriety and press, but not content with his exorbitant speaking fees,[9][10] he decided to take advantage of Wikipedia's popularity, co-founding the for-profit Wikia Inc.[b] (known since 2018 as Fandom).[11] Wales continued to profit from his speaking invitations until at least 2013,[11][12] making from $50,000[11] to over $70,000[12] per engagement. He continues to benefit from an image as "the guy who made the sum of the world's information free without making a penny himself"[12] when in fact, from the beginning, he emphasized to his speaking hosts that, rather than representing the Foundation, he was to be paid directly in his "personal capacity" as a speaker.[13]

Wales has been a lifelong supporter and advocate for the right-libertarian ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand.[6][7] Wales claims that Wikipedia was heavily inspired by Hayek's well-known theory of dispersed knowledge and self-organization in a capitalist economy.

Wales has repeatedly minimized the role of Larry Sanger in Wikipedia's early development,[citation needed] and he has discredited Sanger's status as "co-founder",[citation needed] going so far as to personally edit Wikipedia pages to remove references to Sanger.[14][15] In fact, it is generally accepted that Sanger created much of the site's early infrastructure[citation needed] as well as coining the name WikiPedia.[citation needed] Wales later apologized for editing his own page but maintained that he had been rightfully correcting "blatant error[s]".[15] Sanger is critical of the Wikipedia project and of Wales for several reasons, including its bottom-up, "anti-elitist" approach.[citation needed]

Issues

Anonymity

US Congress

Sitting members of the US Congress and their staffers regularly make anonymous edits to Wikipedia.[16][17] The edits go back to at least 2007 and include posts from 2008 presidential candidate Joe Biden,[18] Senator Dianne Feinstein,[18] and former Representative Mike Pence.[19] Edits range widely, from "touching up" their own articles[18][19] to transphobic attacks,[20] removal of references to US torture,[21] and unhinged propaganda, such as the claim that the Cuban government had been behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy.[17] Wikipedia temporarily suspended Congressional IPs in 2014, citing "disruptive edits".[17]

In July 2014, a Twitter user created a bot to automatically track anonymous edits originating from Congress's IP range.[22] The account's posts were widely disseminated until 2018, when an anonymous Congressional user doxxed three Republican Congressmen in a series of Wiki edits,[23] triggering the bot to automatically spread the sensitive information. Twitter promptly suspended the account.[24] A former staffer was later charged for the incident;[25] however, even after the bot's owner offered to automatically redact any future sensitive posts, Twitter refused to lift the ban.[22] The account has since moved to the Mastodon platform.[26]

British Parliament

The account @parliamentedits tracks edits from the British Parliament, similarly to @congressedits.

Structure

Wikipedia boasts that its structure allows for any user to make edits. In reality, getting an edit to stick is a time-consuming process which requires prior understanding of Wikipedia's procedures and internal politics and may involve a lengthy debate process on the article's Talk page.

Bias and sources

Wikipedia has strict policies on the use of sources which have the effect of stifling views which breach the narrow confines of Western academic and media opinion. These include the following:

  • "Academic consensus" only: Political and historical disagreements are treated like scientific disagreements, making "fringe" theories unaccepted by academics tantamount to pseudoscience.
Example: Conspiracy theories surrounding Jeffrey Epstein or Seth Rich are stonewalled in the mainstream media, making them inadmissable on Wikipedia due to lack of mainstream sources.
  • No original research: Working outside the bounds of established institutions, even with quality sources or new evidence, is forbidden.
Example: Citations from ancient Sovietologists like Service and Conquest stand on the same footing as recent works, ignoring the monumentous importance of the Soviet archives for the study of Soviet history.

Editors

Wikipedia allows paid editors to contribute. The only stipulation is that these editors disclose their funding on their user Talk page. Paid edits in content articles have no indication that they were made by a paid editor.

Philip Cross

Authoritative position

Wikipedia has shown clear strengths in certain areas, such as for retrieving statistics and dates, reading on STEM-related topics, and for collecting sources on a topic. However, the site's informal reputation as being authoritative has led to overreliance and a lack of due skepticism towards its contents. Reporters and media outlets have been caught stealing content from Wikipedia on several occasions,[citation needed] including uncited material. In such cases, the article in question may even be used to support the original claim on Wikipedia, a phenomenon known to Wiki editors as "citogenesis".[27] In addition, unlike a source written by one author or institution, Wikipedia articles do not disclose the positions or biases of their editors, allowing articles to claim to represent all viewpoints on an issue without clarifying the positions of the author.

Strategy

Wikipedia, as a free-to-edit information source which shapes the opinions of millions of users around the world, presents itself as an obvious target for an entryist campaign, and some leftists advocate such a strategy. There are precedents which could be cited in support: in the mid-2010s, users of the white supremacist site Stormfront launched "Swarmfront", a targeted and highly coordinated propaganda campaign to spread racist rhetoric on 4chan and Reddit. The campaign coincided with the rise of the alt-right, making it difficult to measure its actual influence, but its unique rhetoric was noticeable in the discourse on both websites at the time.[28]

Notes

  1. ↑ Namely, Tim Shell and Michael Davis. See Archive:Former Board of Trustees members at foundation.wikimedia.org. Davis was the founder and longtime head of Chicago Options Associates as well as, notably, the subject of a 2007 landmark Illinois court case concerning his attempt to avoid paying over $800,000 in damages to a former client.
  2. ↑ Not to be confused with the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation.

References

  1. ↑ https://ir.comscore.com/static-files/45b068e1-1cee-412a-b48f-21ec34e7b59d
  2. ↑ "Top Websites Ranking - Most Visited Websites in April 2023 - Similarweb". Similarweb. 2023-05-01. Archived from the original on 2023-05-10. Retrieved 2023-05-11.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  3. ↑ McNichol, Tom (2007-02-14). "With Wikia, a Wikipedia founder looks to strike it rich. - March 1, 2007". money.cnn.com. Archived from the original on 2007-03-02. Retrieved 2023-05-14.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  4. ↑ Pink, Daniel H. (2005-03-01). "The Book Stops Here". WIRED. Archived from the original on 2023-01-30. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  5. ↑ Pink 2005.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "The free-knowledge fundamentalist". The Economist. 2010-12-03. Archived from the original on 2010-12-03. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Mangu-Ward, Katherine (2007-05-30). "Wikipedia and Beyond". Reason.com. Retrieved 2023-05-11.
  8. ↑ "Wikipedia:FAQ/Overview". Wikipedia. 2002-10-01. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  9. ↑ Finkelstein 2008.
  10. ↑ Greenfield, Rebecca (2013-06-27). "Jimmy Wales Is Only Worth $1 Million". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on 2020-11-11. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Finkelstein, Seth (2008-09-24). "Wikipedia isn't about human potential, whatever Wales says". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 2023-03-31. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 Chozick, Amy (2013-06-30). "Jimmy Wales Is Not an Internet Billionaire". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2017-11-20. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  13. ↑ Quoted in Finkelstein 2008; live on the Web, in a somewhat corrupted format, at https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-August/022341.html.
  14. ↑ "Wikipedia Founder Looks Out for Number 1". Workbench. 1986-01-04. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Hansen, Evan (2005-12-19). "Wikipedia Founder Edits Own Bio". WIRED. Archived from the original on 2012-05-30. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  16. ↑ "United States congressional staff edits to Wikipedia". Wikipedia. 2006-01-30. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 Miller, Joe (2014-07-25). "Wikipedia blocks 'disruptive' page edits from US Congress". BBC News. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 Noguchi, Yuki (2006-02-09). "Wikipedia's Help From the Hill". Washington Post. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 "Did Mike Pence's Office Edit His Wikipedia Page To Make It More Flattering?". HuffPost. 2011-08-18. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  20. ↑ Browning, Laura M. (2014-08-21). "Someone in Congress is messing with an Orange Is The New Black star's Wikipedia page". The A.V. Club. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  21. ↑ Ries, Brian (2022-03-11). "Senate staffer tries to scrub 'torture' reference from Wikipedia's CIA torture article". Mashable. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 "What Happened to CongressEdits? The Thrilling Life and Untold Death of Twitter's Most Important Wikipedia Bot". The Wikipedian. 2019-01-17. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  23. ↑ Thebault, Reis (2018-09-28). "Fight over Kavanaugh nomination finds its oddest front yet: Wikipedia pages". Washington Post. Archived from the original on 2018-12-01. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  24. ↑ "Quarrantine PII · Issue #169 · edsu/anon". GitHub. 2018-10-03. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  25. ↑ Hsu, Spencer S. (2018-10-04). "Democratic ex-staffer contests charges he posted personal data on GOP senators, threatened witness in doxing". Washington Post. Archived from the original on 2018-10-23. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  26. ↑ "congressedits (@[email protected])". botsin.space. Retrieved 2023-05-19.
  27. ↑ "Wikipedia:List of citogenesis incidents". Wikipedia. 2016-11-22. Retrieved 2023-05-14.
  28. ↑ "Who or what is Stormfront, and how are they ruining Reddit?". Reddit. 2015-05-01. Retrieved 2023-05-11.

External links

  • @congressedits, account compiling edits made to Wikipedia from the US Congress, now on Mastodon
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