Wikipedia

Wikipedia "The free encyclopedia"
Logo of the English version of Wikipedia since 2010.
Front page of Wikipedia.
Type	Collaborative online encyclopedia, wiki
Available in	334 languages
Founded	15 January, 2001
Founder	Jimmy Wales Larry Sanger
Users	~280,000 active editors
Espoused ideology	None (de-jure) Liberalism (de-facto)
URL	wikipedia.org

Wikipedia is a collaborative, free-to-edit online encyclopedia based on open-source MediaWiki software. It was launched in 2001 by capitalist Jimmy 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, a ranking it still holds as of May 2023. 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 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; after just six years, he had "earned enough to support himself and his wife for the rest of their lives".Template:Sfn 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". In March 2000, with funding from Bomis, Wales hired his friend Larry Sanger to begin work on a for-profit, 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 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. Wales quickly gained personal notoriety and press, but not content with his exorbitant speaking fees,Template:Sfn he decided to take advantage of Wikipedia's popularity, co-founding the for-profit Wikia Inc. (known since 2018 as Fandom). Wales continued to profit from his speaking invitations until at least 2013, making from $50,000 to over $70,000 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" 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.

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

Issues

Anonymity

Editing by state governments

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

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

In 2007, Reuters found that the CIA and FBI had made edits to Wikipedia pages concerning the Iraq War and Guantanamo Bay.

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.

Languages

Wikipedia.org maintains 321 separate "Wikipedias", mostly separated by language, each with their own separate articles, Talk pages, and moderators. This can result in major differences in content based on the language's userbase. The Belarusian language has two standard varieties which are highly similar but have political implications, a situation somewhat comparable to Norwegian. [citation needed] Taraškievica, a non-standard orthography which reverts the Soviet-era language reforms of 1933, has its own wiki which frames the Belarusian government as an "occupation government" and a "puppet state" with President Lukashenko as "head of the occupation", and displays the white-red-white flag used by Belarusian nationalists and pro-Western groups.

In 2020, a Reddit user discovered that nearly half of all pages on the Scots Wikipedia had been written by a user who spoke no Scots but who had administrator status through seniority and used their position to overrule actual Scots speakers. The user had apparently composed pages by individually running English words through an English-to-Scots online dictionary without regard for grammatical rules.Wikipedias for Balkan languages, in particular Croatian, are notorious for their whitewashing of Nazi and Ustaše crimes. The Croatian Minister of Education, Science, and Sport even discouraged use of the Croatian Wikipedia on account of its extreme bias.

Bias and sources

Wikipedia has strict policies concerning sources which have the effect of stifling views that 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.

• "Reliable sources" only:

Example: Wikipedia has currently deprecated several sources which have not been demonstrated to be less reliable than other media outlets, including CGTN, the Global Times, Baidu Baike, Russia Today, Telesur, MintPress News, and The Grayzone. As of July 19, 2023, edits from Dr.Swag Lord, Red-tailed hawk, and Philip Cross make up over 50% of the content on the article on The Grayzone.

• No original research: Working outside the bounds of established institutions, even with quality sources or new evidence, is forbidden.

Example: Citations from anti-communist Sovietologists like Service and Conquest stand on the same footing as recent works, ignoring the momentous importance of the Soviet archives for the study of Soviet history.

Motivated editors can make use of these policies to gain an advantage when defending Western mainstream narratives, making correcting bias difficult even with reliable evidence.

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.

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 lifting content from Wikipedia on several occasions, 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". 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.

See also

• MediaWiki

External links

• @congressedits, account compiling edits made to Wikipedia from the US Congress, now on Mastodon
• WhoColor, a browser script which color-codes Wiki text by editor and has other useful features