fbpx
Wikipedia

Criticism of Wikipedia

January 13, 2023

Most criticism of Wikipedia has been directed toward its content, its community of established users, and its processes. Critics have questioned its factual reliability, the readability and organization of the 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. In addition, 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 from contributors as well as administrators and other top figures, social stratification between a guardian class and newer users, excessive rule-making, edit warring, and uneven application of policies.

Two radically different versions of the Wikipedia biography Klee Irwin (now deleted[1]) presented to the public within days of each other: Wikipedia's susceptibility to edit wars and bias is an issue often raised by critics of the project.

Criticism of content

The reliability of Wikipedia is often questioned. In "Wikipedia: The Dumbing Down of World Knowledge" (2010), journalist Edwin Black characterized the content of articles as a mixture of "truth, half-truth, and some falsehoods".[2] Oliver Kamm, in "Wisdom?: More like Dumbness of the Crowds" (2007), said that articles usually are dominated by the loudest and most persistent editorial voices or by an interest group with an ideological "axe to grind".[3]

In his article "The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia" (2012), Timothy Messer–Kruse criticized the undue-weight policy that deals with the relative importance of sources, observing that it showed Wikipedia's goal was not to present correct and definitive information about a subject but to present the majority opinion of the sources cited.[4][5] In their article "You Just Type in What You are Looking for: Undergraduates' Use of Library Resources vs. Wikipedia" (2012) in an academic librarianship journal, the authors noted another author's point that omissions within an article might give the reader false ideas about a topic, based upon the incomplete content of Wikipedia.[6]

Wikipedia is sometimes characterized as having a hostile editing environment. In Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia (2014), Dariusz Jemielniak, a steward for Wikimedia Foundation projects, stated that the complexity of the rules and laws governing editorial content and the behavior of the editors is a burden for new editors and a license for the "office politics" of disruptive editors.[7][8] In a follow-up article, Jemielniak said that abridging and rewriting the editorial rules and laws of Wikipedia for clarity of purpose and simplicity of application would resolve the bureaucratic bottleneck of too many rules.[8] In The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia's Reaction to Popularity is Causing its Decline (2013), Aaron Halfaker said the over-complicated rules and laws of Wikipedia unintentionally provoked the decline in editorial participation that began in 2009—frightening away new editors who otherwise would contribute to Wikipedia.[9][10][failed verification]

There have also been works that describe the possible misuse of Wikipedia. In "Wikipedia or Wickedpedia?" (2008), the Hoover Institution said Wikipedia is an unreliable resource for correct knowledge, information, and facts about a subject, because, as an open-source website, the editorial content of the articles is readily subjected to manipulation and propaganda.[11] The 2014 edition of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's official student handbook, Academic Integrity at MIT, informs students that Wikipedia is not a reliable academic source, stating, "the bibliography published at the end of the Wikipedia entry may point you to potential sources. However, do not assume that these sources are reliable – use the same criteria to judge them as you would any other source. Do not consider the Wikipedia bibliography as a replacement for your own research."[12]

Accuracy of information

Main article: Reliability of Wikipedia

Not authoritative

Wikipedia acknowledges that the encyclopedia should not be used as a primary source for research, either academic or informational. The British librarian Philip Bradley said, "the main problem is the lack of authority. With printed publications, the publishers have to ensure that their data are reliable, as their livelihood depends on it. But with something like this, all that goes out the window."[13] Likewise, Robert McHenry, editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica from 1992 to 1997, said that readers of Wikipedia articles cannot know who wrote the article they are reading—it might have been written by an expert in the subject matter or by an amateur.[14] In November 2015, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger told Zach Schwartz in Vice: "I think Wikipedia never solved the problem of how to organize itself in a way that didn't lead to mob rule" and that since he left the project, "People that I would say are trolls sort of took over. The inmates started running the asylum."[15]

Comparative study of science articles

 
"Teaching criticism vs. teaching praise": an analysis of talk-page messages for the Wikipedia Summer of Research (2011) conventionhttp://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Research:WSOR11[16]

In "Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head-to-head", a 2005 article published in the scientific journal Nature, the results of a blind experiment (single-blind study), which compared the factual and informational accuracy of entries from Wikipedia and the Encyclopædia Britannica, were reported. The 42-entry sample included science articles and biographies of scientists, which were compared for accuracy by anonymous academic reviewers; they found that the average Wikipedia entry contained four errors and omissions, while the average Encyclopædia Britannica entry contained three errors and omissions. The study concluded that Wikipedia and Britannica were comparable in terms of the accuracy of its science entries.[17] Nevertheless, the reviewers had two principal criticisms of the Wikipedia science entries: (i) thematically confused content, without an intelligible structure (order, presentation, interpretation); and (ii) that undue weight is given to controversial, fringe theories about the subject matter.[18]

The dissatisfaction of the Encyclopædia Britannica editors led to Nature publishing additional survey documentation that substantiated the results of the comparative study.[19] Based upon the additional documents, Encyclopædia Britannica denied the validity of the study, stating it was flawed, because the Britannica extracts were compilations that sometimes included articles written for the youth version of the encyclopedia.[20] In turn, Nature acknowledged that some Britannica articles were compilations, but denied that such editorial details invalidated the conclusions of the comparative study of the science articles.[21]

The editors of Britannica also said that while the Nature study showed that the rate of error between the two encyclopedias was similar, the errors in a Wikipedia article usually were errors of fact, while the errors in a Britannica article were errors of omission. According to the editors of Britannica, Britannica was more accurate than Wikipedia in that respect.[20] Subsequently, Nature magazine rejected the Britannica response with a rebuttal of the editors' specific objections about the research method of the study.[22][23]

Lack of methodical fact-checking

 
American journalist John Seigenthaler, the object of the Seigenthaler incident

Inaccurate information that is not obviously false may persist in Wikipedia for a long time before it is challenged. The most prominent cases reported by mainstream media involved biographies of living people.

The Wikipedia Seigenthaler biography incident demonstrated that the subject of a biographical article must sometimes fix blatant lies about his own life. In May 2005, an anonymous user edited the biographical article on American journalist and writer John Seigenthaler so that it contained several false and defamatory statements.[24][25] The inaccurate claims went unnoticed from May until September 2005 when they were discovered by Victor S. Johnson Jr., a friend of Seigenthaler. Wikipedia content is often mirrored at sites such as Answers.com, which means that incorrect information can be replicated alongside correct information through a number of web sources. Such information can thereby develop false authority due to its presence at such sites.[26]

In another example, on March 2, 2007, MSNBC.com reported that then-New York Senator Hillary Clinton had been incorrectly listed for 20 months in her Wikipedia biography as having been valedictorian of her class of 1969 at Wellesley College, when in fact she was not (though she did speak at commencement).[27] The article included a link to the Wikipedia edit,[28] where the incorrect information was added on July 9, 2005. The inaccurate information was removed within 24 hours after the MSNBC.com report appeared.[29]

Attempts to perpetrate hoaxes may not be confined to editing existing Wikipedia articles, but can also include creating new articles. In October 2005, Alan Mcilwraith, a call center worker from Scotland, created a Wikipedia article in which he wrote that he was a highly decorated war hero. The article was quickly identified as a hoax by other users and deleted.[30]

There have also been instances of users deliberately inserting false information into Wikipedia in order to test the system and demonstrate its alleged unreliability. Gene Weingarten, a journalist, ran such a test in 2007, in which he inserted false information into his own Wikipedia article; it was removed 27 hours later by a Wikipedia editor.[31] Wikipedia considers the deliberate insertion of false and misleading information to be vandalism.[32]

Neutral point of view and conflicts of interest

Further information: Wikipedia:Core content policies

Wikipedia regards the concept of a neutral point of view as one of its non-negotiable principles; however, it acknowledges that such a concept has its limitations – its NPOV policy states that articles should be "as far as possible" written, "without editorial bias". Mark Glaser, a journalist, also wrote that this may be an impossible ideal due to the inevitable biases of editors.[33] Research has shown that articles can maintain bias in spite of the neutral point of view policy through word choice, the presentation of opinions and controversial claims as facts, and framing bias.[34][35]

In August 2007, a tool called WikiScanner—developed by Virgil Griffith, a visiting researcher from the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico—was released to match edits to the encyclopedia by non-registered users with an extensive database of IP addresses.[36] News stories appeared about IP addresses from various organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Diebold, Inc. and the Australian government being used to make edits to Wikipedia articles, sometimes of an opinionated or questionable nature. Another story stated that an IP address from the BBC itself had been used to vandalize the article on George W. Bush.[37] The BBC quoted a Wikipedia spokesperson as praising the tool: "We really value transparency and the scanner really takes this to another level. Wikipedia Scanner may prevent an organization or individuals from editing articles that they're really not supposed to."[38] Not everyone hailed WikiScanner as a success for Wikipedia. Oliver Kamm, in a column for The Times, argued instead that:[3]

The WikiScanner is thus an important development in bringing down a pernicious influence on our intellectual life. Critics of the web decry the medium as the cult of the amateur. Wikipedia is worse than that; it is the province of the covert lobby. The most constructive course is to stand on the sidelines and jeer at its pretensions.

WikiScanner reveals conflicts of interest only when the editor does not have a Wikipedia account and their IP address is used instead. Conflict-of-interest editing done by editors with accounts is not detected, since those edits are anonymous to everyone except some Wikipedia administrators.[39]

Scientific disputes

The 2005 Nature study also gave two brief examples of challenges that Wikipedian science writers purportedly faced on Wikipedia. The first concerned the addition of a section on violence to the schizophrenia article, which was little more than a "rant" about the need to lock people up, in the view of one of the article's regular editors, neuropsychologist Vaughan Bell. He said that editing it stimulated him to look up the literature on the topic.[17]

Another dispute involved the climate researcher William Connolley, a Wikipedia editor who was opposed by others. The topic in this second dispute was "language pertaining to the greenhouse effect",[40] and The New Yorker reported that this dispute, which was far more protracted, had led to arbitration, which took three months to produce a decision.[40] The outcome of arbitration was for Connolley to be restricted to undoing edits on articles once per day.[40]

Exposure to political operatives and advocates

See also: Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia

While Wikipedia policy requires articles to have a neutral point of view, it is not immune from attempts by outsiders (or insiders) with an agenda to place a spin on articles. In January 2006, it was revealed that several staffers of members of the U.S. House of Representatives had embarked on a campaign to cleanse their respective bosses' biographies on Wikipedia, as well as inserting negative remarks on political opponents. References to a campaign promise by Martin Meehan to surrender his seat in 2000 were deleted, and negative comments were inserted into the articles on United States Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, and Eric Cantor, a congressman from Virginia. Numerous other changes were made from an IP address assigned to the House of Representatives.[41] In an interview, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales remarked that the changes were "not cool".[42]

Larry Delay and Pablo Bachelet wrote that from their perspective, some articles dealing with Latin American history and groups (such as the Sandinistas and Cuba) lack political neutrality and are written from a sympathetic Marxist perspective which treats socialist dictatorships favorably at the expense of alternative positions.[43][44]

In 2008, the pro-Israel group Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) organized an e-mail campaign to encourage readers to correct perceived Israel-related biases and inconsistencies in Wikipedia.[45] CAMERA argued the excerpts were unrepresentative and that it had explicitly campaigned merely "toward encouraging people to learn about and edit the online encyclopedia for accuracy".[46] Defenders of CAMERA and the competing group, Electronic Intifada, went into mediation.[45] Israeli diplomat David Saranga said Wikipedia is generally fair in regard to Israel. When it was pointed out that the entry on Israel mentioned the word "occupation" nine times, whereas the entry on the Palestinian people mentioned "terror" only once, he responded, "It means only one thing: Israelis should be more active on Wikipedia. Instead of blaming it, they should go on the site much more, and try and change it."[47]

Israeli political commentator Haviv Rettig Gur, reviewing widespread perceptions in Israel of systemic bias in Wikipedia articles, has argued that there are deeper structural problems creating this bias: anonymous editing favors biased results, especially if the editors organize concerted campaigns of defamation as has been done in articles dealing with Arab-Israeli issues, and current Wikipedia policies, while well-meant, have proven ineffective in handling this.[48]

On August 31, 2008, The New York Times ran an article detailing the edits made to the biography of Alaska governor Sarah Palin in the wake of her nomination as the running mate of Arizona Senator John McCain. During the 24 hours before the McCain campaign announcement, 30 edits, many of them adding flattering details, were made to the article by the user "Young_Trigg".[49] This person later acknowledged working on the McCain campaign, and having several other user accounts.[50]

In November 2007, libelous accusations were made against two politicians from southwestern France, Jean-Pierre Grand and Hélène Mandroux-Colas, on their Wikipedia biographies. Grand asked the president of the French National Assembly and Prime Minister to reinforce the legislation on the penal responsibility of Internet sites and of authors who peddle false information in order to cause harm.[51] Senator Jean Louis Masson then requested the Minister of Justice to tell him whether it would be possible to increase the criminal responsibilities of hosting providers, site operators, and authors of libelous content; the minister declined to do so, recalling the existing rules in the LCEN law (see Internet censorship in France).[52]

On August 25, 2010, the Toronto Star reported that the Canadian "government is now conducting two investigations into federal employees who have taken to Wikipedia to express their opinion on federal policies and bitter political debates."[53]

In 2010, Al Jazeera's Teymoor Nabili suggested that the article Cyrus Cylinder had been edited for political purposes by "an apparent tussle of opinions in the shadowy world of hard drives and 'independent' editors that comprise the Wikipedia industry." He suggested that after the Iranian presidential election of 2009 and ensuing "anti-Iranian activities", a "strenuous attempt to portray the cylinder as nothing more than the propaganda tool of an aggressive invader" was visible. The edits following his analysis of the edits during 2009 and 2010, represented "a complete dismissal of the suggestion that the cylinder, or Cyrus' actions, represent a concern for human rights or any kind of enlightened intent," in stark contrast to Cyrus' own reputation as documented in the Old Testament and the people of Babylon.[54]

Commandeering or sanitizing articles

Articles of particular interest to an editor or group of editors are sometimes modified based on these editors' respective points of views.[55] Some companies and organizations—such as Sony, Diebold, Nintendo, Dell, the CIA, and the Church of Scientology—as well as individuals, such as United States Congressional staffers, were all shown to have modified the Wikipedia pages about themselves in order to present a point of view that describes them positively; these organizations may have editors who revert negative changes as soon as these changes are submitted.[56][57]

The Chinese Wikipedia article on the Tiananmen Square massacre was rewritten to describe it as necessary to "quell the counterrevolutionary riots" and Taiwan was described as "a province in the People's Republic of China". According to the BBC, "there are indications that [such edits] are not all necessarily organic, nor random" and were in fact orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party.[58][59]

Quality of presentation

Quality of writing

 
A March 30, 2021, screenshot of English Wikipedia's article on Earth, a featured-class article

In a 2006 mention of Jimmy Wales, Time magazine stated that the policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the "biggest (and perhaps best) encyclopedia in the world".[60]

In 2008, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that the quality of a Wikipedia article would suffer rather than gain from adding more writers when the article lacked appropriate explicit or implicit coordination.[61] For instance, when contributors rewrite small portions of an entry rather than making full-length revisions, high- and low-quality content may be intermingled within an entry. Roy Rosenzweig, a history professor, stated that American National Biography Online outperformed Wikipedia in terms of its "clear and engaging prose", which, he said, was an important aspect of good historical writing.[62] Contrasting Wikipedia's treatment of Abraham Lincoln to that of Civil War historian James McPherson in American National Biography Online, he said that both were essentially accurate and covered the major episodes in Lincoln's life, but praised "McPherson's richer contextualization ... his artful use of quotations to capture Lincoln's voice ... and ... his ability to convey a profound message in a handful of words." By contrast, he gives an example of Wikipedia's prose that he finds "both verbose and dull". Rosenzweig also criticized the "waffling—encouraged by the NPOV policy—[which] means that it is hard to discern any overall interpretive stance in Wikipedia history". While generally praising the article on William Clarke Quantrill, he quoted its conclusion as an example of such "waffling", which then stated: "Some historians ... remember him as an opportunistic, bloodthirsty outlaw, while others continue to view him as a daring soldier and local folk hero."[62]

Other critics have made similar charges that, even if Wikipedia articles are factually accurate, they are often written in a poor, almost unreadable style. Frequent Wikipedia critic Andrew Orlowski commented, "Even when a Wikipedia entry is 100 percent factually correct, and those facts have been carefully chosen, it all too often reads as if it has been translated from one language to another then into a third, passing an illiterate translator at each stage."[63] A study of Wikipedia articles on cancer was conducted in 2010 by Yaacov Lawrence of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University. The study was limited to those articles that could be found in the Physician Data Query and excluded those written at the "start" class or "stub" class level. Lawrence found the articles accurate but not very readable, and thought that "Wikipedia's lack of readability (to non-college readers) may reflect its varied origins and haphazard editing".[64] The Economist argued that better-written articles tend to be more reliable: "inelegant or ranting prose usually reflects muddled thoughts and incomplete information".[65]

The Wall Street Journal debate

In the September 12, 2006, edition of The Wall Street Journal, Jimmy Wales debated with Dale Hoiberg, editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica.[66] Hoiberg focused on a need for expertise and control in an encyclopedia and cited Lewis Mumford that overwhelming information could "bring about a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance." Wales emphasized Wikipedia's differences and asserted that openness and transparency lead to quality. Hoiberg said he "had neither the time nor space to respond to [criticisms]" and "could corral any number of links to articles alleging errors in Wikipedia", to which Wales responded: "No problem! Wikipedia to the rescue with a fine article", and included a link to the Wikipedia article about criticism of Wikipedia.[66]

Systemic bias in coverage

See also: Reliability of Wikipedia § Coverage, and Academic studies about Wikipedia § A minority of editors produce the majority of persistent content

Wikipedia has been accused of systemic bias, which is to say its general nature leads, without necessarily any conscious intention, to the propagation of various prejudices. Although many articles in newspapers have concentrated on minor factual errors in Wikipedia articles, there are also concerns about large-scale, presumably unintentional effects from the increasing influence and use of Wikipedia as a research tool at all levels. In an article in the Times Higher Education magazine (London), philosopher Martin Cohen describes Wikipedia as having "become a monopoly" with "all the prejudices and ignorance of its creators," which he calls a "youthful cab-drivers" perspective.[67] Cohen concludes that "[t]o control the reference sources that people use is to control the way people comprehend the world. Wikipedia may have a benign, even trivial face, but underneath may lie a more sinister and subtle threat to freedom of thought."[67] That freedom is undermined by what he sees as what matters on Wikipedia, "not your sources but the 'support of the community."[67]

Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis developed a statistical model to measure systematic bias in the behavior of Wikipedia's users regarding controversial topics. The authors focused on behavioral changes of the encyclopedia's administrators after assuming the post, writing that systematic bias occurred after the fact.[68]

Critics also point to the tendency to cover topics in detail disproportionate to their importance. For example, Stephen Colbert once mockingly praised Wikipedia for having a longer entry on 'lightsabers' than it does on the 'printing press'.[69] Dale Hoiberg, the editor-in-chief of Encyclopædia Britannica, said "People write of things they're interested in, and so many subjects don't get covered, and news events get covered in great detail. In the past, the entry on Hurricane Frances was more than five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street was twice as long as the article on Tony Blair."[13]

This approach of comparing two articles, one about a traditionally encyclopedic subject and the other about one more popular with the crowd, has been called "wikigroaning".[70][71][72] A defense of inclusion criteria is that the encyclopedia's longer coverage of pop culture does not deprive the more "worthy" or serious subjects of space.[73]

Notability of article topics

See also: Notability in the English Wikipedia and Criticism of Wikipedia § Systemic bias in coverage

Wikipedia's notability guidelines, which are used by editors to determine if a subject merits its own article, and the application thereof, are the subject of much criticism.[74] A Wikipedia editor rejected a draft article about Donna Strickland before she won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018, because no independent sources were given to show that Strickland was sufficiently notable by Wikipedia's standards. Journalists highlighted this as an indicator of the limited visibility of women in science compared to their male colleagues.[75][76]

The gender bias on Wikipedia is well documented and has prompted a movement to increase the number of notable women on Wikipedia through the Women in Red WikiProject. In an article entitled "Seeking Disambiguation", Annalisa Merelli interviewed Catalina Cruz, a candidate for office in Queens, New York in the 2018 election who had the notorious SEO disadvantage of having the same name as a porn star with a Wikipedia page. Merelli also interviewed the Wikipedia editor who wrote the candidate's ill-fated article (which was deleted, then restored, after she won the election). She described the Articles for Deletion process and pointed to other candidates who had pages on the English Wikipedia despite never having held office.[77]

Novelist Nicholson Baker, critical of deletionism, writes: "There are quires, reams, bales of controversy over what constitutes notability in Wikipedia: nobody will ever sort it out."[78]

Journalist Timothy Noah wrote of his treatment: "Wikipedia's notability policy resembles U.S. immigration policy before 9/11: stringent rules, spotty enforcement". In the same article, Noah mentions that the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Stacy Schiff was not considered notable enough for a Wikipedia entry until she wrote her article "Know it All" about the Wikipedia Essjay controversy.[79]

On a more generic level, a 2014 study found no correlation between the characteristics of a given Wikipedia page about an academic and the academic's notability as determined by citation counts. The metrics of each Wikipedia page examined included length, number of links to the page from other articles, and number of edits made to the page. This study also found that Wikipedia did not cover notable ISI highly cited researchers properly.[80]

In 2020, Wikipedia was criticized for the amount of time it took for an article about Theresa Greenfield, a candidate for the 2020 United States Senate election in Iowa, to leave Wikipedia's Articles for the Creation process and become published. Particularly, the criteria for notability were criticized, with The Washington Post reporting: "Greenfield is a uniquely tricky case for Wikipedia because she doesn't have the background that most candidates for major political office typically have (like prior government experience or prominence in business). Even if Wikipedia editors could recognize she was prominent, she had a hard time meeting the official criteria for notability."[81] Jimmy Wales also criticized the long process on his talk page.[82]

Partisanship

Main article: Ideological bias on Wikipedia

According to Haaretz, "Wikipedia has succeeded in being accused of being both too liberal and too conservative, and has critics from across the spectrum.", while also noting that Wikipedia is "usually accused of being too liberal".[83] According to CNN, Wikipedia's ideological bias "may match the ideological bias of the news ecosystem."[84]

U.S. commentators, mostly politically conservative ones, have suggested that a politically liberal viewpoint is predominant in the English Wikipedia. Andrew Schlafly created Conservapedia because of his perception that Wikipedia contained a liberal bias.[85] Conservapedia's editors have compiled a list of alleged examples of liberal bias in Wikipedia.[86] In 2007, an article in The Christian Post criticised Wikipedia's coverage of intelligent design, saying it was biased and hypocritical.[87] Lawrence Solomon of National Review considered the Wikipedia articles on subjects like global warming, intelligent design, and Roe v. Wade all to be slanted in favor of liberal views.[88] In a September 2010 issue of the conservative weekly Human Events, Rowan Scarborough presented a critique of Wikipedia's coverage of American politicians prominent in the approaching U.S. midterm elections as evidence of systemic liberal bias. Scarborough compares the biographical articles of liberal and conservative opponents in Senate races in the Alaska Republican primary and the Delaware and Nevada general election, emphasizing the quantity of negative coverage of Tea Party movement-endorsed candidates. He also cites criticism by Lawrence Solomon and quotes in full the lead section of Wikipedia's article on Conservapedia as evidence of an underlying bias.[89]

In 2006, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said: "The Wikipedia community is very diverse, from liberal to conservative to libertarian and beyond. If averages mattered, and due to the nature of the wiki software (no voting) they almost certainly don't, I would say that the Wikipedia community is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population on average, because we are global and the international community of English speakers is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population. There are no data or surveys to back that."[90] In 2007, Wales said that claims of liberal bias on Wikipedia "are not supported by the facts".[91] Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu analyzed 2012 era Wikipedia articles on U.S. politics, going back a decade, and wrote a study[92] arguing the more contributors there were to an article, the less biased the article would be, and that – based on a study of frequent collocations – fewer articles "leaned Democrat" than was the case in Wikipedia's early years.[93][94] Sorin Adam Matei, a professor at Purdue University, said that "for certain political topics, there's a central-left bias. There's also a slight when it comes to more political topics, counter-cultural bias. It's not across the board, and it's not for all things."[95]

In February 2021, Fox News accused Wikipedia of whitewashing communism and socialism.[96] In November 2021, the English Wikipedia's entry for "Mass killings under communist regimes" was nominated for deletion, with some editors arguing that it has "a biased 'anti-Communist' point of view", that "it should not resort to 'simplistic presuppositions that events are driven by any specific ideology'", and that "by combining different elements of research to create a 'synthesis', this constitutes original research and therefore breaches Wikipedia rules."[97] This was criticized by historian Robert Tombs, who called it "morally indefensible, at least as bad as Holocaust denial, because 'linking ideology and killing' is the very core of why these things are important. I have read the Wikipedia page, and it seems to be careful and balanced. Therefore, attempts to remove it can only be ideologically motivated – to whitewash Communism."[97] Other Wikipedia editors and users on social media opposed the deletion of the article.[98] The article's deletion nomination received considerable attention from conservative media.[99] The Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think tank, called the arguments made in favor of deletion "absurd and ahistorical".[99] On December 1, 2021, a panel of four administrators found that the discussion yielded no consensus, meaning that the status quo was retained, and the article was not deleted.[100] The article's deletion discussion was the largest in Wikipedia's history.[99]

Right-wing Hindus have accused Wikipedia of being anti-Hindu and anti-Indian.[101]

National or corporate bias

In 2008, Tim Anderson, a senior lecturer in political economy at the University of Sydney, said Wikipedia administrators display an American-focused bias in their interactions with editors and their determinations of which sources are appropriate for use on the site. Anderson was outraged after several of the sources he used in his edits to the Hugo Chávez article, including Venezuela Analysis and Z Magazine, were disallowed as "unusable". Anderson also described Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy to ZDNet Australia as "a facade" and that Wikipedia "hides behind a reliance on corporate media editorials".[102]

Racial bias

Main article: Racial bias on Wikipedia

Wikipedia has been charged with having a systemic racial bias in its coverage, due to an underrepresentation of people of colour as editors.[103] The President of Wikimedia D.C., James Hare, noted that "a lot of black history is left out" of Wikipedia, due to articles predominately being written by white editors.[104] Articles that do exist on African topics are, according to some critics, largely edited by editors from Europe and North America and thus reflect their knowledge and consumption of media, which "tend to perpetuate a negative image" of Africa.[105] Maira Liriano, of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, has argued that the lack of information regarding black history on Wikipedia "makes it seem like it's not important."[106] San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguía has stressed how it is important for Latinos to be part of Wikipedia "because it is a major source of where people get their information."[107] In 2010, an analysis of Wikipedia edits revealed that Asia, as the most populous continent, was represented in only 16.67% of edits. Africa (6.35%) and South America (2.58%) were equally underrepresented.[108]

In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Center criticized Wikipedia for being "vulnerable to manipulation by neo-Nazis, white nationalists and racist academics seeking a wider audience for extreme views."[109] According to the SPLC, "[c]ivil POV-pushers can disrupt the editing process by engaging other users in tedious and frustrating debates or tie up administrators in endless rounds of mediation. Users who fall into this category include racialist academics and members of the human biodiversity, or HBD, blogging community. ... In recent years, the proliferation of far-right online spaces, such as white nationalist forums, alt-right boards and HBD blogs, has created a readymade pool of users that can be recruited to edit on Wikipedia en masse. ... The presence of white nationalists and other far-right extremists on Wikipedia is an ongoing problem that is unlikely to go away in the near future given the rightward political shift in countries where the majority of the site's users live.[109] The SPLC cited the article "Race and intelligence" as an example of the alt-right influence on Wikipedia, stating that at that time the article presented a "false balance" between fringe racialist views and the "mainstream perspective in psychology."[109] In 2022 The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on a researcher at Cleveland State University whose "home institution was essentially providing a soapbox for racist pseudoscience." The article states that he had some influence on "public misperceptions of race" as a result of heavy editing of an early version of Wikipedia's article on race and intelligence.[110]

Gender bias and sexism

Main article: Gender bias on Wikipedia
 
Former Wikimedia Foundation executive Sue Gardner has listed reasons offered by some women in "Why Women Don't Edit Wikipedia".[111]

Wikipedia has a longstanding controversy concerning gender bias and sexism.[112][113][114][115][116][117] Gender bias on Wikipedia refers to the finding that between 84 and 91 percent of Wikipedia editors are male,[118][119] which allegedly leads to systemic bias.[120] Wikipedia has been criticized[112] by some journalists and academics for lacking not only women contributors but also extensive and in-depth encyclopedic attention to many topics regarding gender. Sue Gardner, former executive director of the Foundation, said that increasing diversity was about making the encyclopedia "as good as it could be". Factors cited as possibly discouraging women from editing included the "obsessive fact-loving realm", associations with the "hard-driving hacker crowd", and the necessity to be "open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists."[113]

In 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation set a goal of increasing the proportion of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015.[113] In August 2013, Gardner conceded defeat: "I didn't solve it. We didn't solve it. The Wikimedia Foundation didn't solve it. The solution won't come from the Wikimedia Foundation."[121] In August 2014, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales acknowledged in a BBC interview the failure of Wikipedia to fix the gender gap and announced the Wikimedia Foundation's plans for "doubling down" on the issue. Wales said the Foundation would be open to more outreach and more software changes.[122]

Writing in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Marie Vitulli states that "mathematicians have had a difficult time when writing biographies of women mathematicians," and she describes the aggressiveness of editors and administrators in deleting such articles.[123]

Criticism was presented on this topic in The Signpost (WP:THREATENING2MEN).[124]

Institutional bias

Wikipedia has been criticized for reflecting the bias and influence of media that are seen as reliable due to their dominance, and for being a site of conflict between entrenched or special institutional interests. Public relations firms and interest lobbies, corporate, political and otherwise, have been accused of working systemically to distort Wikipedia's articles in their respective interests.[125]

Firearms-related articles

Wikipedia has been criticized for issues related to bias in firearms-related articles. According to critics, systematic bias arises from the tendency of the editors most active in maintaining firearms-related articles to also be gun enthusiasts, and firearms-related articles are dominated by technical information while issues of the social impact and regulation of firearms are relegated to separate articles. Communications were facilitated by a "WikiProject," called "WikiProject Firearms", an on-wiki group of editors with a common interest. The alleged pro-gun bias drew increased attention after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, in February 2018. The Wikimedia Foundation defended itself from allegations of being host to opinion-influencing campaigns of pro-gun groups, saying that the contents are always being updated and improved.[126][127][128][129][130][131][132]

Skeptical bias

In 2014, supporters of holistic healing and energy psychology began a Change.org petition asking for "true scientific discourse" on Wikipedia, complaining that "much of the information [on Wikipedia] related to holistic approaches to healing is biased, misleading, out-of-date, or just plain wrong". In response, Jimmy Wales said Wikipedia covers only works that are published in respectable scientific journals.[133][134]

Wikipedia has been accused of being biased against views outside of the scientific mainstream due to influence from the skeptical movement.[35] Social scientist Brian Martin examined the influence of skeptics on Wikipedia by looking for parallels between Wikipedia entries and characteristic techniques used by skeptics, finding that the result "does not prove that Skeptics are shaping Wikipedia but is compatible with that possibility."[35]

Sexual content

See also: Wikipedia § Explicit content

Wikipedia has been criticized for allowing graphic sexual content such as images and videos of masturbation and ejaculation as well as photos from hardcore pornographic films found on its articles. Child protection campaigners say graphic sexual content appears on many Wikipedia entries, displayed without any warning or age verification.[135]

The Wikipedia article Virgin Killer—a 1976 album from German heavy metal band Scorpions—features a picture of the album's original cover, which depicts a naked prepubescent girl. In December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation, a nonprofit, nongovernment-affiliated organization, added the article to its blacklist, criticizing the inclusion of the picture as "distasteful". As a result, access to the article was blocked for four days by most Internet service providers in the United Kingdom.[136] Seth Finkelstein writing for The Guardian argues that the debate over the album cover masks a structural lack of accountability on Wikipedia, in particular when it comes to sexual content.[137] For example, the deletion by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales of images of lolicon versions of the character Wikipe-tan created a minor controversy on the topic. The deletion was taken as endorsement of the non-lolicon images of Wikipe-tan, which Wales later had to explicitly deny: "I don't like Wikipe-tan and never have."[138] Finkelstein sees Wikipedia as composed of fiefdoms, which makes it difficult for the Wikipedia community to deal with such issues, and sometimes necessitates top-down intervention.[137]

Exposure to vandals

Main article: Vandalism on Wikipedia
 
Vandalism of a Wikipedia article

As an online encyclopedia that almost anyone can edit, Wikipedia has had problems with vandalism of articles, which range from blanking articles to inserting profanities, hoaxes, or nonsense. Wikipedia has a range of tools available to users and administrators in order to fight against vandalism, including blocking and banning vandals and automated bots that detect and repair vandalism. Supporters of the project argue that the vast majority of vandalism on Wikipedia is reverted within a short time, and a study by Fernanda Viégas of the MIT Media Lab and Martin Wattenberg and Kushal Dave of IBM Research found that most vandal edits were reverted within around five minutes; however, they state that "it is essentially impossible to find a crisp definition of vandalism."[139] While most instances of page blanking or the addition of offensive material are soon reverted, less obvious vandalism, or vandalism to a little-viewed article, has remained for longer periods.

A 2007 conference paper estimated that 1 in 271 articles had some "damaged" content. Most of the damage involved nonsense; 20% involved actual misinformation. It reported that 42% of damage gets repaired before any reader clicked on the article, and 80% before 30 people did so.[140]

Privacy concerns

Most privacy concerns refer to cases of government or employer data gathering, computer or electronic monitoring; or trading data between organizations. According to James Donnelly and Jenifer Haeckel, "the Internet has created conflicts between personal privacy, commercial interests and the interests of society at large".[141] Balancing the rights of all concerned as technology alters the social landscape will not be easy. It "is not yet possible to anticipate the path of the common law or governmental regulation" regarding this problem.[141]

The concern in the case of Wikipedia is the right of a private citizen to remain private; to remain a "private citizen" rather than a "public figure" in the eyes of the law.[142] It is somewhat of a battle between the right to be anonymous in cyberspace and the right to be anonymous in real life ("meatspace"). A particular problem occurs in the case of an individual who is relatively unimportant and for whom there exists a Wikipedia page against their wishes.[citation needed]

In 2005, Agence France-Presse quoted Daniel Brandt, the Wikipedia Watch owner, as saying that "the basic problem is that no one, neither the trustees of Wikimedia Foundation, nor the volunteers who are connected with Wikipedia, consider themselves responsible for the content."[143]

In January 2006, a German court ordered the German Wikipedia shut down within Germany because it stated the full name of Boris Floricic, aka "Tron", a deceased hacker who was formerly with the Chaos Computer Club. More specifically, the court ordered that the URL within the German .de domain (http://www.wikipedia.de/) may no longer redirect to the encyclopedia's servers in Florida at http://de.wikipedia.org although German readers were still able to use the US-based URL directly, and there was virtually no loss of access on their part. The court order arose out of a lawsuit filed by Floricic's parents, demanding that their son's surname be removed from Wikipedia. The next month on February 9, 2006, the injunction against Wikimedia Deutschland was overturned, with the court rejecting the notion that Tron's right to privacy or that of his parents was being violated.[144]

Criticism of the community

Role of Jimmy Wales

The community of Wikipedia editors has been criticized for placing an irrational emphasis on Jimmy Wales as a person. Wales's role in personally determining the content of some articles has also been criticized as contrary to the independent spirit that Wikipedia supposedly has gained.[145][146] In early 2007, Wales dismissed the criticism of the Wikipedia model: "I am unaware of any problems with the quality of discourse on the site. I don't know of any higher-quality discourse anywhere."[147][148][149][150][151]

Conflict of interest cases

Main article: Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia

A Business Insider article wrote about a controversy in September 2012 where two Wikimedia Foundation employees were found to have been "running a PR business on the side and editing Wikipedia on behalf of their clients."[152]

Unfair treatment of women

In 2015, The Atlantic published a story by Emma Paling about a contributor who was able to obtain no relief from the Arbitration Committee for off-site harassment. Paling quotes a then-sitting Arbitrator speaking about bias against women on the Arbitration Committee.[153]

In the online magazine Slate, David Auerbach criticized the Arbitration Committee's decision to block a woman indefinitely without simultaneously blocking her "chief antagonists" in the December 2014 Gender Gap Task Force case. He mentions his own experience with what he calls "the unblockable"—abrasive editors who can get away with complaints against them because there are enough supporters, and that he had observed a "general indifference or even hostility to an outside opinion" on the English Wikipedia. Auerbach considers the systematic defense of vulgar language use by insiders as a symptom of the toxicity he describes.[154]

In January 2015, The Guardian reported that the Arbitration Committee had banned five feminist editors from gender-related articles on a case related to the Gamergate controversy while including quotes from a Wikipedia editor alleging unfair treatment.[155][156] Other commentators, including from Gawker and ThinkProgress, provided additional analysis while sourcing from The Guardian's story.[156][157][158][159][160] Reports in The Washington Post, Slate and Social Text described these articles as "flawed" or factually inaccurate, pointing out that the Arbitration case had not concluded as at the time of publishing; no editor had been banned.[156][161][162] After the result was published, Gawker wrote that "ArbCom ruled to punish six editors who could be broadly classified as 'anti-Gamergate' and five who are 'pro-Gamergate'." All of the supposed "Five Horsemen"[non sequitur] were among the editors punished, with one of them being the sole editor banned due to this case.[163] An article called "ArbitrationGate" regarding this situation was created (and quickly deleted) on Wikipedia, while The Guardian later issued a correction to their article.[156] The Committee and the Wikimedia Foundation issued press statements that the Gamergate case was in response to the atmosphere of the Gamergate article resembling a "battlefield" due to "various sides of the discussion [having] violated community policies and guidelines on conduct", and that the committee was fulfilling its role to "uphold a civil, constructive atmosphere" on Wikipedia. The committee also wrote that it "does not rule on the content of articles, or make judgements on the personal views of parties to the case".[161][164] Michael Mandiberg, writing in Social Text, remained unconvinced.[162]

Croatian Wikipedia

See also: Croatian Wikipedia

On the Croatian Wikipedia, a group of administrators were criticized for blocking Wikipedians who were in favor of LGBT rights.[165][166][167] In an interview given to Index.hr, Robert Kurelić, a professor of history at the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, has commented that "the Croatian Wikipedia is only a tool used by its administrators to promote their own political agendas, giving false and distorted facts".[168] As two particularly prominent examples he listed the Croatian Wikipedia's coverage of Istrianism (a regionalist movement in Istria, a region mostly located in Croatia), defined as a "movement fabricated to reduce the number of Croats", and antifašizam (anti-fascism), which according to him is defined as the opposite of what it really means.[168] Kurelić further advised "that it would be good if a larger number of people got engaged and started writing on Wikipedia", because "administrators want to exploit high-school and university students, the most common users of Wikipedia, to change their opinions and attitudes, which presents a serious issue".[168]

In 2013, Croatia's Minister of Science, Education and Sports at the time, Željko Jovanović, called for pupils and students in Croatia to avoid using the Croatian Wikipedia.[165] In an interview given to Novi list, Jovanović said that

"the idea of openness and relevance as a knowledge source that Wikipedia could and should represent has been completely discredited – which, for certain, has never been the goal of Wikipedia's creators nor the huge number of people around the world who share their knowledge and time using that medium. Croatian pupils and students have been wronged by this, so we have to warn them, unfortunately, that a large part of the content of the Croatian version of Wikipedia is not only dubious but also [contains] obvious forgeries, and therefore we invite them to use more reliable sources of information, which include Wikipedia in English and in other major languages of the world."[165]

Jovanović has also commented on the Croatian Wikipedia editors – calling them a "minority group that has usurped the right to edit the Croatian-language Wikipedia".[165]

Lack of verifiable identities

Scandals involving administrators and arbitrators

David Boothroyd, a Wikipedia editor and a Labour Party (United Kingdom) member, created controversy in 2009, when Wikipedia Review contributor "Tarantino" discovered that he committed sockpuppeting, editing under the accounts "Dbiv", "Fys", and "Sam Blacketer", none of which acknowledged his real identity. After earning Administrator status with one account, then losing it for inappropriate use of the administrative tools, Boothroyd regained Administrator status with the Sam Blacketer sockpuppet account in April 2007.[169] Later in 2007, Boothroyd's Sam Blacketer account became part of the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee.[170] Under the Sam Blacketer account, Boothroyd edited many articles related to United Kingdom politics, including that of rival Conservative Party leader David Cameron.[171] Boothroyd then resigned as an administrator and as an arbitrator.[172][173]

Essjay controversy

Main article: Essjay controversy
 
Essjay

In July 2006, The New Yorker ran a feature by Stacy Schiff about "a highly credentialed Wikipedia editor".[40] The initial version of the article included an interview with a Wikipedia administrator using the pseudonym Essjay, who described himself as a tenured professor of theology.[174] Essjay's Wikipedia user page, now removed, said the following:

I am a tenured professor of theology at a private university in the eastern United States; I teach both undergraduate and graduate theology. I have been asked repeatedly to reveal the name of the institution, however, I decline to do so; I am unsure of the consequences of such an action, and believe it to be in my best interests to remain anonymous.[175]

Essjay also said he held four academic degrees: Bachelor of Arts in religious studies (B.A.), Master of Arts in religion (M.A.R.), Doctorate of Philosophy in theology (Ph.D.), and Doctorate in Canon Law (JCD). Essjay specialized in editing articles about religion on Wikipedia, including subjects such as "the penitential rite, transubstantiation, the papal tiara";[40] on one occasion he was called in to give some "expert testimony" on the status of Mary in the Roman Catholic Church.[176] In January 2007, Essjay was hired as a manager with Wikia, a wiki-hosting service founded by Wales and Angela Beesley. In February, Wales appointed Essjay as a member of the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, a group with powers to issue binding rulings in disputes relating to Wikipedia.[177]

 
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who left Wikipedia to found Citizendium

In late February 2007, The New Yorker added an editorial note to its article on Wikipedia stating that it had learned that Essjay was Ryan Jordan, a 24-year-old college dropout from Kentucky with no advanced degrees and no teaching experience.[178] Initially Jimmy Wales commented on the issue of Essjay's identity: "I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it." Larry Sanger, co-founder[179][180][181] of Wikipedia, responded to Wales on his Citizendium blog by calling Wales' initial reaction "utterly breathtaking, and ultimately tragic". Sanger said the controversy "reflects directly on the judgment and values of the management of Wikipedia."[182]

Wales later issued a new statement saying he had not previously understood that "EssJay used his false credentials in content disputes." He added: "I have asked EssJay to resign his positions of trust within the Wikipedia community."[183] Sanger responded the next day: "It seems Jimmy finds nothing wrong, nothing trust-violating, with the act itself of openly and falsely touting many advanced degrees on Wikipedia. But there most obviously is something wrong with it, and it's just as disturbing for Wikipedia's head to fail to see anything wrong with it."[184]

On March 4, Essjay wrote on his user page that he was leaving Wikipedia, and he also resigned his position with Wikia.[185] A subsequent article in The Courier-Journal (Louisville) suggested that the new résumé he had posted at his Wikia page was exaggerated.[186] The March 19, 2007, issue of The New Yorker published a formal apology by Wales to the magazine and Stacy Schiff for Essjay's false statements.[187]

Discussing the incident, the New York Times noted that the Wikipedia community had responded to the affair with "the fury of the crowd", and observed:

The Essjay episode underlines some of the perils of collaborative efforts like Wikipedia that rely on many contributors acting in good faith, often anonymously and through self-designated user names. But it also shows how the transparency of the Wikipedia process—all editing of entries is marked and saved—allows readers to react to suspected fraud.[188]

The Essjay incident received extensive media coverage, including a national United States television broadcast on ABC's World News with Charles Gibson [189] and the March 7, 2007, Associated Press story.[190] The controversy has led to a proposal that users who say they possess academic qualifications should have to provide evidence before citing them in Wikipedia content disputes.[191] The proposal was not accepted.[192]

Anonymity

Wikipedia has been criticised for allowing editors to contribute anonymously (without a registered account and using an auto-generated IP-labeled account) or pseudonymously (using a registered account), with critics saying that this leads to a lack of accountability.[151][193] This also sometimes leads to uncivil conduct in debates between Wikipedians.[151][193] For privacy reasons, Wikipedia forbids editors to reveal information about another editor on Wikipedia.[194]

Criticism of process

Level of debate, edit wars, and harassment

Further information: Academic studies about Wikipedia § Power plays

The standard of debate on Wikipedia has been called into question by people who have noted that contributors can make a long list of salient points and pull in a wide range of empirical observations to back up their arguments, only to have them ignored completely on the site.[195] An academic study of Wikipedia articles found that the level of debate among Wikipedia editors on controversial topics often degenerated into counterproductive squabbling:

For uncontroversial, "stable" topics self-selection also ensures that members of editorial groups are substantially well-aligned with each other in their interests, backgrounds, and overall understanding of the topics ... For controversial topics, on the other hand, self-selection may produce a strongly misaligned editorial group. It can lead to conflicts among the editorial group members, continuous edit wars, and may require the use of formal work coordination and control mechanisms. These may include intervention by administrators who enact dispute review and mediation processes, [or] completely disallow or limit and coordinate the types and sources of edits.[196]

In 2008, a team from the Palo Alto Research Center found that for editors who make between two and nine edits a month, the percentage of their edits being reverted had gone from 5% in 2004 to about 15%, and people who make only one edit a month were being reverted at a 25% rate.[197] According to The Economist magazine (2008), "The behaviour of Wikipedia's self-appointed deletionist guardians, who excise anything that does not meet their standards, justifying their actions with a blizzard of acronyms, is now known as 'wiki-lawyering'."[198] In regards to the decline in the number of Wikipedia editors since the 2007 policy changes, another study stated this was partly down to the way "in which newcomers are rudely greeted by automated quality control systems and are overwhelmed by the complexity of the rule system."[10]

Another complaint about Wikipedia focuses on the efforts of contributors with idiosyncratic beliefs, who push their point of view in an effort to dominate articles, especially controversial ones.[199][200] This sometimes results in revert wars and pages being locked down. In response, an Arbitration Committee has been formed on the English Wikipedia that deals with the worst alleged offenders—though a conflict resolution strategy is actively encouraged before going to this extent. Also, to stop the continuous reverting of pages, Jimmy Wales introduced a "three-revert rule", whereby those users who reverse the effect of others' contributions to one article more than three times in a 24-hour period may be blocked.[201]

In a 2008 article in The Brooklyn Rail, Wikipedia contributor David Shankbone contended that he had been harassed and stalked because of his work on Wikipedia, had received no support from the authorities or the Wikimedia Foundation, and only mixed support from the Wikipedia community. Shankbone wrote, "If you become a target on Wikipedia, do not expect a supportive community."[202]

David Auerbach, writing in Slate magazine, said:

I am not exaggerating when I say it is the closest thing to Kafka's The Trial I have ever witnessed, with editors and administrators giving conflicting and confusing advice, complaints getting "boomeranged" onto complainants who then face disciplinary action for complaining, and very little consistency in the standards applied. In my short time there, I repeatedly observed editors lawyering an issue with acronyms, only to turn around and declare "Ignore all rules!" when faced with the same rules used against them ... The problem instead stems from the fact that administrators and longtime editors have developed a fortress mentality in which they see new editors as dangerous intruders who will wreck their beautiful encyclopedia, and thus antagonize and even persecute them.[154]

Wikipedia has also been criticized for its weak enforcement against perceived toxicities among the editing community at various times. In one case a longtime editor was nearly driven to suicide following online abuse from editors and a ban from the site before being rescued from the suicide attempt.[203]

In order to address this problem Wikipedia planned to institute a new rule of conduct aimed at combating 'toxic behavior'. The development of the new rule of conduct would take place in two phases. The first will include setting policies for in-person and virtual events as well as policies for technical spaces including chat rooms and other Wikimedia projects. A second phase outlining enforcement when the rules are broken is planned to be approved by the end of 2020, according to the Wikimedia board's plan.[204][needs update]

Consensus and the "hive mind"

Oliver Kamm, in an article for The Times, said Wikipedia's reliance on consensus in forming its content was dubious:[3]

Wikipedia seeks not truth but consensus, and like an interminable political meeting, the end result will be dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices.

Wikimedia advisor Benjamin Mako Hill also talked about Wikipedia's disproportional representation of viewpoints, saying:

In Wikipedia, debates can be won by stamina. If you care more and argue longer, you will tend to get your way. The result, very often, is that individuals and organizations with a very strong interest in having Wikipedia say a particular thing tend to win out over other editors who just want the encyclopedia to be solid, neutral, and reliable. These less-committed editors simply have less at stake and their attention is more distributed.[205]

Wikimedia trustee Dariusz Jemielniak says:

Tiring out one's opponent is a common strategy among experienced Wikipedians ... I have resorted to it many times.[206]

In his article, "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism" (first published online by Edge: The Third Culture, May 30, 2006), computer scientist and digital theorist Jaron Lanier describes Wikipedia as a "hive mind" that is "for the most part stupid and boring", and asks, rhetorically, "why to pay attention to it?" His thesis says:

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.[207]

Lanier also says the current economic trend is to reward entities that aggregate information, rather than those that actually generate content. In the absence of "new business models", the popular demand for content will be sated by mediocrity, thus reducing or even eliminating any monetary incentives for the production of new knowledge.[207]

Lanier's opinions produced some strong disagreement. Internet consultant Clay Shirky noted that Wikipedia has many internal controls in place and is not a mere mass of unintelligent collective effort:

Neither proponents nor detractors of hive mind rhetoric have much interesting to say about Wikipedia itself, because both groups ignore the details ... Wikipedia is best viewed as an engaged community that uses a large and growing number of regulatory mechanisms to manage a huge set of proposed edits ... To take the specific case of Wikipedia, the Seigenthaler/Kennedy debacle catalyzed both soul-searching and new controls to address the problems exposed, and the controls included, inter alia, a greater focus on individual responsibility, the very factor "Digital Maoism" denies is at work.[208]

Excessive rule-making

Various figures involved with the Wikimedia Foundation have argued that Wikipedia's increasingly complex policies and guidelines are driving away new contributors to the site. Former chair Kat Walsh was quoted in a 2009 article as criticizing the project, saying, "It was easier when I joined in 2004 ... Everything was a little less complicated ... It's harder and harder for new people to adjust."[209] Wikipedia administrator Oliver Moran views "policy creep" as the major barrier, writing that "the loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage".[210] According to Jemielniak, the sheer complexity of the rules and laws governing content and editor behavior has become excessive and creates a learning burden for new editors.[7][211] In 2014 Jemielniak suggested actively rewriting, and abridging, the rules and laws to decrease their complexity and size.[7][211]

Social stratification

Further information: Academic studies about Wikipedia § Work distribution and social strata

Despite the perception that the Wikipedia process is democratic, "a small number of people are running the show",[212] including administrators, bureaucrats, stewards, checkusers, mediators, arbitrators, and oversighters.[8] In an article on Wikipedia conflicts in 2007, The Guardian discussed "a backlash among some editors, who argue that blocking users compromises the supposedly open nature of the project, and the imbalance of power between users and administrators may even be a reason some users choose to vandalise in the first place" based on the experiences of one editor who became a vandal after his edits were reverted and he was blocked for edit warring.[213]

See also

References

This article incorporates text from the GFDL Wikipedia page Wikipedia:Replies to common objections.
  1. ^ "Wikipedia: Articles for deletion/Klee Irwin (3rd nomination)". Wikipedia. January 15, 2014.
  2. ^ Black, Edwin (April 19, 2010). "Wikipedia—The Dumbing Down of World Knowledge". History News Network. from the original on September 9, 2016. Retrieved October 21, 2014.
  3. ^ a b c Kamm, Oliver (August 16, 2007). . The Times. Archived from the original on August 14, 2011. (Author's own copy September 5, 2016, at the Wayback Machine)
  4. ^ Messer-Kruse, Timothy (February 12, 2012). "The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia". The Chronicle of Higher Education. from the original on December 18, 2016. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  5. ^ "Wikipedia Experience Sparks National Debate". The BG News. Bowling Green State University. February 27, 2012. from the original on August 27, 2016. Retrieved March 27, 2014.
  6. ^ Colón-Aguirre, Monica; Fleming-May, Rachel A. (October 11, 2012). "'You Just Type in What You Are Looking For': Undergraduates' Use of Library Resources vs. Wikipedia" (PDF). The Journal of Academic Librarianship. p. 392. (PDF) from the original on April 19, 2016. Retrieved March 27, 2014. cited Fallis, Don. "Toward an Epistemology" (2008)
  7. ^ a b c Jemielniak, Dariusz (2014). Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia. Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804791205.
  8. ^ a b c Jemielniak, Dariusz (June 22, 2014). "The Unbearable Bureaucracy of Wikipedia: the legalistic atmosphere is making it impossible to attract and keep the new editors the site needs". Slate. from the original on September 10, 2016. Retrieved September 18, 2016.
  9. ^ Vergano, Dan (January 3, 2013). "Study: Wikipedia is driving away newcomers". USA Today. from the original on September 21, 2015. Retrieved November 19, 2014.
  10. ^ a b Halfaker, Aaron; Geiger, R. Stuart; Morgan, Jonathan T.; Riedl, John (2012). "The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia's Reaction to Popularity Is Causing Its Decline". American Behavioral Scientist. 57 (5): 664. doi:10.1177/0002764212469365. ISSN 0002-7642. S2CID 144208941.
  11. ^ Petrilli, Michael J. (February 29, 2008). "Wikipedia or Wikipedia?". Education Next. from the original on November 21, 2016. Retrieved October 22, 2014.
  12. ^ "Citing Electronic Sources". Massachusetts Institute of Technology. from the original on September 6, 2015. Retrieved October 21, 2014.
  13. ^ a b Waldman, Simon (October 26, 2004). "Who knows?". The Guardian. London. from the original on April 6, 2019. Retrieved December 30, 2005.
  14. ^ Vallely, Paul (October 10, 2006). . The Independent. London. Archived from the original on October 24, 2006. Retrieved October 18, 2006.
  15. ^ Schwartz, Zach (November 11, 2015). "Wikipedia's Co-Founder Is Wikipedia's Most Outspoken Critic". Vice. from the original on November 14, 2015. Retrieved August 26, 2017.
  16. ^ "Research:Wikimedia Summer of Research 2011/Newbie teaching strategy trends". Meta.wikimedia.org. June 3, 2011. Archived from the original on December 13, 2013. Retrieved December 6, 2013.
  17. ^ a b Giles, Jim (December 15, 2005). "Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head". Nature. 438 (7070): 900–901. Bibcode:2005Natur.438..900G. doi:10.1038/438900a. PMID 16355180.
  18. ^ "Wikipedia head to head with Britannica". ABC Science. Agence France-Presse (AFP). December 15, 2005. from the original on February 16, 2015. Retrieved February 15, 2014.
  19. ^ Giles, J (December 22, 2005). "Supplementary Information to Accompany Nature news article 'Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head'". Nature. 438 (7070): 900–901. Bibcode:2005Natur.438..900G. doi:10.1038/438900a. PMID 16355180.
  20. ^ a b "Fatally Flawed: Refuting the Recent Study on Encyclopaedic Accuracy by the journal Nature" (PDF). Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. March 2006. (PDF) from the original on December 2, 2018. Retrieved June 30, 2009.
  21. ^ "Britannica attacks". Nature. 440 (7084): 582. March 30, 2006. Bibcode:2006Natur.440R.582.. doi:10.1038/440582b. PMID 16572128.
  22. ^ "Wikipedia study 'fatally flawed'". BBC News. March 24, 2006. from the original on August 5, 2017. Retrieved September 1, 2008.
  23. ^ (PDF). Press release. March 23, 2006. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 6, 2016. Retrieved September 1, 2008.
  24. ^ John Seigenthaler (November 29, 2005). "A false Wikipedia 'biography'". USA Today. from the original on January 6, 2012. Retrieved August 26, 2017.
  25. ^ Seelye, Katharine Q. (December 3, 2005). "Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar". The New York Times. from the original on September 7, 2014. Retrieved February 18, 2017.
  26. ^ "Mistakes and hoaxes on-line". Australian Broadcasting Corporation. April 15, 2006. from the original on November 13, 2012. Retrieved April 28, 2007.
  27. ^ Dedman, Bill (March 3, 2007). "Reading Hillary Clinton's hidden thesis". NBC News. from the original on March 6, 2013. Retrieved March 17, 2007.
  28. ^ "Hillary Rodham Clinton [archived version]". Wikipedia.org. July 9, 2005. from the original on February 16, 2016. Retrieved March 17, 2007.
  29. ^ "Hillary Rodham Clinton [archived version]". Wikipedia.org. March 2, 2007. from the original on February 16, 2016. Retrieved March 17, 2007.
  30. ^ Paige, Cara (April 11, 2006). . Daily Record. Archived from the original on September 30, 2007. Retrieved November 24, 2007.
  31. ^ Weingarten, Gene (March 16, 2007). . The News & Observer. Archived from the original on March 20, 2007. Retrieved April 8, 2006.
  32. ^ "Wikipedia:Vandalism [archived version]". Wikipedia.org. November 24, 2009.
  33. ^ Mark Glaser (April 17, 2006). "Wikipedia Bias: Is There a Neutral View on George W. Bush?". PBS. from the original on October 2, 2015. Retrieved October 27, 2007. The search for a 'neutral point of view' mirrors the efforts of journalists to be objective, to show both sides without taking sides and remaining unbiased. But maybe this is impossible and unattainable, and perhaps misguided. Because if you open it up for anyone to edit, you're asking for anything but neutrality.
  34. ^ Hube, Christoph; Fetahu, Besnik (November 4–7, 2019). "Neural Based Statement Classification for Biased Language". Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. WSDM '19 Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. Melbourne VIC, Australia. pp. 259–268. arXiv:1811.05740. doi:10.1145/3289600.3291018. ISBN 978-1-4503-5940-5..
  35. ^ a b c Martin, Brian (2021) "Policing orthodoxy on Wikipedia: Skeptics in action?", Journal of Science Communication, 20:2, doi:10.22323/2.20020209
  36. ^ Verkaik, Robert (August 18, 2007). "Wikipedia and the art of censorship". The Independent. London. from the original on December 1, 2010. Retrieved August 26, 2017.
  37. ^ Blakely, Rhys (August 15, 2007). "Exposed: guess who has been polishing their Wikipedia entries?". The Times. London. from the original on May 17, 2009. Retrieved August 15, 2007.
  38. ^ Fildes, Jonathan (August 15, 2007). "Wikipedia 'shows CIA page edits'". BBC. from the original on January 11, 2009. Retrieved August 15, 2007.
  39. ^ Metz, Cade (December 18, 2007). "Truth, anonymity and the Wikipedia Way: Why it's broke and how it can be fixed". The Register. from the original on August 10, 2017. Retrieved August 10, 2017.
  40. ^ a b c d e Schiff, Stacy (July 31, 2006). "Know it all: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?". The New Yorker. from the original on November 22, 2008. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  41. ^ Lehmann, Evan (January 27, 2006). . Lowell Sun. Archived from the original on February 2, 2006. Retrieved February 2, 2014.
  42. ^ "Senator staffers spam Wikipedia". January 30, 2006. from the original on March 29, 2006. Retrieved September 13, 2006.
  43. ^ Bachelet, Pablo (May 3, 2006). . The Miami Herald. Archived from the original on October 6, 2015. Alt URL September 23, 2015, at the Wayback Machine
  44. ^ Delay, Larry (August 3, 2006). (PDF). Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE). Archived from the original (PDF) on September 10, 2008. Retrieved July 8, 2008.
  45. ^ a b McElroy, Damien (May 8, 2008). "Israeli battles rage on Wikipedia". The Daily Telegraph. London. from the original on May 9, 2008. Retrieved May 8, 2008.
  46. ^ "Letter in Harper's Magazine About Wikipedia Issues". CAMERA. August 14, 2008. from the original on July 31, 2016. Retrieved March 31, 2010.
  47. ^ Liphshiz, Cnaan (December 25, 2007). "Your Wiki Entry Counts". Haaretz. from the original on June 5, 2011. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  48. ^ Rettig Gur, Haviv (May 16, 2010). "Israeli-Palestinian conflict rages on Wikipedia". The Jerusalem Post. from the original on June 29, 2011. Retrieved December 6, 2013.
  49. ^ Cohen, Noam (August 31, 2008). "Don't Like Palin's Wikipedia Story? Change It". The New York Times. from the original on February 28, 2018. Retrieved February 18, 2017.
  50. ^ "Sarah Palins Wikipedia entry glossed over by mystery user hrs. before VP announcement". Thaindian News. September 2, 2008. from the original on May 24, 2011. Retrieved November 16, 2008.[better source needed]
  51. ^ . Vnunet.fr. November 28, 2007. Archived from the original on May 16, 2008.
  52. ^ . Official website of the French Sénat. February 14, 2008. Archived from the original on July 21, 2011. Retrieved August 30, 2015. [A question from Senator Jean-Louis Masson to the Minister of Justice, and the Minister's response]
  53. ^ Woods, Allan (August 25, 2010). "Ottawa investigating Wikipedia edits". Toronto Star. from the original on August 27, 2010. Retrieved August 26, 2010.
  54. ^ Nabili, Teymoor (September 11, 2010). "The Cyrus Cylinder, Wikipedia and Iran conspiracies". blogs.alJazeera.net. from the original on March 11, 2012. Retrieved November 19, 2013.
  55. ^ Jackson, Ron (August 4, 2009). "Open Season on Domainers and Domaining — Overtly Biased L.A. Times Article Leads Latest Assault on Objectivity and Accuracy". from the original on August 14, 2015. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  56. ^ "Umbria Blogosphere Analysis — Wikipedia and Corporate Blogging" (PDF). J.D. Power Web Intelligence. August 24, 2007.[permanent dead link] "Organizations like Sony, Diebold, Nintendo, Dell, the CIA, and the Church of Scientology were all shown to have sanitized pages about themselves."
  57. ^ MacDonald, Marc (February 1, 2008). "Wikipedia Continues To Sanitize Bush Content". from the original on October 8, 2015. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  58. ^ Walker, Christopher; Kalathil, Shanthi; Ludwig, Jessica (2020). "The Cutting Edge of Sharp Power". Journal of Democracy. 31 (1): 124–137. doi:10.1353/jod.2020.0010. S2CID 211145754.
  59. ^ Miller, Carl (October 5, 2019). "China and Taiwan clash over Wikipedia edits". BBC News. Retrieved August 24, 2020.
  60. ^ Anderson, Chris (May 8, 2006). "Jimmy Wales – The 2006 Time 100". Time. Retrieved November 11, 2017.
  61. ^ Kittur, Aniket; Kraut, Robert E. (2008). "Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in Wikipedia: quality through coordination". Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. New York: ACM. pp. 37–46. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.546.9900. doi:10.1145/1460563.1460572. ISBN 978-1-60558-007-4. S2CID 1184433.
  62. ^ a b Rosenzweig, Roy (June 2006). . The Journal of American History. 93 (1): pp. 117–146. doi:10.2307/4486062. JSTOR 4486062. Archived from the original on April 25, 2010. Retrieved August 11, 2006. (Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media)
  63. ^ Orlowski, Andrew (October 18, 2005). "Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems". The Register. Retrieved September 30, 2007.
  64. ^ "Cancer information on Wikipedia is accurate, but not very readable, study finds". Science Daily. June 2, 2010. Retrieved December 31, 2010.
  65. ^ "Fact or fiction? Wikipedia's variety of contributors is not only a strength". The Economist. March 10, 2007. Retrieved December 31, 2010.
  66. ^ a b . The Wall Street Journal. September 12, 2006. Archived from the original on January 15, 2016. Retrieved September 13, 2006.
  67. ^ a b c Cohen, Martin (August 28, 2008). "Encyclopaedia Idiotica". Times Higher Education. from the original on September 6, 2011. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  68. ^ Das, Sanmay; Allen, Lavoie; Malik, Magdon-Ismail (November 1, 2013). "Manipulation among the arbiters of collective intelligence: How Wikipedia administrators mold public opinion". CIKM '13 Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on Information & Knowledge Management. San Francisco, California, US: ACM. pp. 1097–1106. doi:10.1145/2505515.2505566. ISBN 978-1-4503-2263-8. from the original on November 6, 2018. Retrieved April 7, 2017.
  69. ^ Stephen Colbert. The Colbert Report episode 3109. August 21, 2007.
  70. ^ Brophy-Warren, Jamin. "Oh, that John Locke". The Wall Street Journal. No. 2007–06–16. p. 3. from the original on September 4, 2017. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  71. ^ Hendren, Johnny "DocEvil" (June 5, 2007). "The Art of Wikigroaning". Something Awful. from the original on June 16, 2007. Retrieved June 17, 2007.
  72. ^ Brown, Andrew (June 14, 2007). "No amount of collaboration will make the sun orbit the Earth". The Guardian. London. from the original on June 23, 2007. Retrieved March 27, 2010.
  73. ^ Ivor Tossell (June 15, 2007). "Duality of Wikipedia". The Globe and Mail. from the original on December 21, 2012. Retrieved December 25, 2019.
  74. ^ Kirby, J.P. (October 20, 2007). . J.P.'s Random Ramblings [blog]. Archived from the original on August 9, 2011.
  75. ^ Corinne Purtill; Zoë Schlanger. "Wikipedia had rejected Nobel Prize winner Donna Strickland because she wasn't famous enough". Quartz. from the original on October 25, 2018. Retrieved November 20, 2018.
  76. ^ Resnick, Brian (October 3, 2018). "The 2018 Nobel Prize reminds us that women scientists too often go unrecognized". Vox. from the original on October 25, 2018. Retrieved October 3, 2018.
  77. ^ Annalisa Merelli (August 18, 2018). "Seeking Disambiguation: Running for office is hard when you have a porn star's name. This makes it worse". Quartz. from the original on November 21, 2018. Retrieved November 20, 2018.
  78. ^ Baker, Nicholson (March 20, 2008). "The Charms of Wikipedia". The New York Review of Books. 55 (4). from the original on March 3, 2008. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  79. ^ Noah, Timothy (February 24, 2007). "Evicted from Wikipedia". Slate. from the original on June 21, 2009. Retrieved March 31, 2010.
  80. ^ Samoilenko, Anna; Yasseri, Taha (January 22, 2014). "The distorted mirror of Wikipedia: a quantitative analysis of Wikipedia coverage of academics". EPJ Data Science. 3 (1). arXiv:1310.8508. doi:10.1140/epjds20. S2CID 4971771.
  81. ^ Steinsson, Sverrir. "Senate candidate Theresa Greenfield finally got her Wikipedia page. Here's why it took so long". The Washington Post. Retrieved October 28, 2020.
  82. ^ Harrison, Stephen (October 27, 2020). "Why Did It Take So Long for the Democratic Senate Candidate in Iowa to Get a Wikipedia Page?". Slate. The Slate Group. Retrieved October 28, 2020.
  83. ^ Benjakob, Omer (May 27, 2018). "The Witch Hunt Against a 'pro-Israel' Wikipedia Editor". Haaretz. Retrieved March 16, 2022.
  84. ^ Kelly, Samantha Murphy (May 20, 2022). "Meet the Wikipedia editor who published the Buffalo shooting entry minutes after it started". CNN. Retrieved May 24, 2022.
  85. ^ Johnson, Bobbie (March 1, 2007). "Conservapedia — the US religious right's answer to Wikipedia". The Guardian. London. Retrieved March 27, 2010.
  86. ^ Turner, Adam (March 5, 2007). "Conservapedia aims to set Wikipedia right". IT Wire. from the original on March 31, 2012. Retrieved May 12, 2008.
  87. ^ Huntington, Doug (May 9, 2007). "'Design' Proponents Accuse Wikipedia of Bias, Hypocrisy". The Christian Post. from the original on May 14, 2011. Retrieved August 9, 2007.
  88. ^ Solomon, Lawrence (July 8, 2008). "Wikipropaganda On Global Warming". National Review. CBS News. from the original on August 28, 2008. Retrieved July 20, 2008.
  89. ^ Scarborough, Rowan (September 27, 2010). . Human Events. Archived from the original on December 7, 2010. Retrieved October 3, 2010.
  90. ^ Glaser, Mark (April 21, 2006). "Email Debate: Wales Discusses Political Bias on Wikipedia". PBS Mediashift. from the original on October 5, 2015. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  91. ^ "Conservative wants to set Wikipedia right". The Toronto Star. March 11, 2007. ISSN 0319-0781. Retrieved December 16, 2021.
  92. ^ Greenstein, Shane; Zhu, Feng (March 1, 2016). Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia — Working Paper 15-023 (PDF). Cambridge, MA, USA: Harvard Business School. (PDF) from the original on November 8, 2016. Retrieved October 31, 2016.
  93. ^ Greenstein, Shane; Zhu, Feng (December 1, 2012). . Archived from the original on October 31, 2016. Retrieved October 31, 2016.
  94. ^ Khimm, Suzy (June 18, 2012). "Study: Wikipedia perpetuates political bias". The Washington Post. from the original on February 5, 2015. Retrieved May 29, 2013.
  95. ^ Matsakis, Louise (March 16, 2018). "Don't Ask Wikipedia to Cure the Internet". Wired. from the original on March 16, 2018. Retrieved March 17, 2018.
  96. ^ Lott, Maxim (February 18, 2021). "Inside Wikipedia's leftist bias: socialism pages whitewashed, communist atrocities buried". Fox News. Retrieved March 31, 2022.
  97. ^ a b Simpson, Craig (November 27, 2021). "Wikipedia may delete entry on 'mass killings' under Communism due to claims of bias". The Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. from the original on November 28, 2021. Retrieved November 28, 2021.
  98. ^ Chasmar, Jessica (November 29, 2021). . Fox News. Archived from the original on November 30, 2021. Retrieved December 2, 2021.
  99. ^ a b c Rauwerda, Annie (December 31, 2021). "To delete or not to delete? The fate of the most contentious Wikipedia articles". Input Mag. Retrieved February 7, 2022.
  100. ^ "Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mass killings under communist regimes (4th nomination)", English Wikipedia, December 2, 2021, retrieved December 1, 2021
  101. ^ Kauntia, Nishant (November 30, 2020). "How Wikipedia earned the ire of the Hindu Right". The Caravan. Retrieved December 9, 2020.
  102. ^ Browne, Marcus (February 12, 2008). "Wikipedia accused of 'US-centric bias'". ZDNet Australia. from the original on October 1, 2015. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  103. ^ Melamed, Samantha (March 26, 2015). "Edit-athon aims to put left-out black artists into Wikipedia". Philadelphia Daily News. from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved April 13, 2015.
  104. ^ Smith, Jada (February 20, 2015). "Howard University Fills in Wikipedia's Gaps in Black History". The New York Times. from the original on February 23, 2015. Retrieved April 13, 2015.
  105. ^ Goko, Colleen. "Drive launched to 'Africanise' Wikipedia". Business Day. South Africa. from the original on July 6, 2015. Retrieved April 13, 2015.
  106. ^ Cassano, Jay. "Black History Matters, So Why Is Wikipedia Missing So Much Of It?". Fast Company. from the original on May 10, 2015. Retrieved April 13, 2015.
  107. ^ Reynosa, Peter (December 3, 2015). "Why Don't More Latinos Contribute To Wikipedia?". El Tecolote. from the original on December 8, 2015. Retrieved December 5, 2015.
  108. ^ Livingstone, Randall M. (November 23, 2010). "Let's Leave the Bias to the Mainstream Media: A Wikipedia Community Fighting for Information Neutrality". M/C Journal. 13 (6). doi:10.5204/mcj.315. ISSN 1441-2616.
  109. ^ a b c Justin Ward (March 12, 2018). "Wikipedia wars: inside the fight against far-right editors, vandals and sock puppets". from the original on May 14, 2020. Retrieved March 1, 2020.
  110. ^ Standifer, Cid (October 13, 2022). "Racial Pseudoscience on the Faculty: A professor's research flew under the radar for years. What finally got him fired?". The Chronicle of Higher Education.
  111. ^ Gardner, Sue (February 19, 2011). "Nine Reasons Why Women Don't Edit Wikipedia, In Their Own Words" (blog). suegardner.org. from the original on July 18, 2015. Retrieved September 8, 2015.
  112. ^ a b Cassell, Justine (February 4, 2011). "Editing Wars Behind the Scenes". The New York Times. from the original on February 27, 2017. Retrieved February 18, 2017.
  113. ^ a b c Cohen, Noam (January 30, 2011). "Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia's Contributor List". The New York Times. from the original on December 21, 2012. Retrieved January 31, 2011.
  114. ^ Gleick, James (April 29, 2013). "Wikipedia's Women Problem". The New York Review of Books. from the original on November 5, 2013. Retrieved November 19, 2013.
  115. ^ Filipacchi, Amanda (April 24, 2013). "Wikipedia's Sexism Toward Women Novelists". The New York Times. from the original on October 15, 2015. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  116. ^ Dunn, Gaby (May 1, 2013). "Does Sexism Lurk?". DailyDot.com. from the original on July 5, 2014. Retrieved November 19, 2013.
  117. ^ Zandt, Deanna (April 26, 2013). "Yes, Wikipedia Is Sexist – That's Why It Needs You". Forbes. from the original on October 30, 2013. Retrieved November 19, 2013.
  118. ^ Andrew Lih (June 20, 2015). "Can Wikipedia Survive?". The New York Times. Washington. from the original on June 21, 2015. Retrieved June 21, 2015. ... the considerable and often-noted gender gap among Wikipedia editors; in 2011, less than 15 percent were women.
  119. ^ Statistics based on Wikimedia Foundation Wikipedia editor surveys (Nov. 2010-April 2011) and November 2011 Archived June 5, 2016, at the Wayback Machine (April - October 2011)
  120. ^ Cohen, Noam (January 30, 2011). "Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia's Contributor List". The New York Times. from the original on February 3, 2011. Retrieved January 31, 2011.
  121. ^ Huang, Keira (August 11, 2013). "Wikipedia fails to bridge gender gap". South China Morning Post. from the original on January 15, 2016. Retrieved October 27, 2015.
  122. ^ Wikipedia 'completely failed' to fix gender imbalance December 29, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, BBC interview with Jimmy Wales, August 8, 2014; starting at 45 seconds.
  123. ^ Vitulli, Marie A. (2018). "Writing women in mathematics into Wikipedia". Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 65 (3): 331–332. doi:10.1090/noti1650.
  124. ^ Peake, Bryce (2015). "WP:THREATENING2MEN: Misogynist Infopolitics and the Hegemony of the Asshole Consensus on English Wikipedia". Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology (7). doi:10.7264/N3TH8JZS. from the original on February 12, 2020. Retrieved February 18, 2020.
  125. ^ "PR firms pledge 'ethical' use of Wikipedia". BBC News. June 12, 2014. Retrieved November 9, 2021.
  126. ^ Parakilas, Jacob (March 18, 2014). . Action on Armed Violence. Archived from the original on September 14, 2017. Retrieved March 7, 2018. But if a reader had started on the page for either of Breivik's guns, the Ruger or the Glock, they would not know this. That reader would find a great deal of technical information about the weapons in question – their weights, lengths, cartridges, rates of fire, magazine capacities, muzzle velocities – and detailed descriptions of their designs, all illustrated with abundant photographs and diagrams.
  127. ^ Walther, Matthew (November 7, 2017). "The adolescent cult of the AR-15". The Week. from the original on March 24, 2018. Retrieved March 23, 2018. What do the perpetrators of the massacres at Sandy Hook, at Aurora, at Orlando, and at Sutherland Springs have in common? They were all men under 30 and they all used versions of the same kind of firearm, the AR-15, the semi-automatic version of the military's M-16, and the bestselling gun in America. It might be difficult to make this connection because as I write this, the section on the use of AR-15s in mass killings has been deleted from Wikipedia ...
  128. ^ Brandom, Russell (March 6, 2018). "How gun buffs took over Wikipedia's AR-15 page; After Parkland, gun control information was strangely hard to find". The Verge. Vox Media. from the original on March 9, 2018. Retrieved March 9, 2018. But on Wikipedia, as in the real world, the users with the deepest technical knowledge of firearms are also the most fervent gun owners and the most hostile to gun control. For critics, that's led to a persistent pro-gun bias on the web's leading source of neutral information at a time when the gun control debate is more heated than ever.
  129. ^ "Pro-gun Wikipedia users spark fierce editing war; Editors against tighter controls on firearms have been purging information that shows weapons such as AR-15s in a bad light". Sky News. March 7, 2018. from the original on March 10, 2018. Retrieved March 9, 2018. The bias in the articles was not explicit, but structural. The project did not insert false information into the articles but instead purged information that showed the weapons in a bad light - dismissing it as "off-topic".
  130. ^ Brennan, David (March 7, 2018). "Pro-gun Group Edited AR-15 Wikipedia Page to Hide Mass Shootings". Newsweek. from the original on March 8, 2018. Retrieved March 9, 2018. A group of pro-gun Wikipedia editors tried to hide the true number of mass shootings associated with the AR-15 rifle in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida.
  131. ^ Einenkel, Walter (March 8, 2018). "A gun group has been editing Wikipedia's firearms pages to sanitize mass shootings, for months". Yahoo! News. Newsweek. from the original on March 10, 2018. Retrieved March 9, 2018. The Wikimedia Foundation has defended itself and Wikipedia from allegations of being host to these kinds of influence campaigns, arguing that the encyclopaedia is constantly being updated and improved.
  132. ^ Benjakob, Omer (March 18, 2018). "Gun Enthusiasts Are Waging a War of Attrition on Wikipedia, and It Looks Like They're Winning". Haaretz. from the original on March 24, 2018. Retrieved March 23, 2018. According to The Verge report and an independent follow-up by Haaretz, the top editors of the Colt page are pro-gun enthusiasts who skewed the information presented on it and are also involved in editing other articles on Wikipedia – for example, the much more general article, titled AR 15 – to push their worldview ... Through countless exhausting debates, this small group of pro-gun Wikipedia editors – linked together through Wikipedia's Firearms project (or "WikiProject:Firearms," mentioned below) – has managed to control almost completely the discourse around the rifle, predominantly by making sure any potentially negative details about it be excluded from the original Colt AR-15 article.
  133. ^ Sifferlin, Alexandra (March 25, 2014). "Wikipedia Founder Sticks It To 'Lunatic' Holistic Healers". Time. from the original on October 14, 2014. Retrieved October 22, 2014.
  134. ^ Newman, Lily Hay (March 27, 2014). "Jimmy Wales Gets Real, and Sassy, About Wikipedia's Holistic Healing Coverage". Slate. from the original on June 25, 2018. Retrieved October 22, 2014.
  135. ^ . Livenews.com.au. Archived from the original on September 17, 2008. Retrieved March 31, 2010.
  136. ^ Raphael, JR (December 10, 2008). "Wikipedia Censorship Sparks Free Speech Debate". The Washington Post. from the original on April 29, 2011. Retrieved May 10, 2009.
  137. ^ a b Seth Finkelstein (December 18, 2008), "Sting in the Scorpions tale is the exposure of Wiki's weakness", The Guardian, from the original on December 7, 2013, retrieved May 23, 2018
  138. ^ Dorothy Howard; Patrick W. Galbraith (November 20, 2015), Meet the manga avatars of your favorite tech platforms, Hopes&Fears, from the original on May 23, 2018, retrieved May 23, 2018
  139. ^ Viégas, Fernanda B.; Wattenberg, Martin; Dave, Kushal (April 24–29, 2004). "Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations" (PDF). Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations. CHI '04 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM). Vienna, Austria: ACM. pp. 575–582. doi:10.1145/985692.985765. ISBN 1-58113-702-8. (PDF) from the original on November 11, 2018. Retrieved September 1, 2008.
  140. ^ Priedhorsky, Reid; Chen, Jilin; Lam, Shyong (Tony) K.; Panciera, Katherine; Terveen, Loren; Riedl, John (November 4, 2007). Creating, destroying, and restoring value in wikipedia. Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on Supporting group work. Sanibel Island, Florida, USA: ACM. p. 259. doi:10.1145/1316624.1316663. ISBN 978-1-59593-845-9. online November 22, 2019, at the Wayback Machine
  141. ^ a b Donnelly, James; Haeckl, Jenifer (April 12, 2001). . Archived from the original on December 1, 2008.
  142. ^ See "Public and Private Figures" May 19, 2016, at the Wayback Machine by the Digital Media Law Project for the legal distinction.
  143. ^ Lever, Rob (December 11, 2005). "Wikipedia Becomes Internet Force, Faces Crisis". Agence France-Presse (AFP). Archived from the original on October 6, 2007. Retrieved December 26, 2007.
  144. ^ . Heinz Heise. February 9, 2006. Archived from the original on February 8, 2007. Retrieved January 31, 2014.
  145. ^ Arthur, Charles (February 9, 2009). "Jimmy Wales in drive-by shooting of Wikipedia". The Guardian. from the original on October 6, 2015. Retrieved August 31, 2015.
  146. ^ Mitchell, Dan (December 24, 2005). "Insider Editing at Wikipedia". The New York Times. from the original on May 29, 2015. Retrieved August 31, 2015.
  147. ^ "Wikipedia Co-Founder Creates Competing Site". Infopackets.com. April 4, 2007. from the original on November 5, 2013. Retrieved November 19, 2013.
  148. ^ Bergstein, Brian (March 26, 2007). "Building an alternative to Wikipedia". NBC News. from the original on November 5, 2013. Retrieved November 19, 2013.
  149. ^ . Yahoo! Voices. April 17, 2007. Archived from the original on July 28, 2014. Retrieved November 19, 2013.
  150. ^ "Wikipedia Co-Founder Unveils Rival Free Encyclopedia". Fox News Channel. Associated Press. March 28, 2007. from the original on July 15, 2014. Retrieved November 19, 2013.
  151. ^ a b c Bergstein, Brian (March 25, 2007). "Citizendium aims to be better Wikipedia". USA Today. from the original on October 16, 2012. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  152. ^ Wood, Mike (January 9, 2013). "I Get Paid To Edit Wikipedia For Leading Companies". Business Insider. from the original on November 23, 2013. Retrieved November 19, 2013.
  153. ^ Paling, Emma (October 21, 2015). . The Atlantic. Archived from the original on October 21, 2015. Retrieved October 21, 2015.
  154. ^ a b Auerbach, David (December 11, 2014). "Encyclopedia Frown: Wikipedia is amazing. But it's become a rancorous, sexist, elitist, stupidly bureaucratic mess". Slate. from the original on December 16, 2014. Retrieved December 17, 2014.
  155. ^ Hern, Alex (January 23, 2015). "Wikipedia votes to ban some editors from gender-related articles". The Guardian. from the original on August 26, 2015. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  156. ^ a b c d Auerbach, David (February 5, 2015). "The Wikipedia Ouroboros". Slate. from the original on February 5, 2015. Retrieved February 5, 2015.
  157. ^ Louise, Maryam (January 25, 2015). "GamerGate Wikipedia Ruling Bans Harassed Feminist Editors, Outrage Ensues". Inquisitr.com. from the original on September 4, 2015. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  158. ^ Williams, Lauren (January 23, 2015). . Think Progress. Archived from the original on March 10, 2016. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  159. ^ Bennett, Alanna (January 24, 2015). "Wikipedia Has Banned Five Feminist Editors From Gamergate Articles & More". The Mary Sue. from the original on August 12, 2015. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  160. ^ Cush, Andy (January 23, 2015). . Gawker. Archived from the original on September 13, 2015. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  161. ^ a b Dewey, Caitlin (January 29, 2015). "Gamergate, Wikipedia and the limits of 'human knowledge'". The Washington Post. from the original on January 29, 2015. Retrieved January 29, 2015.
  162. ^ a b Mandiberg, Michael (February 1, 2015). "The Affective Labor of Wikipedia: GamerGate, Harassment, and Peer Production". Social Text. from the original on February 22, 2015. Retrieved February 21, 2015.
  163. ^ Cush, Andy (January 30, 2015). . Gawker.com. Archived from the original on February 17, 2015. Retrieved February 17, 2015.
  164. ^ Beaudette, Philippe (January 27, 2015). "Civility, Wikipedia, and the conversation on Gamergate". Wikimedia Foundation. from the original on January 31, 2015. Retrieved January 28, 2015.
  165. ^ a b c d [Jovanović: "Children, do not use the Croatian Wikipedia because its contents are forgeries"] (in Croatian). Novi list. Archived from the original on September 1, 2019. Retrieved September 13, 2013.
  166. ^ Trolls hijack Wikipedia to turn articles against gays
  167. ^ How pro-fascist ideologues are rewriting Croatia's history
  168. ^ a b c "Jovanovićeva poruka učenicima i studentima: Ne koristite hrvatsku Wikipediju!" [Jovanović's message to the pupils and students: Don't use Croatian Wikipedia!] (in Croatian). Index.hr. Retrieved September 13, 2013.
  169. ^ "User Rights Log". Wikipedia.
  170. ^ "Arbitration Series". Wikipedia. Archived from the original on October 12, 2017.
  171. ^ Metz, Cade (May 26, 2009). "Sockpuppeting British politico resigns from Wikisupremecourt". The Register. from the original on May 29, 2009. Retrieved May 27, 2009.
  172. ^ "Meta: Steward requests/Permissions". Meta-Wiki. from the original on January 15, 2016. Retrieved August 15, 2014.
  173. ^ Welham, Jamie; Lakhani, Nina (June 7, 2009). "Wikipedia 'sentinel' quits after using alias to alter entries". The Independent. from the original on March 18, 2010. Retrieved March 31, 2010.
  174. ^ Finkelstein, Seth (March 8, 2007). "Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive". The Guardian. from the original on March 29, 2007. Retrieved August 1, 2007. At some point, Essjay said he had sent a letter to a real-life college professor using his invented persona's credentials, vouching for Wikipedia's accuracy. In the letter he wrote in part, "It is never the case that known incorrect information is allowed to remain in Wikipedia."
  175. ^ "User: Essjay". Wikipedia. Archived from the original on February 25, 2006.
  176. ^ "Talk:Five solas [archived version]". Wikipedia.org. June 11, 2005. from the original on February 16, 2016. Retrieved June 18, 2007.
  177. ^ Orlowski, Andrew (March 2, 2007). "Bogus Wikipedia Prof. was blessed then promoted: The Counterfactual History Man". The Register. from the original on March 4, 2007. Retrieved March 18, 2007.
  178. ^ "Fake professor in Wikipedia storm". BBC News. March 6, 2007. from the original on March 8, 2007. Retrieved March 8, 2007.
  179. ^ Bergstein, Brian (March 25, 2007). "Sanger says he co-started Wikipedia". The Washington Post. Associated Press. from the original on November 12, 2012. Retrieved March 26, 2007. The nascent Web encyclopedia Citizendium springs from Larry Sanger, a philosophy Ph.D. who counts himself as a co-founder of Wikipedia, the site he now hopes to usurp. The claim doesn't seem particularly controversial—Sanger has long been cited as a co-founder. Yet the other founder, Jimmy Wales, isn't happy about it.
  180. ^ Meyers, Peter (September 20, 2001). "Fact-Driven? Collegial? This Site Wants You". The New York Times. from the original on April 15, 2009. Retrieved August 30, 2015. "I can start an article that will consist of one paragraph, and then a real expert will come along and add three paragraphs and clean up my one paragraph", said Larry Sanger of Las Vegas, who founded Wikipedia with Mr. Wales.
  181. ^ Mehegan, David (February 12, 2006). "Bias, sabotage haunt Wikipedia's free world". Boston Globe. from the original on May 12, 2006. Retrieved July 30, 2007.
  182. ^ Sanger, Larry (March 1, 2007). "Wikipedia firmly supports your right to identity fraud". Citizendium Blog. Archived from the original on March 4, 2007. Retrieved March 2, 2007.
  183. ^ "User talk:Jimbo Wales [archived version]". Wikipedia.org. from the original on February 16, 2016. Retrieved September 1, 2008.
  184. ^ Sanger, Larry (March 3, 2007). . Citizendium Blog. Archived from the original on March 6, 2007. Retrieved March 3, 2007.
  185. ^ "Essjay's Wikia user page". Wikia.com. from the original on November 6, 2007. Retrieved September 19, 2007.
  186. ^ Wolfson, Andrew (March 6, 2007). "Wikipedia editor who posed as professor is Ky. dropout: Man resigns post after controversy". Louisville Courier-Journal. Retrieved March 7, 2007. Alt URL September 30, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  187. ^ Wales, Jimmy (March 19, 2007). "Making amends". The New Yorker. p. 24.
  188. ^ Cohen, Noam (March 5, 2007). "A Contributor to Wikipedia Has His Fictional Side". The New York Times. from the original on October 13, 2007. Retrieved March 5, 2007.
  189. ^ "[ABC News broadcast on Essjay]". ABC News. from the original on March 10, 2007. Retrieved March 8, 2007.
  190. ^ Bergstein, Brian (March 7, 2007). "After flap over phony professor, Wikipedia wants some writers to share real names". USA Today. Associated Press. from the original on May 16, 2009. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  191. ^ Williams, Martyn (March 9, 2007). "Wikipedia Founder Addresses User Credentials". PC World. IDG News Service. from the original on September 24, 2015. Retrieved August 31, 2015.
  192. ^ "Wikipedia's credentials policy [archived version]". Wikipedia.org. January 5, 2008. from the original on January 15, 2016. Retrieved August 31, 2015.
  193. ^ a b Spicuzza, Mary (February 13, 2008). "Wikipedia Idiots: The Edit Wars of San Francisco". SF Weekly. p. 2. from the original on September 11, 2015. Retrieved August 30, 2015.
  194. ^ "Privacy". Wikipedia.
  195. ^ Arthur, Charles (December 14, 2005). "Log on and join in, but beware the web cults". The Guardian. from the original on May 3, 2006. Retrieved July 14, 2006.
  196. ^ Stvilla, Besiki; Twidale, Michael; Smith, Linda; Gasser, Les (February 21, 2008). (PDF). Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. Archived from the original (PDF) on August 20, 2007. ["Information Quality Work Organization in Wikipedia" at Wiley Online Library](subscription required)
  197. ^ Johnson, Bobbie (August 12, 2009). "Wikipedia approaches its limits". The Guardian. from the original on March 1, 2014. Retrieved May 25, 2014.
  198. ^ "The battle for Wikipedia's soul". The Economist. March 6, 2008. from the original on September 24, 2015. Retrieved August 31, 2015.
  199. ^ Hickman, Martin; Roberts, Genevieve (February 13, 2006). "Wikipedia – separating fact from fiction". The New Zealand Herald. from the original on September 29, 2007. Retrieved April 17, 2007. Such checking leads to a daily battle of wits with the cyber-wreckers who insert erroneous, ludicrous and offensive material into entries. How frequently entries get messed about with depends on the controversy of their subjects. This week the entry Muslim is being attacked dozens of times a day following the row about cartoons of Mohammed with angry denunciations of suicide bombing and claims of hypocrisy. Prime Minister Tony Blair's entry is a favourite for distortion with new statements casting aspersions on his integrity.
  200. ^ Kleinz, Torsten (February 2005). (PDF). Linux Magazine. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 2, 2015. Retrieved May 12, 2007. The Wikipedia's open structure makes it a target for trolls and vandals who malevolently add incorrect information to articles, get other people tied up in endless discussions, and generally do everything to draw attention to themselves.
  201. ^ "Wiki page on Three-revert-rule". Wikipedia. Archived from the original on July 13, 2017.
  202. ^ Shankbone, David (June 7, 2008). "Nobody's Safe in Cyberspace". The Brooklyn Rail. from the original on August 28, 2008. Retrieved July 10, 2008.
  203. ^ Koebler, Jason (May 17, 2016). "Wikipedia Editor Says Site's Toxic Community Has Him Contemplating Suicide". Vice. from the original on April 5, 2020. Retrieved February 28, 2020.
  204. ^ "Wikipedia sets new rules to combat 'toxicity'". BBC News. May 23, 2020. from the original on June 5, 2020. Retrieved June 11, 2020.
  205. ^ Hill, Benjamin Mako (March 27, 2013). "The Institute for Cultural Diplomacy and Wikipedia". mako.cc. eous. from the original on September 5, 2015. Retrieved August 31, 2015.
  206. ^ Postril, Virginia (November 17, 2014). "Who Killed Wikipedia?". Pacific Standard. from the original on August 25, 2019. Retrieved August 31, 2015.
  207. ^ a b Lanier, Jaron (May 30, 2006). "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism". Edge. from the original on April 29, 2007. Retrieved April 30, 2007.
  208. ^ Shirky, Clay (June 7, 2006). . Corante.com. Archived from the original on June 13, 2006. Retrieved May 1, 2007.
  209. ^ Angwin, Julia; Fowler, Geoffrey A. (November 27, 2009). "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages". The Wall Street Journal. from the original on October 25, 2017. Retrieved July 28, 2013.(subscription required)
  210. ^ Simonite, Tom (October 22, 2013). "The Decline of Wikipedia". MIT Technology Review. Archived from the original on June 19, 2015. Retrieved March 26, 2015.
  211. ^ a b Jemielniak, Dariusz (June 22, 2014). "The Unbearable Bureaucracy of Wikipedia". Slate. from the original on July 1, 2014. Retrieved July 1, 2014.
  212. ^ Wilson, Chris (February 22, 2008). "The Wisdom of the Chaperones: Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy". Slate. from the original on March 20, 2013. Retrieved January 14, 2013.
  213. ^ Kleeman, Jenny (March 25, 2007). "Wiki wars". The Guardian. from the original on October 31, 2013. Retrieved October 4, 2007.

Further reading

  • Jacobs, Julia (April 8, 2019). "Wikipedia Isn't Officially a Social Network. But the Harassment Can Get Ugly". The New York Times.
  • Keen, Andrew. The Cult of the Amateur. Doubleday/Currency, 2007. ISBN 978-0-385-52080-5 (substantial criticisms of Wikipedia and another web 2.0 projects).
    • Keen, Andrew (June 16, 2007). "Does the Internet Undermine Culture?". NPR. Retrieved March 31, 2010 (Audio version (with transcript) of the NPR interview with Andrew Keen on June 16, 2007).{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
  • Rafaeli, Sheizaf & Ariel, Yaron (2008). "Online motivational factors: Incentives for participation and contribution in Wikipedia." In A. Barak (ed.), Psychological aspects of cyberspace: Theory, research, applications (pp. 243–267). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
    • . Archived from the original on November 27, 2012. Retrieved November 19, 2013.
  • Simonite, Tom (October 22, 2013). "The Decline of Wikipedia: Even As More People Than Ever Rely on It, Fewer People Create It". MIT Technology Review. Technologyreview.com. 116 (6). Retrieved August 9, 2014.

External links

 
Wikiquote has quotations related to Criticism of Wikipedia.
  • A Compendium of Wikipedia Criticism – Wikipediocracy

January 13, 2023
criticism, wikipedia, most, criticism, wikipedia, been, directed, toward, content, community, established, users, processes, critics, have, questioned, factual, reliability, readability, organization, articles, lack, methodical, fact, checking, political, bias. Most criticism of Wikipedia has been directed toward its content its community of established users and its processes Critics have questioned its factual reliability the readability and organization of the 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 In addition 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 from contributors as well as administrators and other top figures social stratification between a guardian class and newer users excessive rule making edit warring and uneven application of policies Two radically different versions of the Wikipedia biography Klee Irwin now deleted 1 presented to the public within days of each other Wikipedia s susceptibility to edit wars and bias is an issue often raised by critics of the project Contents 1 Criticism of content 1 1 Accuracy of information 1 1 1 Not authoritative 1 1 2 Comparative study of science articles 1 1 3 Lack of methodical fact checking 1 1 4 Neutral point of view and conflicts of interest 1 1 5 Scientific disputes 1 1 6 Exposure to political operatives and advocates 1 1 7 Commandeering or sanitizing articles 1 2 Quality of presentation 1 2 1 Quality of writing 1 2 2 The Wall Street Journal debate 1 3 Systemic bias in coverage 1 3 1 Notability of article topics 1 3 2 Partisanship 1 3 3 National or corporate bias 1 3 4 Racial bias 1 3 5 Gender bias and sexism 1 3 6 Institutional bias 1 3 7 Firearms related articles 1 3 8 Skeptical bias 1 4 Sexual content 1 5 Exposure to vandals 1 6 Privacy concerns 2 Criticism of the community 2 1 Role of Jimmy Wales 2 2 Conflict of interest cases 2 3 Unfair treatment of women 2 4 Croatian Wikipedia 2 5 Lack of verifiable identities 2 5 1 Scandals involving administrators and arbitrators 2 5 2 Essjay controversy 2 5 3 Anonymity 3 Criticism of process 3 1 Level of debate edit wars and harassment 3 2 Consensus and the hive mind 3 3 Excessive rule making 3 4 Social stratification 4 See also 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External linksCriticism of content EditThe reliability of Wikipedia is often questioned In Wikipedia The Dumbing Down of World Knowledge 2010 journalist Edwin Black characterized the content of articles as a mixture of truth half truth and some falsehoods 2 Oliver Kamm in Wisdom More like Dumbness of the Crowds 2007 said that articles usually are dominated by the loudest and most persistent editorial voices or by an interest group with an ideological axe to grind 3 In his article The Undue Weight of Truth on Wikipedia 2012 Timothy Messer Kruse criticized the undue weight policy that deals with the relative importance of sources observing that it showed Wikipedia s goal was not to present correct and definitive information about a subject but to present the majority opinion of the sources cited 4 5 In their article You Just Type in What You are Looking for Undergraduates Use of Library Resources vs Wikipedia 2012 in an academic librarianship journal the authors noted another author s point that omissions within an article might give the reader false ideas about a topic based upon the incomplete content of Wikipedia 6 Wikipedia is sometimes characterized as having a hostile editing environment In Common Knowledge An Ethnography of Wikipedia 2014 Dariusz Jemielniak a steward for Wikimedia Foundation projects stated that the complexity of the rules and laws governing editorial content and the behavior of the editors is a burden for new editors and a license for the office politics of disruptive editors 7 8 In a follow up article Jemielniak said that abridging and rewriting the editorial rules and laws of Wikipedia for clarity of purpose and simplicity of application would resolve the bureaucratic bottleneck of too many rules 8 In The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System How Wikipedia s Reaction to Popularity is Causing its Decline 2013 Aaron Halfaker said the over complicated rules and laws of Wikipedia unintentionally provoked the decline in editorial participation that began in 2009 frightening away new editors who otherwise would contribute to Wikipedia 9 10 failed verification There have also been works that describe the possible misuse of Wikipedia In Wikipedia or Wickedpedia 2008 the Hoover Institution said Wikipedia is an unreliable resource for correct knowledge information and facts about a subject because as an open source website the editorial content of the articles is readily subjected to manipulation and propaganda 11 The 2014 edition of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology s official student handbook Academic Integrity at MIT informs students that Wikipedia is not a reliable academic source stating the bibliography published at the end of the Wikipedia entry may point you to potential sources However do not assume that these sources are reliable use the same criteria to judge them as you would any other source Do not consider the Wikipedia bibliography as a replacement for your own research 12 Accuracy of information Edit Main article Reliability of Wikipedia Not authoritative Edit Wikipedia acknowledges that the encyclopedia should not be used as a primary source for research either academic or informational The British librarian Philip Bradley said the main problem is the lack of authority With printed publications the publishers have to ensure that their data are reliable as their livelihood depends on it But with something like this all that goes out the window 13 Likewise Robert McHenry editor in chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1992 to 1997 said that readers of Wikipedia articles cannot know who wrote the article they are reading it might have been written by an expert in the subject matter or by an amateur 14 In November 2015 Wikipedia co founder Larry Sanger told Zach Schwartz in Vice I think Wikipedia never solved the problem of how to organize itself in a way that didn t lead to mob rule and that since he left the project People that I would say are trolls sort of took over The inmates started running the asylum 15 Comparative study of science articles Edit Teaching criticism vs teaching praise an analysis of talk page messages for the Wikipedia Summer of Research 2011 conventionhttp www mediawiki org wiki Research WSOR11 16 In Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to head a 2005 article published in the scientific journal Nature the results of a blind experiment single blind study which compared the factual and informational accuracy of entries from Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica were reported The 42 entry sample included science articles and biographies of scientists which were compared for accuracy by anonymous academic reviewers they found that the average Wikipedia entry contained four errors and omissions while the average Encyclopaedia Britannica entry contained three errors and omissions The study concluded that Wikipedia and Britannica were comparable in terms of the accuracy of its science entries 17 Nevertheless the reviewers had two principal criticisms of the Wikipedia science entries i thematically confused content without an intelligible structure order presentation interpretation and ii that undue weight is given to controversial fringe theories about the subject matter 18 The dissatisfaction of the Encyclopaedia Britannica editors led to Nature publishing additional survey documentation that substantiated the results of the comparative study 19 Based upon the additional documents Encyclopaedia Britannica denied the validity of the study stating it was flawed because the Britannica extracts were compilations that sometimes included articles written for the youth version of the encyclopedia 20 In turn Nature acknowledged that some Britannica articles were compilations but denied that such editorial details invalidated the conclusions of the comparative study of the science articles 21 The editors of Britannica also said that while the Nature study showed that the rate of error between the two encyclopedias was similar the errors in a Wikipedia article usually were errors of fact while the errors in a Britannica article were errors of omission According to the editors of Britannica Britannica was more accurate than Wikipedia in that respect 20 Subsequently Nature magazine rejected the Britannica response with a rebuttal of the editors specific objections about the research method of the study 22 23 Lack of methodical fact checking Edit American journalist John Seigenthaler the object of the Seigenthaler incident Inaccurate information that is not obviously false may persist in Wikipedia for a long time before it is challenged The most prominent cases reported by mainstream media involved biographies of living people The Wikipedia Seigenthaler biography incident demonstrated that the subject of a biographical article must sometimes fix blatant lies about his own life In May 2005 an anonymous user edited the biographical article on American journalist and writer John Seigenthaler so that it contained several false and defamatory statements 24 25 The inaccurate claims went unnoticed from May until September 2005 when they were discovered by Victor S Johnson Jr a friend of Seigenthaler Wikipedia content is often mirrored at sites such as Answers com which means that incorrect information can be replicated alongside correct information through a number of web sources Such information can thereby develop false authority due to its presence at such sites 26 In another example on March 2 2007 MSNBC com reported that then New York Senator Hillary Clinton had been incorrectly listed for 20 months in her Wikipedia biography as having been valedictorian of her class of 1969 at Wellesley College when in fact she was not though she did speak at commencement 27 The article included a link to the Wikipedia edit 28 where the incorrect information was added on July 9 2005 The inaccurate information was removed within 24 hours after the MSNBC com report appeared 29 Attempts to perpetrate hoaxes may not be confined to editing existing Wikipedia articles but can also include creating new articles In October 2005 Alan Mcilwraith a call center worker from Scotland created a Wikipedia article in which he wrote that he was a highly decorated war hero The article was quickly identified as a hoax by other users and deleted 30 There have also been instances of users deliberately inserting false information into Wikipedia in order to test the system and demonstrate its alleged unreliability Gene Weingarten a journalist ran such a test in 2007 in which he inserted false information into his own Wikipedia article it was removed 27 hours later by a Wikipedia editor 31 Wikipedia considers the deliberate insertion of false and misleading information to be vandalism 32 Neutral point of view and conflicts of interest Edit Further information Wikipedia Core content policies Wikipedia regards the concept of a neutral point of view as one of its non negotiable principles however it acknowledges that such a concept has its limitations its NPOV policy states that articles should be as far as possible written without editorial bias Mark Glaser a journalist also wrote that this may be an impossible ideal due to the inevitable biases of editors 33 Research has shown that articles can maintain bias in spite of the neutral point of view policy through word choice the presentation of opinions and controversial claims as facts and framing bias 34 35 In August 2007 a tool called WikiScanner developed by Virgil Griffith a visiting researcher from the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico was released to match edits to the encyclopedia by non registered users with an extensive database of IP addresses 36 News stories appeared about IP addresses from various organizations such as the Central Intelligence Agency the National Republican Congressional Committee the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Diebold Inc and the Australian government being used to make edits to Wikipedia articles sometimes of an opinionated or questionable nature Another story stated that an IP address from the BBC itself had been used to vandalize the article on George W Bush 37 The BBC quoted a Wikipedia spokesperson as praising the tool We really value transparency and the scanner really takes this to another level Wikipedia Scanner may prevent an organization or individuals from editing articles that they re really not supposed to 38 Not everyone hailed WikiScanner as a success for Wikipedia Oliver Kamm in a column for The Times argued instead that 3 The WikiScanner is thus an important development in bringing down a pernicious influence on our intellectual life Critics of the web decry the medium as the cult of the amateur Wikipedia is worse than that it is the province of the covert lobby The most constructive course is to stand on the sidelines and jeer at its pretensions WikiScanner reveals conflicts of interest only when the editor does not have a Wikipedia account and their IP address is used instead Conflict of interest editing done by editors with accounts is not detected since those edits are anonymous to everyone except some Wikipedia administrators 39 Scientific disputes Edit The 2005 Nature study also gave two brief examples of challenges that Wikipedian science writers purportedly faced on Wikipedia The first concerned the addition of a section on violence to the schizophrenia article which was little more than a rant about the need to lock people up in the view of one of the article s regular editors neuropsychologist Vaughan Bell He said that editing it stimulated him to look up the literature on the topic 17 Another dispute involved the climate researcher William Connolley a Wikipedia editor who was opposed by others The topic in this second dispute was language pertaining to the greenhouse effect 40 and The New Yorker reported that this dispute which was far more protracted had led to arbitration which took three months to produce a decision 40 The outcome of arbitration was for Connolley to be restricted to undoing edits on articles once per day 40 Exposure to political operatives and advocates Edit See also Conflict of interest editing on Wikipedia While Wikipedia policy requires articles to have a neutral point of view it is not immune from attempts by outsiders or insiders with an agenda to place a spin on articles In January 2006 it was revealed that several staffers of members of the U S House of Representatives had embarked on a campaign to cleanse their respective bosses biographies on Wikipedia as well as inserting negative remarks on political opponents References to a campaign promise by Martin Meehan to surrender his seat in 2000 were deleted and negative comments were inserted into the articles on United States Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee and Eric Cantor a congressman from Virginia Numerous other changes were made from an IP address assigned to the House of Representatives 41 In an interview Wikipedia co founder Jimmy Wales remarked that the changes were not cool 42 Larry Delay and Pablo Bachelet wrote that from their perspective some articles dealing with Latin American history and groups such as the Sandinistas and Cuba lack political neutrality and are written from a sympathetic Marxist perspective which treats socialist dictatorships favorably at the expense of alternative positions 43 44 In 2008 the pro Israel group Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America CAMERA organized an e mail campaign to encourage readers to correct perceived Israel related biases and inconsistencies in Wikipedia 45 CAMERA argued the excerpts were unrepresentative and that it had explicitly campaigned merely toward encouraging people to learn about and edit the online encyclopedia for accuracy 46 Defenders of CAMERA and the competing group Electronic Intifada went into mediation 45 Israeli diplomat David Saranga said Wikipedia is generally fair in regard to Israel When it was pointed out that the entry on Israel mentioned the word occupation nine times whereas the entry on the Palestinian people mentioned terror only once he responded It means only one thing Israelis should be more active on Wikipedia Instead of blaming it they should go on the site much more and try and change it 47 Israeli political commentator Haviv Rettig Gur reviewing widespread perceptions in Israel of systemic bias in Wikipedia articles has argued that there are deeper structural problems creating this bias anonymous editing favors biased results especially if the editors organize concerted campaigns of defamation as has been done in articles dealing with Arab Israeli issues and current Wikipedia policies while well meant have proven ineffective in handling this 48 On August 31 2008 The New York Times ran an article detailing the edits made to the biography of Alaska governor Sarah Palin in the wake of her nomination as the running mate of Arizona Senator John McCain During the 24 hours before the McCain campaign announcement 30 edits many of them adding flattering details were made to the article by the user Young Trigg 49 This person later acknowledged working on the McCain campaign and having several other user accounts 50 In November 2007 libelous accusations were made against two politicians from southwestern France Jean Pierre Grand and Helene Mandroux Colas on their Wikipedia biographies Grand asked the president of the French National Assembly and Prime Minister to reinforce the legislation on the penal responsibility of Internet sites and of authors who peddle false information in order to cause harm 51 Senator Jean Louis Masson then requested the Minister of Justice to tell him whether it would be possible to increase the criminal responsibilities of hosting providers site operators and authors of libelous content the minister declined to do so recalling the existing rules in the LCEN law see Internet censorship in France 52 On August 25 2010 the Toronto Star reported that the Canadian government is now conducting two investigations into federal employees who have taken to Wikipedia to express their opinion on federal policies and bitter political debates 53 In 2010 Al Jazeera s Teymoor Nabili suggested that the article Cyrus Cylinder had been edited for political purposes by an apparent tussle of opinions in the shadowy world of hard drives and independent editors that comprise the Wikipedia industry He suggested that after the Iranian presidential election of 2009 and ensuing anti Iranian activities a strenuous attempt to portray the cylinder as nothing more than the propaganda tool of an aggressive invader was visible The edits following his analysis of the edits during 2009 and 2010 represented a complete dismissal of the suggestion that the cylinder or Cyrus actions represent a concern for human rights or any kind of enlightened intent in stark contrast to Cyrus own reputation as documented in the Old Testament and the people of Babylon 54 Commandeering or sanitizing articles Edit Articles of particular interest to an editor or group of editors are sometimes modified based on these editors respective points of views 55 Some companies and organizations such as Sony Diebold Nintendo Dell the CIA and the Church of Scientology as well as individuals such as United States Congressional staffers were all shown to have modified the Wikipedia pages about themselves in order to present a point of view that describes them positively these organizations may have editors who revert negative changes as soon as these changes are submitted 56 57 The Chinese Wikipedia article on the Tiananmen Square massacre was rewritten to describe it as necessary to quell the counterrevolutionary riots and Taiwan was described as a province in the People s Republic of China According to the BBC there are indications that such edits are not all necessarily organic nor random and were in fact orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party 58 59 Quality of presentation Edit Quality of writing Edit A March 30 2021 screenshot of English Wikipedia s article on Earth a featured class article In a 2006 mention of Jimmy Wales Time magazine stated that the policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the biggest and perhaps best encyclopedia in the world 60 In 2008 researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that the quality of a Wikipedia article would suffer rather than gain from adding more writers when the article lacked appropriate explicit or implicit coordination 61 For instance when contributors rewrite small portions of an entry rather than making full length revisions high and low quality content may be intermingled within an entry Roy Rosenzweig a history professor stated that American National Biography Online outperformed Wikipedia in terms of its clear and engaging prose which he said was an important aspect of good historical writing 62 Contrasting Wikipedia s treatment of Abraham Lincoln to that of Civil War historian James McPherson in American National Biography Online he said that both were essentially accurate and covered the major episodes in Lincoln s life but praised McPherson s richer contextualization his artful use of quotations to capture Lincoln s voice and his ability to convey a profound message in a handful of words By contrast he gives an example of Wikipedia s prose that he finds both verbose and dull Rosenzweig also criticized the waffling encouraged by the NPOV policy which means that it is hard to discern any overall interpretive stance in Wikipedia history While generally praising the article on William Clarke Quantrill he quoted its conclusion as an example of such waffling which then stated Some historians remember him as an opportunistic bloodthirsty outlaw while others continue to view him as a daring soldier and local folk hero 62 Other critics have made similar charges that even if Wikipedia articles are factually accurate they are often written in a poor almost unreadable style Frequent Wikipedia critic Andrew Orlowski commented Even when a Wikipedia entry is 100 percent factually correct and those facts have been carefully chosen it all too often reads as if it has been translated from one language to another then into a third passing an illiterate translator at each stage 63 A study of Wikipedia articles on cancer was conducted in 2010 by Yaacov Lawrence of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University The study was limited to those articles that could be found in the Physician Data Query and excluded those written at the start class or stub class level Lawrence found the articles accurate but not very readable and thought that Wikipedia s lack of readability to non college readers may reflect its varied origins and haphazard editing 64 The Economist argued that better written articles tend to be more reliable inelegant or ranting prose usually reflects muddled thoughts and incomplete information 65 The Wall Street Journal debate Edit In the September 12 2006 edition of The Wall Street Journal Jimmy Wales debated with Dale Hoiberg editor in chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica 66 Hoiberg focused on a need for expertise and control in an encyclopedia and cited Lewis Mumford that overwhelming information could bring about a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance Wales emphasized Wikipedia s differences and asserted that openness and transparency lead to quality Hoiberg said he had neither the time nor space to respond to criticisms and could corral any number of links to articles alleging errors in Wikipedia to which Wales responded No problem Wikipedia to the rescue with a fine article and included a link to the Wikipedia article about criticism of Wikipedia 66 Systemic bias in coverage Edit See also Reliability of Wikipedia Coverage and Academic studies about Wikipedia A minority of editors produce the majority of persistent content Wikipedia has been accused of systemic bias which is to say its general nature leads without necessarily any conscious intention to the propagation of various prejudices Although many articles in newspapers have concentrated on minor factual errors in Wikipedia articles there are also concerns about large scale presumably unintentional effects from the increasing influence and use of Wikipedia as a research tool at all levels In an article in the Times Higher Education magazine London philosopher Martin Cohen describes Wikipedia as having become a monopoly with all the prejudices and ignorance of its creators which he calls a youthful cab drivers perspective 67 Cohen concludes that t o control the reference sources that people use is to control the way people comprehend the world Wikipedia may have a benign even trivial face but underneath may lie a more sinister and subtle threat to freedom of thought 67 That freedom is undermined by what he sees as what matters on Wikipedia not your sources but the support of the community 67 Researchers from Washington University in St Louis developed a statistical model to measure systematic bias in the behavior of Wikipedia s users regarding controversial topics The authors focused on behavioral changes of the encyclopedia s administrators after assuming the post writing that systematic bias occurred after the fact 68 Critics also point to the tendency to cover topics in detail disproportionate to their importance For example Stephen Colbert once mockingly praised Wikipedia for having a longer entry on lightsabers than it does on the printing press 69 Dale Hoiberg the editor in chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica said People write of things they re interested in and so many subjects don t get covered and news events get covered in great detail In the past the entry on Hurricane Frances was more than five times the length of that on Chinese art and the entry on Coronation Street was twice as long as the article on Tony Blair 13 This approach of comparing two articles one about a traditionally encyclopedic subject and the other about one more popular with the crowd has been called wikigroaning 70 71 72 A defense of inclusion criteria is that the encyclopedia s longer coverage of pop culture does not deprive the more worthy or serious subjects of space 73 Notability of article topics Edit See also Notability in the English Wikipedia and Criticism of Wikipedia Systemic bias in coverage Wikipedia s notability guidelines which are used by editors to determine if a subject merits its own article and the application thereof are the subject of much criticism 74 A Wikipedia editor rejected a draft article about Donna Strickland before she won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018 because no independent sources were given to show that Strickland was sufficiently notable by Wikipedia s standards Journalists highlighted this as an indicator of the limited visibility of women in science compared to their male colleagues 75 76 The gender bias on Wikipedia is well documented and has prompted a movement to increase the number of notable women on Wikipedia through the Women in Red WikiProject In an article entitled Seeking Disambiguation Annalisa Merelli interviewed Catalina Cruz a candidate for office in Queens New York in the 2018 election who had the notorious SEO disadvantage of having the same name as a porn star with a Wikipedia page Merelli also interviewed the Wikipedia editor who wrote the candidate s ill fated article which was deleted then restored after she won the election She described the Articles for Deletion process and pointed to other candidates who had pages on the English Wikipedia despite never having held office 77 Novelist Nicholson Baker critical of deletionism writes There are quires reams bales of controversy over what constitutes notability in Wikipedia nobody will ever sort it out 78 Journalist Timothy Noah wrote of his treatment Wikipedia s notability policy resembles U S immigration policy before 9 11 stringent rules spotty enforcement In the same article Noah mentions that the Pulitzer Prize winning writer Stacy Schiff was not considered notable enough for a Wikipedia entry until she wrote her article Know it All about the Wikipedia Essjay controversy 79 On a more generic level a 2014 study found no correlation between the characteristics of a given Wikipedia page about an academic and the academic s notability as determined by citation counts The metrics of each Wikipedia page examined included length number of links to the page from other articles and number of edits made to the page This study also found that Wikipedia did not cover notable ISI highly cited researchers properly 80 In 2020 Wikipedia was criticized for the amount of time it took for an article about Theresa Greenfield a candidate for the 2020 United States Senate election in Iowa to leave Wikipedia s Articles for the Creation process and become published Particularly the criteria for notability were criticized with The Washington Post reporting Greenfield is a uniquely tricky case for Wikipedia because she doesn t have the background that most candidates for major political office typically have like prior government experience or prominence in business Even if Wikipedia editors could recognize she was prominent she had a hard time meeting the official criteria for notability 81 Jimmy Wales also criticized the long process on his talk page 82 Partisanship Edit Main article Ideological bias on Wikipedia According to Haaretz Wikipedia has succeeded in being accused of being both too liberal and too conservative and has critics from across the spectrum while also noting that Wikipedia is usually accused of being too liberal 83 According to CNN Wikipedia s ideological bias may match the ideological bias of the news ecosystem 84 U S commentators mostly politically conservative ones have suggested that a politically liberal viewpoint is predominant in the English Wikipedia Andrew Schlafly created Conservapedia because of his perception that Wikipedia contained a liberal bias 85 Conservapedia s editors have compiled a list of alleged examples of liberal bias in Wikipedia 86 In 2007 an article in The Christian Post criticised Wikipedia s coverage of intelligent design saying it was biased and hypocritical 87 Lawrence Solomon of National Review considered the Wikipedia articles on subjects like global warming intelligent design and Roe v Wade all to be slanted in favor of liberal views 88 In a September 2010 issue of the conservative weekly Human Events Rowan Scarborough presented a critique of Wikipedia s coverage of American politicians prominent in the approaching U S midterm elections as evidence of systemic liberal bias Scarborough compares the biographical articles of liberal and conservative opponents in Senate races in the Alaska Republican primary and the Delaware and Nevada general election emphasizing the quantity of negative coverage of Tea Party movement endorsed candidates He also cites criticism by Lawrence Solomon and quotes in full the lead section of Wikipedia s article on Conservapedia as evidence of an underlying bias 89 In 2006 Wikipedia co founder Jimmy Wales said The Wikipedia community is very diverse from liberal to conservative to libertarian and beyond If averages mattered and due to the nature of the wiki software no voting they almost certainly don t I would say that the Wikipedia community is slightly more liberal than the U S population on average because we are global and the international community of English speakers is slightly more liberal than the U S population There are no data or surveys to back that 90 In 2007 Wales said that claims of liberal bias on Wikipedia are not supported by the facts 91 Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu analyzed 2012 era Wikipedia articles on U S politics going back a decade and wrote a study 92 arguing the more contributors there were to an article the less biased the article would be and that based on a study of frequent collocations fewer articles leaned Democrat than was the case in Wikipedia s early years 93 94 Sorin Adam Matei a professor at Purdue University said that for certain political topics there s a central left bias There s also a slight when it comes to more political topics counter cultural bias It s not across the board and it s not for all things 95 In February 2021 Fox News accused Wikipedia of whitewashing communism and socialism 96 In November 2021 the English Wikipedia s entry for Mass killings under communist regimes was nominated for deletion with some editors arguing that it has a biased anti Communist point of view that it should not resort to simplistic presuppositions that events are driven by any specific ideology and that by combining different elements of research to create a synthesis this constitutes original research and therefore breaches Wikipedia rules 97 This was criticized by historian Robert Tombs who called it morally indefensible at least as bad as Holocaust denial because linking ideology and killing is the very core of why these things are important I have read the Wikipedia page and it seems to be careful and balanced Therefore attempts to remove it can only be ideologically motivated to whitewash Communism 97 Other Wikipedia editors and users on social media opposed the deletion of the article 98 The article s deletion nomination received considerable attention from conservative media 99 The Heritage Foundation an American conservative think tank called the arguments made in favor of deletion absurd and ahistorical 99 On December 1 2021 a panel of four administrators found that the discussion yielded no consensus meaning that the status quo was retained and the article was not deleted 100 The article s deletion discussion was the largest in Wikipedia s history 99 Right wing Hindus have accused Wikipedia of being anti Hindu and anti Indian 101 National or corporate bias Edit In 2008 Tim Anderson a senior lecturer in political economy at the University of Sydney said Wikipedia administrators display an American focused bias in their interactions with editors and their determinations of which sources are appropriate for use on the site Anderson was outraged after several of the sources he used in his edits to the Hugo Chavez article including Venezuela Analysis and Z Magazine were disallowed as unusable Anderson also described Wikipedia s neutral point of view policy to ZDNet Australia as a facade and that Wikipedia hides behind a reliance on corporate media editorials 102 Racial bias Edit Main article Racial bias on Wikipedia Wikipedia has been charged with having a systemic racial bias in its coverage due to an underrepresentation of people of colour as editors 103 The President of Wikimedia D C James Hare noted that a lot of black history is left out of Wikipedia due to articles predominately being written by white editors 104 Articles that do exist on African topics are according to some critics largely edited by editors from Europe and North America and thus reflect their knowledge and consumption of media which tend to perpetuate a negative image of Africa 105 Maira Liriano of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has argued that the lack of information regarding black history on Wikipedia makes it seem like it s not important 106 San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguia has stressed how it is important for Latinos to be part of Wikipedia because it is a major source of where people get their information 107 In 2010 an analysis of Wikipedia edits revealed that Asia as the most populous continent was represented in only 16 67 of edits Africa 6 35 and South America 2 58 were equally underrepresented 108 In 2018 the Southern Poverty Law Center criticized Wikipedia for being vulnerable to manipulation by neo Nazis white nationalists and racist academics seeking a wider audience for extreme views 109 According to the SPLC c ivil POV pushers can disrupt the editing process by engaging other users in tedious and frustrating debates or tie up administrators in endless rounds of mediation Users who fall into this category include racialist academics and members of the human biodiversity or HBD blogging community In recent years the proliferation of far right online spaces such as white nationalist forums alt right boards and HBD blogs has created a readymade pool of users that can be recruited to edit on Wikipedia en masse The presence of white nationalists and other far right extremists on Wikipedia is an ongoing problem that is unlikely to go away in the near future given the rightward political shift in countries where the majority of the site s users live 109 The SPLC cited the article Race and intelligence as an example of the alt right influence on Wikipedia stating that at that time the article presented a false balance between fringe racialist views and the mainstream perspective in psychology 109 In 2022 The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on a researcher at Cleveland State University whose home institution was essentially providing a soapbox for racist pseudoscience The article states that he had some influence on public misperceptions of race as a result of heavy editing of an early version of Wikipedia s article on race and intelligence 110 Gender bias and sexism Edit Main article Gender bias on Wikipedia Former Wikimedia Foundation executive Sue Gardner has listed reasons offered by some women in Why Women Don t Edit Wikipedia 111 Wikipedia has a longstanding controversy concerning gender bias and sexism 112 113 114 115 116 117 Gender bias on Wikipedia refers to the finding that between 84 and 91 percent of Wikipedia editors are male 118 119 which allegedly leads to systemic bias 120 Wikipedia has been criticized 112 by some journalists and academics for lacking not only women contributors but also extensive and in depth encyclopedic attention to many topics regarding gender Sue Gardner former executive director of the Foundation said that increasing diversity was about making the encyclopedia as good as it could be Factors cited as possibly discouraging women from editing included the obsessive fact loving realm associations with the hard driving hacker crowd and the necessity to be open to very difficult high conflict people even misogynists 113 In 2011 the Wikimedia Foundation set a goal of increasing the proportion of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015 113 In August 2013 Gardner conceded defeat I didn t solve it We didn t solve it The Wikimedia Foundation didn t solve it The solution won t come from the Wikimedia Foundation 121 In August 2014 Wikipedia co founder Jimmy Wales acknowledged in a BBC interview the failure of Wikipedia to fix the gender gap and announced the Wikimedia Foundation s plans for doubling down on the issue Wales said the Foundation would be open to more outreach and more software changes 122 Writing in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society Marie Vitulli states that mathematicians have had a difficult time when writing biographies of women mathematicians and she describes the aggressiveness of editors and administrators in deleting such articles 123 Criticism was presented on this topic in The Signpost WP THREATENING2MEN 124 Institutional bias Edit Wikipedia has been criticized for reflecting the bias and influence of media that are seen as reliable due to their dominance and for being a site of conflict between entrenched or special institutional interests Public relations firms and interest lobbies corporate political and otherwise have been accused of working systemically to distort Wikipedia s articles in their respective interests 125 Firearms related articles Edit Wikipedia has been criticized for issues related to bias in firearms related articles According to critics systematic bias arises from the tendency of the editors most active in maintaining firearms related articles to also be gun enthusiasts and firearms related articles are dominated by technical information while issues of the social impact and regulation of firearms are relegated to separate articles Communications were facilitated by a WikiProject called WikiProject Firearms an on wiki group of editors with a common interest The alleged pro gun bias drew increased attention after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland Florida in February 2018 The Wikimedia Foundation defended itself from allegations of being host to opinion influencing campaigns of pro gun groups saying that the contents are always being updated and improved 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 Skeptical bias Edit In 2014 supporters of holistic healing and energy psychology began a Change org petition asking for true scientific discourse on Wikipedia complaining that much of the information on Wikipedia related to holistic approaches to healing is biased misleading out of date or just plain wrong In response Jimmy Wales said Wikipedia covers only works that are published in respectable scientific journals 133 134 Wikipedia has been accused of being biased against views outside of the scientific mainstream due to influence from the skeptical movement 35 Social scientist Brian Martin examined the influence of skeptics on Wikipedia by looking for parallels between Wikipedia entries and characteristic techniques used by skeptics finding that the result does not prove that Skeptics are shaping Wikipedia but is compatible with that possibility 35 Sexual content Edit See also Wikipedia Explicit content Wikipedia has been criticized for allowing graphic sexual content such as images and videos of masturbation and ejaculation as well as photos from hardcore pornographic films found on its articles Child protection campaigners say graphic sexual content appears on many Wikipedia entries displayed without any warning or age verification 135 The Wikipedia article Virgin Killer a 1976 album from German heavy metal band Scorpions features a picture of the album s original cover which depicts a naked prepubescent girl In December 2008 the Internet Watch Foundation a nonprofit nongovernment affiliated organization added the article to its blacklist criticizing the inclusion of the picture as distasteful As a result access to the article was blocked for four days by most Internet service providers in the United Kingdom 136 Seth Finkelstein writing for The Guardian argues that the debate over the album cover masks a structural lack of accountability on Wikipedia in particular when it comes to sexual content 137 For example the deletion by Wikipedia co founder Jimmy Wales of images of lolicon versions of the character Wikipe tan created a minor controversy on the topic The deletion was taken as endorsement of the non lolicon images of Wikipe tan which Wales later had to explicitly deny I don t like Wikipe tan and never have 138 Finkelstein sees Wikipedia as composed of fiefdoms which makes it difficult for the Wikipedia community to deal with such issues and sometimes necessitates top down intervention 137 Exposure to vandals Edit Main article Vandalism on Wikipedia Vandalism of a Wikipedia article As an online encyclopedia that almost anyone can edit Wikipedia has had problems with vandalism of articles which range from blanking articles to inserting profanities hoaxes or nonsense Wikipedia has a range of tools available to users and administrators in order to fight against vandalism including blocking and banning vandals and automated bots that detect and repair vandalism Supporters of the project argue that the vast majority of vandalism on Wikipedia is reverted within a short time and a study by Fernanda Viegas of the MIT Media Lab and Martin Wattenberg and Kushal Dave of IBM Research found that most vandal edits were reverted within around five minutes however they state that it is essentially impossible to find a crisp definition of vandalism 139 While most instances of page blanking or the addition of offensive material are soon reverted less obvious vandalism or vandalism to a little viewed article has remained for longer periods A 2007 conference paper estimated that 1 in 271 articles had some damaged content Most of the damage involved nonsense 20 involved actual misinformation It reported that 42 of damage gets repaired before any reader clicked on the article and 80 before 30 people did so 140 Privacy concerns Edit Most privacy concerns refer to cases of government or employer data gathering computer or electronic monitoring or trading data between organizations According to James Donnelly and Jenifer Haeckel the Internet has created conflicts between personal privacy commercial interests and the interests of society at large 141 Balancing the rights of all concerned as technology alters the social landscape will not be easy It is not yet possible to anticipate the path of the common law or governmental regulation regarding this problem 141 The concern in the case of Wikipedia is the right of a private citizen to remain private to remain a private citizen rather than a public figure in the eyes of the law 142 It is somewhat of a battle between the right to be anonymous in cyberspace and the right to be anonymous in real life meatspace A particular problem occurs in the case of an individual who is relatively unimportant and for whom there exists a Wikipedia page against their wishes citation needed In 2005 Agence France Presse quoted Daniel Brandt the Wikipedia Watch owner as saying that the basic problem is that no one neither the trustees of Wikimedia Foundation nor the volunteers who are connected with Wikipedia consider themselves responsible for the content 143 In January 2006 a German court ordered the German Wikipedia shut down within Germany because it stated the full name of Boris Floricic aka Tron a deceased hacker who was formerly with the Chaos Computer Club More specifically the court ordered that the URL within the German de domain http www wikipedia de may no longer redirect to the encyclopedia s servers in Florida at http de wikipedia org although German readers were still able to use the US based URL directly and there was virtually no loss of access on their part The court order arose out of a lawsuit filed by Floricic s parents demanding that their son s surname be removed from Wikipedia The next month on February 9 2006 the injunction against Wikimedia Deutschland was overturned with the court rejecting the notion that Tron s right to privacy or that of his parents was being violated 144 Criticism of the community EditRole of Jimmy Wales Edit The community of Wikipedia editors has been criticized for placing an irrational emphasis on Jimmy Wales as a person Wales s role in personally determining the content of some articles has also been criticized as contrary to the independent spirit that Wikipedia supposedly has gained 145 146 In early 2007 Wales dismissed the criticism of the Wikipedia model I am unaware of any problems with the quality of discourse on the site I don t know of any higher quality discourse anywhere 147 148 149 150 151 Conflict of interest cases Edit Main article Conflict of interest editing on Wikipedia A Business Insider article wrote about a controversy in September 2012 where two Wikimedia Foundation employees were found to have been running a PR business on the side and editing Wikipedia on behalf of their clients 152 Unfair treatment of women Edit In 2015 The Atlantic published a story by Emma Paling about a contributor who was able to obtain no relief from the Arbitration Committee for off site harassment Paling quotes a then sitting Arbitrator speaking about bias against women on the Arbitration Committee 153 In the online magazine Slate David Auerbach criticized the Arbitration Committee s decision to block a woman indefinitely without simultaneously blocking her chief antagonists in the December 2014 Gender Gap Task Force case He mentions his own experience with what he calls the unblockable abrasive editors who can get away with complaints against them because there are enough supporters and that he had observed a general indifference or even hostility to an outside opinion on the English Wikipedia Auerbach considers the systematic defense of vulgar language use by insiders as a symptom of the toxicity he describes 154 In January 2015 The Guardian reported that the Arbitration Committee had banned five feminist editors from gender related articles on a case related to the Gamergate controversy while including quotes from a Wikipedia editor alleging unfair treatment 155 156 Other commentators including from Gawker and ThinkProgress provided additional analysis while sourcing from The Guardian s story 156 157 158 159 160 Reports in The Washington Post Slate and Social Text described these articles as flawed or factually inaccurate pointing out that the Arbitration case had not concluded as at the time of publishing no editor had been banned 156 161 162 After the result was published Gawker wrote that ArbCom ruled to punish six editors who could be broadly classified as anti Gamergate and five who are pro Gamergate All of the supposed Five Horsemen non sequitur were among the editors punished with one of them being the sole editor banned due to this case 163 An article called ArbitrationGate regarding this situation was created and quickly deleted on Wikipedia while The Guardian later issued a correction to their article 156 The Committee and the Wikimedia Foundation issued press statements that the Gamergate case was in response to the atmosphere of the Gamergate article resembling a battlefield due to various sides of the discussion having violated community policies and guidelines on conduct and that the committee was fulfilling its role to uphold a civil constructive atmosphere on Wikipedia The committee also wrote that it does not rule on the content of articles or make judgements on the personal views of parties to the case 161 164 Michael Mandiberg writing in Social Text remained unconvinced 162 Croatian Wikipedia Edit See also Croatian Wikipedia On the Croatian Wikipedia a group of administrators were criticized for blocking Wikipedians who were in favor of LGBT rights 165 166 167 In an interview given to Index hr Robert Kurelic a professor of history at the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula has commented that the Croatian Wikipedia is only a tool used by its administrators to promote their own political agendas giving false and distorted facts 168 As two particularly prominent examples he listed the Croatian Wikipedia s coverage of Istrianism a regionalist movement in Istria a region mostly located in Croatia defined as a movement fabricated to reduce the number of Croats and antifasizam anti fascism which according to him is defined as the opposite of what it really means 168 Kurelic further advised that it would be good if a larger number of people got engaged and started writing on Wikipedia because administrators want to exploit high school and university students the most common users of Wikipedia to change their opinions and attitudes which presents a serious issue 168 In 2013 Croatia s Minister of Science Education and Sports at the time Zeljko Jovanovic called for pupils and students in Croatia to avoid using the Croatian Wikipedia 165 In an interview given to Novi list Jovanovic said that the idea of openness and relevance as a knowledge source that Wikipedia could and should represent has been completely discredited which for certain has never been the goal of Wikipedia s creators nor the huge number of people around the world who share their knowledge and time using that medium Croatian pupils and students have been wronged by this so we have to warn them unfortunately that a large part of the content of the Croatian version of Wikipedia is not only dubious but also contains obvious forgeries and therefore we invite them to use more reliable sources of information which include Wikipedia in English and in other major languages of the world 165 Jovanovic has also commented on the Croatian Wikipedia editors calling them a minority group that has usurped the right to edit the Croatian language Wikipedia 165 Lack of verifiable identities Edit Scandals involving administrators and arbitrators Edit David Boothroyd a Wikipedia editor and a Labour Party United Kingdom member created controversy in 2009 when Wikipedia Review contributor Tarantino discovered that he committed sockpuppeting editing under the accounts Dbiv Fys and Sam Blacketer none of which acknowledged his real identity After earning Administrator status with one account then losing it for inappropriate use of the administrative tools Boothroyd regained Administrator status with the Sam Blacketer sockpuppet account in April 2007 169 Later in 2007 Boothroyd s Sam Blacketer account became part of the English Wikipedia s Arbitration Committee 170 Under the Sam Blacketer account Boothroyd edited many articles related to United Kingdom politics including that of rival Conservative Party leader David Cameron 171 Boothroyd then resigned as an administrator and as an arbitrator 172 173 Essjay controversy Edit Main article Essjay controversy Essjay In July 2006 The New Yorker ran a feature by Stacy Schiff about a highly credentialed Wikipedia editor 40 The initial version of the article included an interview with a Wikipedia administrator using the pseudonym Essjay who described himself as a tenured professor of theology 174 Essjay s Wikipedia user page now removed said the following I am a tenured professor of theology at a private university in the eastern United States I teach both undergraduate and graduate theology I have been asked repeatedly to reveal the name of the institution however I decline to do so I am unsure of the consequences of such an action and believe it to be in my best interests to remain anonymous 175 Essjay also said he held four academic degrees Bachelor of Arts in religious studies B A Master of Arts in religion M A R Doctorate of Philosophy in theology Ph D and Doctorate in Canon Law JCD Essjay specialized in editing articles about religion on Wikipedia including subjects such as the penitential rite transubstantiation the papal tiara 40 on one occasion he was called in to give some expert testimony on the status of Mary in the Roman Catholic Church 176 In January 2007 Essjay was hired as a manager with Wikia a wiki hosting service founded by Wales and Angela Beesley In February Wales appointed Essjay as a member of the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee a group with powers to issue binding rulings in disputes relating to Wikipedia 177 Wikipedia co founder Larry Sanger who left Wikipedia to found Citizendium In late February 2007 The New Yorker added an editorial note to its article on Wikipedia stating that it had learned that Essjay was Ryan Jordan a 24 year old college dropout from Kentucky with no advanced degrees and no teaching experience 178 Initially Jimmy Wales commented on the issue of Essjay s identity I regard it as a pseudonym and I don t really have a problem with it Larry Sanger co founder 179 180 181 of Wikipedia responded to Wales on his Citizendium blog by calling Wales initial reaction utterly breathtaking and ultimately tragic Sanger said the controversy reflects directly on the judgment and values of the management of Wikipedia 182 Wales later issued a new statement saying he had not previously understood that EssJay used his false credentials in content disputes He added I have asked EssJay to resign his positions of trust within the Wikipedia community 183 Sanger responded the next day It seems Jimmy finds nothing wrong nothing trust violating with the act itself of openly and falsely touting many advanced degrees on Wikipedia But there most obviously is something wrong with it and it s just as disturbing for Wikipedia s head to fail to see anything wrong with it 184 On March 4 Essjay wrote on his user page that he was leaving Wikipedia and he also resigned his position with Wikia 185 A subsequent article in The Courier Journal Louisville suggested that the new resume he had posted at his Wikia page was exaggerated 186 The March 19 2007 issue of The New Yorker published a formal apology by Wales to the magazine and Stacy Schiff for Essjay s false statements 187 Discussing the incident the New York Times noted that the Wikipedia community had responded to the affair with the fury of the crowd and observed The Essjay episode underlines some of the perils of collaborative efforts like Wikipedia that rely on many contributors acting in good faith often anonymously and through self designated user names But it also shows how the transparency of the Wikipedia process all editing of entries is marked and saved allows readers to react to suspected fraud 188 The Essjay incident received extensive media coverage including a national United States television broadcast on ABC s World News with Charles Gibson 189 and the March 7 2007 Associated Press story 190 The controversy has led to a proposal that users who say they possess academic qualifications should have to provide evidence before citing them in Wikipedia content disputes 191 The proposal was not accepted 192 Anonymity Edit Wikipedia has been criticised for allowing editors to contribute anonymously without a registered account and using an auto generated IP labeled account or pseudonymously using a registered account with critics saying that this leads to a lack of accountability 151 193 This also sometimes leads to uncivil conduct in debates between Wikipedians 151 193 For privacy reasons Wikipedia forbids editors to reveal information about another editor on Wikipedia 194 Criticism of process EditLevel of debate edit wars and harassment Edit Further information Academic studies about Wikipedia Power plays The standard of debate on Wikipedia has been called into question by people who have noted that contributors can make a long list of salient points and pull in a wide range of empirical observations to back up their arguments only to have them ignored completely on the site 195 An academic study of Wikipedia articles found that the level of debate among Wikipedia editors on controversial topics often degenerated into counterproductive squabbling For uncontroversial stable topics self selection also ensures that members of editorial groups are substantially well aligned with each other in their interests backgrounds and overall understanding of the topics For controversial topics on the other hand self selection may produce a strongly misaligned editorial group It can lead to conflicts among the editorial group members continuous edit wars and may require the use of formal work coordination and control mechanisms These may include intervention by administrators who enact dispute review and mediation processes or completely disallow or limit and coordinate the types and sources of edits 196 In 2008 a team from the Palo Alto Research Center found that for editors who make between two and nine edits a month the percentage of their edits being reverted had gone from 5 in 2004 to about 15 and people who make only one edit a month were being reverted at a 25 rate 197 According to The Economist magazine 2008 The behaviour of Wikipedia s self appointed deletionist guardians who excise anything that does not meet their standards justifying their actions with a blizzard of acronyms is now known as wiki lawyering 198 In regards to the decline in the number of Wikipedia editors since the 2007 policy changes another study stated this was partly down to the way in which newcomers are rudely greeted by automated quality control systems and are overwhelmed by the complexity of the rule system 10 Another complaint about Wikipedia focuses on the efforts of contributors with idiosyncratic beliefs who push their point of view in an effort to dominate articles especially controversial ones 199 200 This sometimes results in revert wars and pages being locked down In response an Arbitration Committee has been formed on the English Wikipedia that deals with the worst alleged offenders though a conflict resolution strategy is actively encouraged before going to this extent Also to stop the continuous reverting of pages Jimmy Wales introduced a three revert rule whereby those users who reverse the effect of others contributions to one article more than three times in a 24 hour period may be blocked 201 In a 2008 article in The Brooklyn Rail Wikipedia contributor David Shankbone contended that he had been harassed and stalked because of his work on Wikipedia had received no support from the authorities or the Wikimedia Foundation and only mixed support from the Wikipedia community Shankbone wrote If you become a target on Wikipedia do not expect a supportive community 202 David Auerbach writing in Slate magazine said I am not exaggerating when I say it is the closest thing to Kafka s The Trial I have ever witnessed with editors and administrators giving conflicting and confusing advice complaints getting boomeranged onto complainants who then face disciplinary action for complaining and very little consistency in the standards applied In my short time there I repeatedly observed editors lawyering an issue with acronyms only to turn around and declare Ignore all rules when faced with the same rules used against them The problem instead stems from the fact that administrators and longtime editors have developed a fortress mentality in which they see new editors as dangerous intruders who will wreck their beautiful encyclopedia and thus antagonize and even persecute them 154 Wikipedia has also been criticized for its weak enforcement against perceived toxicities among the editing community at various times In one case a longtime editor was nearly driven to suicide following online abuse from editors and a ban from the site before being rescued from the suicide attempt 203 In order to address this problem Wikipedia planned to institute a new rule of conduct aimed at combating toxic behavior The development of the new rule of conduct would take place in two phases The first will include setting policies for in person and virtual events as well as policies for technical spaces including chat rooms and other Wikimedia projects A second phase outlining enforcement when the rules are broken is planned to be approved by the end of 2020 according to the Wikimedia board s plan 204 needs update Consensus and the hive mind Edit Oliver Kamm in an article for The Times said Wikipedia s reliance on consensus in forming its content was dubious 3 Wikipedia seeks not truth but consensus and like an interminable political meeting the end result will be dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices Wikimedia advisor Benjamin Mako Hill also talked about Wikipedia s disproportional representation of viewpoints saying In Wikipedia debates can be won by stamina If you care more and argue longer you will tend to get your way The result very often is that individuals and organizations with a very strong interest in having Wikipedia say a particular thing tend to win out over other editors who just want the encyclopedia to be solid neutral and reliable These less committed editors simply have less at stake and their attention is more distributed 205 Wikimedia trustee Dariusz Jemielniak says Tiring out one s opponent is a common strategy among experienced Wikipedians I have resorted to it many times 206 In his article Digital Maoism The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism first published online by Edge The Third Culture May 30 2006 computer scientist and digital theorist Jaron Lanier describes Wikipedia as a hive mind that is for the most part stupid and boring and asks rhetorically why to pay attention to it His thesis says The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used how it s been elevated to such importance so quickly And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all wise that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force This is different from representative democracy or meritocracy This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods The fact that it s now being re introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists people who in many cases I know and like doesn t make it any less dangerous 207 Lanier also says the current economic trend is to reward entities that aggregate information rather than those that actually generate content In the absence of new business models the popular demand for content will be sated by mediocrity thus reducing or even eliminating any monetary incentives for the production of new knowledge 207 Lanier s opinions produced some strong disagreement Internet consultant Clay Shirky noted that Wikipedia has many internal controls in place and is not a mere mass of unintelligent collective effort Neither proponents nor detractors of hive mind rhetoric have much interesting to say about Wikipedia itself because both groups ignore the details Wikipedia is best viewed as an engaged community that uses a large and growing number of regulatory mechanisms to manage a huge set of proposed edits To take the specific case of Wikipedia the Seigenthaler Kennedy debacle catalyzed both soul searching and new controls to address the problems exposed and the controls included inter alia a greater focus on individual responsibility the very factor Digital Maoism denies is at work 208 Excessive rule making Edit Various figures involved with the Wikimedia Foundation have argued that Wikipedia s increasingly complex policies and guidelines are driving away new contributors to the site Former chair Kat Walsh was quoted in a 2009 article as criticizing the project saying It was easier when I joined in 2004 Everything was a little less complicated It s harder and harder for new people to adjust 209 Wikipedia administrator Oliver Moran views policy creep as the major barrier writing that the loose collective running the site today estimated to be 90 percent male operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage 210 According to Jemielniak the sheer complexity of the rules and laws governing content and editor behavior has become excessive and creates a learning burden for new editors 7 211 In 2014 Jemielniak suggested actively rewriting and abridging the rules and laws to decrease their complexity and size 7 211 Social stratification Edit Further information Academic studies about Wikipedia Work distribution and social strata Despite the perception that the Wikipedia process is democratic a small number of people are running the show 212 including administrators bureaucrats stewards checkusers mediators arbitrators and oversighters 8 In an article on Wikipedia conflicts in 2007 The Guardian discussed a backlash among some editors who argue that blocking users compromises the supposedly open nature of the project and the imbalance of power between users and administrators may even be a reason some users choose to vandalise in the first place based on the experiences of one editor who became a vandal after his edits were reverted and he was blocked for edit warring 213 See also EditCensorship of Wikipedia Countries blocking or limiting access to Wikipedia Ideological bias on Wikipedia Analysis of claims of ideological bias on Wikipedia Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia Opposing philosphies within the Wikipedia community History of Wikipedia List of Wikipedia controversies Timeline and brief descriptions of controversies involving Wikipedia Reliability of Wikipedia Overview of the reliability of Wikipedia Predictions of the end of Wikipedia Theories that Wikipedia will break down or become obsolete Wikipedia Criticisms Wikipedia Press coverage Wikipedia Replies to common objections Wikipedia Why Wikipedia is not so great Wikipedia Wikipedia is not a reliable sourceReferences EditThis article incorporates text from the GFDL Wikipedia page Wikipedia Replies to common objections Wikipedia Articles for deletion Klee Irwin 3rd nomination Wikipedia January 15 2014 Black Edwin April 19 2010 Wikipedia The Dumbing Down of World Knowledge History News Network Archived from the original on September 9 2016 Retrieved October 21 2014 a b c Kamm Oliver August 16 2007 Wisdom More like dumbness of the crowds The Times Archived from the original on August 14 2011 Author s own copy Archived September 5 2016 at the Wayback Machine Messer Kruse Timothy February 12 2012 The Undue Weight of Truth on Wikipedia The Chronicle of Higher Education Archived from the original on December 18 2016 Retrieved August 30 2015 Wikipedia Experience Sparks National Debate The BG News Bowling Green State University February 27 2012 Archived from the original on August 27 2016 Retrieved March 27 2014 Colon Aguirre Monica Fleming May Rachel A October 11 2012 You Just Type in What You Are Looking For Undergraduates Use of Library Resources vs Wikipedia PDF The Journal of Academic Librarianship p 392 Archived PDF from the original on April 19 2016 Retrieved March 27 2014 cited Fallis Don Toward an Epistemology 2008 a b c Jemielniak Dariusz 2014 Common Knowledge An Ethnography of Wikipedia Stanford University Press ISBN 9780804791205 a b c Jemielniak Dariusz June 22 2014 The Unbearable Bureaucracy of Wikipedia the legalistic atmosphere is making it impossible to attract and keep the new editors the site needs Slate Archived from the original on September 10 2016 Retrieved September 18 2016 Vergano Dan January 3 2013 Study Wikipedia is driving away newcomers USA Today Archived from the original on September 21 2015 Retrieved November 19 2014 a b Halfaker Aaron Geiger R Stuart Morgan Jonathan T Riedl John 2012 The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System How Wikipedia s Reaction to Popularity Is Causing Its Decline American Behavioral Scientist 57 5 664 doi 10 1177 0002764212469365 ISSN 0002 7642 S2CID 144208941 Petrilli Michael J February 29 2008 Wikipedia or Wikipedia Education Next Archived from the original on November 21 2016 Retrieved October 22 2014 Citing Electronic Sources Massachusetts Institute of Technology Archived from the original on September 6 2015 Retrieved October 21 2014 a b Waldman Simon October 26 2004 Who knows The Guardian London Archived from the original on April 6 2019 Retrieved December 30 2005 Vallely Paul October 10 2006 The Big Question Do we Need a More Reliable Online Encyclopedia than Wikipedia The Independent London Archived from the original on October 24 2006 Retrieved October 18 2006 Schwartz Zach November 11 2015 Wikipedia s Co Founder Is Wikipedia s Most Outspoken Critic Vice Archived from the original on November 14 2015 Retrieved August 26 2017 Research Wikimedia Summer of Research 2011 Newbie teaching strategy trends Meta wikimedia org June 3 2011 Archived from the original on December 13 2013 Retrieved December 6 2013 a b Giles Jim December 15 2005 Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head Nature 438 7070 900 901 Bibcode 2005Natur 438 900G doi 10 1038 438900a PMID 16355180 Wikipedia head to head with Britannica ABC Science Agence France Presse AFP December 15 2005 Archived from the original on February 16 2015 Retrieved February 15 2014 Giles J December 22 2005 Supplementary Information to Accompany Nature news article Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head Nature 438 7070 900 901 Bibcode 2005Natur 438 900G doi 10 1038 438900a PMID 16355180 a b Fatally Flawed Refuting the Recent Study on Encyclopaedic Accuracy by the journal Nature PDF Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc March 2006 Archived PDF from the original on December 2 2018 Retrieved June 30 2009 Britannica attacks Nature 440 7084 582 March 30 2006 Bibcode 2006Natur 440R 582 doi 10 1038 440582b PMID 16572128 Wikipedia study fatally flawed BBC News March 24 2006 Archived from the original on August 5 2017 Retrieved September 1 2008 Encyclopaedia Britannica and Nature A Response PDF Press release March 23 2006 Archived from the original PDF on March 6 2016 Retrieved September 1 2008 John Seigenthaler November 29 2005 A false Wikipedia biography USA Today Archived from the original on January 6 2012 Retrieved August 26 2017 Seelye Katharine Q December 3 2005 Snared in the Web of a Wikipedia Liar The New York Times Archived from the original on September 7 2014 Retrieved February 18 2017 Mistakes and hoaxes on line Australian Broadcasting Corporation April 15 2006 Archived from the original on November 13 2012 Retrieved April 28 2007 Dedman Bill March 3 2007 Reading Hillary Clinton s hidden thesis NBC News Archived from the original on March 6 2013 Retrieved March 17 2007 Hillary Rodham Clinton archived version Wikipedia org July 9 2005 Archived from the original on February 16 2016 Retrieved March 17 2007 Hillary Rodham Clinton archived version Wikipedia org March 2 2007 Archived from the original on February 16 2016 Retrieved March 17 2007 Paige Cara April 11 2006 Exclusive Meet the Real Sir Walter Mitty Daily Record Archived from the original on September 30 2007 Retrieved November 24 2007 Weingarten Gene March 16 2007 A wickedly fun test of Wikipedia The News amp Observer Archived from the original on March 20 2007 Retrieved April 8 2006 Wikipedia Vandalism archived version Wikipedia org November 24 2009 Mark Glaser April 17 2006 Wikipedia Bias Is There a Neutral View on George W Bush PBS Archived from the original on October 2 2015 Retrieved October 27 2007 The search for a neutral point of view mirrors the efforts of journalists to be objective to show both sides without taking sides and remaining unbiased But maybe this is impossible and unattainable and perhaps misguided Because if you open it up for anyone to edit you re asking for anything but neutrality Hube Christoph Fetahu Besnik November 4 7 2019 Neural Based Statement Classification for Biased Language Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining WSDM 19 Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining Melbourne VIC Australia pp 259 268 arXiv 1811 05740 doi 10 1145 3289600 3291018 ISBN 978 1 4503 5940 5 a b c Martin Brian 2021 Policing orthodoxy on Wikipedia Skeptics in action Journal of Science Communication 20 2 doi 10 22323 2 20020209 Verkaik Robert August 18 2007 Wikipedia and the art of censorship The Independent London Archived from the original on December 1 2010 Retrieved August 26 2017 Blakely Rhys August 15 2007 Exposed guess who has been polishing their Wikipedia entries The Times London Archived from the original on May 17 2009 Retrieved August 15 2007 Fildes Jonathan August 15 2007 Wikipedia shows CIA page edits BBC Archived from the original on January 11 2009 Retrieved August 15 2007 Metz Cade December 18 2007 Truth anonymity and the Wikipedia Way Why it s broke and how it can be fixed The Register Archived from the original on August 10 2017 Retrieved August 10 2017 a b c d e Schiff Stacy July 31 2006 Know it all Can Wikipedia conquer expertise The New Yorker Archived from the original on November 22 2008 Retrieved August 30 2015 Lehmann Evan January 27 2006 Rewriting history under the dome Lowell Sun Archived from the original on February 2 2006 Retrieved February 2 2014 Senator staffers spam Wikipedia January 30 2006 Archived from the original on March 29 2006 Retrieved September 13 2006 Bachelet Pablo May 3 2006 War of Words Website Can t Define Cuba The Miami Herald Archived from the original on October 6 2015 Alt URL Archived September 23 2015 at the Wayback Machine Delay Larry August 3 2006 A Pernicious Model for Control of the World Wide Web The Cuba Case PDF Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy ASCE Archived from the original PDF on September 10 2008 Retrieved July 8 2008 a b McElroy Damien May 8 2008 Israeli battles rage on Wikipedia The Daily Telegraph London Archived from the original on May 9 2008 Retrieved May 8 2008 Letter in Harper s Magazine About Wikipedia Issues CAMERA August 14 2008 Archived from the original on July 31 2016 Retrieved March 31 2010 Liphshiz Cnaan December 25 2007 Your Wiki Entry Counts Haaretz Archived from the original on June 5 2011 Retrieved August 30 2015 Rettig Gur Haviv May 16 2010 Israeli Palestinian conflict rages on Wikipedia The Jerusalem Post Archived from the original on June 29 2011 Retrieved December 6 2013 Cohen Noam August 31 2008 Don t Like Palin s Wikipedia Story Change It The New York Times Archived from the original on February 28 2018 Retrieved February 18 2017 Sarah Palins Wikipedia entry glossed over by mystery user hrs before VP announcement Thaindian News September 2 2008 Archived from the original on May 24 2011 Retrieved November 16 2008 better source needed Wikipedia en butte a une nouvelle affaire de calomnie Vnunet fr November 28 2007 Archived from the original on May 16 2008 Responsabilite penale des intervenants sur Internet hebergeur du site responsible du site et auteur d allegations diffamatoires Official website of the French Senat February 14 2008 Archived from the original on July 21 2011 Retrieved August 30 2015 A question from Senator Jean Louis Masson to the Minister of Justice and the Minister s response Woods Allan August 25 2010 Ottawa investigating Wikipedia edits Toronto Star Archived from the original on August 27 2010 Retrieved August 26 2010 Nabili Teymoor September 11 2010 The Cyrus Cylinder Wikipedia and Iran conspiracies blogs alJazeera net Archived from the original on March 11 2012 Retrieved November 19 2013 Jackson Ron August 4 2009 Open Season on Domainers and Domaining Overtly Biased L A Times Article Leads Latest Assault on Objectivity and Accuracy Archived from the original on August 14 2015 Retrieved August 30 2015 Umbria Blogosphere Analysis Wikipedia and Corporate Blogging PDF J D Power Web Intelligence August 24 2007 permanent dead link Organizations like Sony Diebold Nintendo Dell the CIA and the Church of Scientology were all shown to have sanitized pages about themselves MacDonald Marc February 1 2008 Wikipedia Continues To Sanitize Bush Content Archived from the original on October 8 2015 Retrieved August 30 2015 Walker Christopher Kalathil Shanthi Ludwig Jessica 2020 The Cutting Edge of Sharp Power Journal of Democracy 31 1 124 137 doi 10 1353 jod 2020 0010 S2CID 211145754 Miller Carl October 5 2019 China and Taiwan clash over Wikipedia edits BBC News Retrieved August 24 2020 Anderson Chris May 8 2006 Jimmy Wales The 2006 Time 100 Time Retrieved November 11 2017 Kittur Aniket Kraut Robert E 2008 Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in Wikipedia quality through coordination Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work New York ACM pp 37 46 CiteSeerX 10 1 1 546 9900 doi 10 1145 1460563 1460572 ISBN 978 1 60558 007 4 S2CID 1184433 a b Rosenzweig Roy June 2006 Can History be Open Source Wikipedia and the Future of the Past The Journal of American History 93 1 pp 117 146 doi 10 2307 4486062 JSTOR 4486062 Archived from the original on April 25 2010 Retrieved August 11 2006 Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media Orlowski Andrew October 18 2005 Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems The Register Retrieved September 30 2007 Cancer information on Wikipedia is accurate but not very readable study finds Science Daily June 2 2010 Retrieved December 31 2010 Fact or fiction Wikipedia s variety of contributors is not only a strength The Economist March 10 2007 Retrieved December 31 2010 a b Will Wikipedia Mean the End Of Traditional Encyclopedias The Wall Street Journal September 12 2006 Archived from the original on January 15 2016 Retrieved September 13 2006 a b c Cohen Martin August 28 2008 Encyclopaedia Idiotica Times Higher Education Archived from the original on September 6 2011 Retrieved August 30 2015 Das Sanmay Allen Lavoie Malik Magdon Ismail November 1 2013 Manipulation among the arbiters of collective intelligence How Wikipedia administrators mold public opinion CIKM 13 Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on Information amp Knowledge Management San Francisco California US ACM pp 1097 1106 doi 10 1145 2505515 2505566 ISBN 978 1 4503 2263 8 Archived from the original on November 6 2018 Retrieved April 7 2017 Stephen Colbert The Colbert Report episode 3109 August 21 2007 Brophy Warren Jamin Oh that John Locke The Wall Street Journal No 2007 06 16 p 3 Archived from the original on September 4 2017 Retrieved August 30 2015 Hendren Johnny DocEvil June 5 2007 The Art of Wikigroaning Something Awful Archived from the original on June 16 2007 Retrieved June 17 2007 Brown Andrew June 14 2007 No amount of collaboration will make the sun orbit the Earth The Guardian London Archived from the original on June 23 2007 Retrieved March 27 2010 Ivor Tossell June 15 2007 Duality of Wikipedia The Globe and Mail Archived from the original on December 21 2012 Retrieved December 25 2019 Kirby J P October 20 2007 The Problem with Wikipedia J P s Random Ramblings blog Archived from the original on August 9 2011 Corinne Purtill Zoe Schlanger Wikipedia had rejected Nobel Prize winner Donna Strickland because she wasn t famous enough Quartz Archived from the original on October 25 2018 Retrieved November 20 2018 Resnick Brian October 3 2018 The 2018 Nobel Prize reminds us that women scientists too often go unrecognized Vox Archived from the original on October 25 2018 Retrieved October 3 2018 Annalisa Merelli August 18 2018 Seeking Disambiguation Running for office is hard when you have a porn star s name This makes it worse Quartz Archived from the original on November 21 2018 Retrieved November 20 2018 Baker Nicholson March 20 2008 The Charms of Wikipedia The New York Review of Books 55 4 Archived from the original on March 3 2008 Retrieved August 30 2015 Noah Timothy February 24 2007 Evicted from Wikipedia Slate Archived from the original on June 21 2009 Retrieved March 31 2010 Samoilenko Anna Yasseri Taha January 22 2014 The distorted mirror of Wikipedia a quantitative analysis of Wikipedia coverage of academics EPJ Data Science 3 1 arXiv 1310 8508 doi 10 1140 epjds20 S2CID 4971771 Steinsson Sverrir Senate candidate Theresa Greenfield finally got her Wikipedia page Here s why it took so long The Washington Post Retrieved October 28 2020 Harrison Stephen October 27 2020 Why Did It Take So Long for the Democratic Senate Candidate in Iowa to Get a Wikipedia Page Slate The Slate Group Retrieved October 28 2020 Benjakob Omer May 27 2018 The Witch Hunt Against a pro Israel Wikipedia Editor Haaretz Retrieved March 16 2022 Kelly Samantha Murphy May 20 2022 Meet the Wikipedia editor who published the Buffalo shooting entry minutes after it started CNN Retrieved May 24 2022 Johnson Bobbie March 1 2007 Conservapedia the US religious right s answer to Wikipedia The Guardian London Retrieved March 27 2010 Turner Adam March 5 2007 Conservapedia aims to set Wikipedia right IT Wire Archived from the original on March 31 2012 Retrieved May 12 2008 Huntington Doug May 9 2007 Design Proponents Accuse Wikipedia of Bias Hypocrisy The Christian Post Archived from the original on May 14 2011 Retrieved August 9 2007 Solomon Lawrence July 8 2008 Wikipropaganda On Global Warming National Review CBS News Archived from the original on August 28 2008 Retrieved July 20 2008 Scarborough Rowan September 27 2010 Wikipedia Whacks the Right Human Events Archived from the original on December 7 2010 Retrieved October 3 2010 Glaser Mark April 21 2006 Email Debate Wales Discusses Political Bias on Wikipedia PBS Mediashift Archived from the original on October 5 2015 Retrieved August 30 2015 Conservative wants to set Wikipedia right The Toronto Star March 11 2007 ISSN 0319 0781 Retrieved December 16 2021 Greenstein Shane Zhu Feng March 1 2016 Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias Evidence from Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia Working Paper 15 023 PDF Cambridge MA USA Harvard Business School Archived PDF from the original on November 8 2016 Retrieved October 31 2016 Greenstein Shane Zhu Feng December 1 2012 Is Wikipedia Biased Verifying the neutral point of view Archived from the original on October 31 2016 Retrieved October 31 2016 Khimm Suzy June 18 2012 Study Wikipedia perpetuates political bias The Washington Post Archived from the original on February 5 2015 Retrieved May 29 2013 Matsakis Louise March 16 2018 Don t Ask Wikipedia to Cure the Internet Wired Archived from the original on March 16 2018 Retrieved March 17 2018 Lott Maxim February 18 2021 Inside Wikipedia s leftist bias socialism pages whitewashed communist atrocities buried Fox News Retrieved March 31 2022 a b Simpson Craig November 27 2021 Wikipedia may delete entry on mass killings under Communism due to claims of bias The Telegraph ISSN 0307 1235 Archived from the original on November 28 2021 Retrieved November 28 2021 Chasmar Jessica November 29 2021 Wikipedia page on Mass killings under communist regimes considered for deletion prompting bias accusations Fox News Archived from the original on November 30 2021 Retrieved December 2 2021 a b c Rauwerda Annie December 31 2021 To delete or not to delete The fate of the most contentious Wikipedia articles Input Mag Retrieved February 7 2022 Wikipedia Articles for deletion Mass killings under communist regimes 4th nomination English Wikipedia December 2 2021 retrieved December 1 2021 Kauntia Nishant November 30 2020 How Wikipedia earned the ire of the Hindu Right The Caravan Retrieved December 9 2020 Browne Marcus February 12 2008 Wikipedia accused of US centric bias ZDNet Australia Archived from the original on October 1 2015 Retrieved August 30 2015 Melamed Samantha March 26 2015 Edit athon aims to put left out black artists into Wikipedia Philadelphia Daily News Archived from the original on March 4 2016 Retrieved April 13 2015 Smith Jada February 20 2015 Howard University Fills in Wikipedia s Gaps in Black History The New York Times Archived from the original on February 23 2015 Retrieved April 13 2015 Goko Colleen Drive launched to Africanise Wikipedia Business Day South Africa Archived from the original on July 6 2015 Retrieved April 13 2015 Cassano Jay Black History Matters So Why Is Wikipedia Missing So Much Of It Fast Company Archived from the original on May 10 2015 Retrieved April 13 2015 Reynosa Peter December 3 2015 Why Don t More Latinos Contribute To Wikipedia El Tecolote Archived from the original on December 8 2015 Retrieved December 5 2015 Livingstone Randall M November 23 2010 Let s Leave the Bias to the Mainstream Media A Wikipedia Community Fighting for Information Neutrality M C Journal 13 6 doi 10 5204 mcj 315 ISSN 1441 2616 a b c Justin Ward March 12 2018 Wikipedia wars inside the fight against far right editors vandals and sock puppets Archived from the original on May 14 2020 Retrieved March 1 2020 Standifer Cid October 13 2022 Racial Pseudoscience on the Faculty A professor s research flew under the radar for years What finally got him fired The Chronicle of Higher Education Gardner Sue February 19 2011 Nine Reasons Why Women Don t Edit Wikipedia In Their Own Words blog suegardner org Archived from the original on July 18 2015 Retrieved September 8 2015 a b Cassell Justine February 4 2011 Editing Wars Behind the Scenes The New York Times Archived from the original on February 27 2017 Retrieved February 18 2017 a b c Cohen Noam January 30 2011 Define Gender Gap Look Up Wikipedia s Contributor List The New York Times Archived from the original on December 21 2012 Retrieved January 31 2011 Gleick James April 29 2013 Wikipedia s Women Problem The New York Review of Books Archived from the original on November 5 2013 Retrieved November 19 2013 Filipacchi Amanda April 24 2013 Wikipedia s Sexism Toward Women Novelists The New York Times Archived from the original on October 15 2015 Retrieved August 30 2015 Dunn Gaby May 1 2013 Does Sexism Lurk DailyDot com Archived from the original on July 5 2014 Retrieved November 19 2013 Zandt Deanna April 26 2013 Yes Wikipedia Is Sexist That s Why It Needs You Forbes Archived from the original on October 30 2013 Retrieved November 19 2013 Andrew Lih June 20 2015 Can Wikipedia Survive The New York Times Washington Archived from the original on June 21 2015 Retrieved June 21 2015 the considerable and often noted gender gap among Wikipedia editors in 2011 less than 15 percent were women Statistics based on Wikimedia Foundation Wikipedia editor surveys 2011 Nov 2010 April 2011 and November 2011 Archived June 5 2016 at the Wayback Machine April October 2011 Cohen Noam January 30 2011 Define Gender Gap Look Up Wikipedia s Contributor List The New York Times Archived from the original on February 3 2011 Retrieved January 31 2011 Huang Keira August 11 2013 Wikipedia fails to bridge gender gap South China Morning Post Archived from the original on January 15 2016 Retrieved October 27 2015 Wikipedia completely failed to fix gender imbalance Archived December 29 2016 at the Wayback Machine BBC interview with Jimmy Wales August 8 2014 starting at 45 seconds Vitulli Marie A 2018 Writing women in mathematics into Wikipedia Notices of the American Mathematical Society 65 3 331 332 doi 10 1090 noti1650 Peake Bryce 2015 WP THREATENING2MEN Misogynist Infopolitics and the Hegemony of the Asshole Consensus on English Wikipedia Ada A Journal of Gender New Media and Technology 7 doi 10 7264 N3TH8JZS Archived from the original on February 12 2020 Retrieved February 18 2020 PR firms pledge ethical use of Wikipedia BBC News June 12 2014 Retrieved November 9 2021 Parakilas Jacob March 18 2014 Wikipedia neutrality and guns Action on Armed Violence Archived from the original on September 14 2017 Retrieved March 7 2018 But if a reader had started on the page for either of Breivik s guns the Ruger or the Glock they would not know this That reader would find a great deal of technical information about the weapons in question their weights lengths cartridges rates of fire magazine capacities muzzle velocities and detailed descriptions of their designs all illustrated with abundant photographs and diagrams Walther Matthew November 7 2017 The adolescent cult of the AR 15 The Week Archived from the original on March 24 2018 Retrieved March 23 2018 What do the perpetrators of the massacres at Sandy Hook at Aurora at Orlando and at Sutherland Springs have in common They were all men under 30 and they all used versions of the same kind of firearm the AR 15 the semi automatic version of the military s M 16 and the bestselling gun in America It might be difficult to make this connection because as I write this the section on the use of AR 15s in mass killings has been deleted from Wikipedia Brandom Russell March 6 2018 How gun buffs took over Wikipedia s AR 15 page After Parkland gun control information was strangely hard to find The Verge Vox Media Archived from the original on March 9 2018 Retrieved March 9 2018 But on Wikipedia as in the real world the users with the deepest technical knowledge of firearms are also the most fervent gun owners and the most hostile to gun control For critics that s led to a persistent pro gun bias on the web s leading source of neutral information at a time when the gun control debate is more heated than ever Pro gun Wikipedia users spark fierce editing war Editors against tighter controls on firearms have been purging information that shows weapons such as AR 15s in a bad light Sky News March 7 2018 Archived from the original on March 10 2018 Retrieved March 9 2018 The bias in the articles was not explicit but structural The project did not insert false information into the articles but instead purged information that showed the weapons in a bad light dismissing it as off topic Brennan David March 7 2018 Pro gun Group Edited AR 15 Wikipedia Page to Hide Mass Shootings Newsweek Archived from the original on March 8 2018 Retrieved March 9 2018 A group of pro gun Wikipedia editors tried to hide the true number of mass shootings associated with the AR 15 rifle in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland Florida Einenkel Walter March 8 2018 A gun group has been editing Wikipedia s firearms pages to sanitize mass shootings for months Yahoo News Newsweek Archived from the original on March 10 2018 Retrieved March 9 2018 The Wikimedia Foundation has defended itself and Wikipedia from allegations of being host to these kinds of influence campaigns arguing that the encyclopaedia is constantly being updated and improved Benjakob Omer March 18 2018 Gun Enthusiasts Are Waging a War of Attrition on Wikipedia and It Looks Like They re Winning Haaretz Archived from the original on March 24 2018 Retrieved March 23 2018 According to The Verge report and an independent follow up by Haaretz the top editors of the Colt page are pro gun enthusiasts who skewed the information presented on it and are also involved in editing other articles on Wikipedia for example the much more general article titled AR 15 to push their worldview Through countless exhausting debates this small group of pro gun Wikipedia editors linked together through Wikipedia s Firearms project or WikiProject Firearms mentioned below has managed to control almost completely the discourse around the rifle predominantly by making sure any potentially negative details about it be excluded from the original Colt AR 15 article Sifferlin Alexandra March 25 2014 Wikipedia Founder Sticks It To Lunatic Holistic Healers Time Archived from the original on October 14 2014 Retrieved October 22 2014 Newman Lily Hay March 27 2014 Jimmy Wales Gets Real and Sassy About Wikipedia s Holistic Healing Coverage Slate Archived from the original on June 25 2018 Retrieved October 22 2014 Wikipedia attacked over porn pages Livenews com au Archived from the original on September 17 2008 Retrieved March 31 2010 Raphael JR December 10 2008 Wikipedia Censorship Sparks Free Speech Debate The Washington Post Archived from the original on April 29 2011 Retrieved May 10 2009 a b Seth Finkelstein December 18 2008 Sting in the Scorpions tale is the exposure of Wiki s weakness The Guardian archived from the original on December 7 2013 retrieved May 23 2018 Dorothy Howard Patrick W Galbraith November 20 2015 Meet the manga avatars of your favorite tech platforms Hopes amp Fears archived from the original on May 23 2018 retrieved May 23 2018 Viegas Fernanda B Wattenberg Martin Dave Kushal April 24 29 2004 Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations PDF Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors withhistory flowVisualizations CHI 04 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems ACM Vienna Austria ACM pp 575 582 doi 10 1145 985692 985765 ISBN 1 58113 702 8 Archived PDF from the original on November 11 2018 Retrieved September 1 2008 Priedhorsky Reid Chen Jilin Lam Shyong Tony K Panciera Katherine Terveen Loren Riedl John November 4 2007 Creating destroying and restoring value in wikipedia Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on Supporting group work Sanibel Island Florida USA ACM p 259 doi 10 1145 1316624 1316663 ISBN 978 1 59593 845 9 online Archived November 22 2019 at the Wayback Machine a b Donnelly James Haeckl Jenifer April 12 2001 Privacy and Security on the Internet What Rights What Remedies Archived from the original on December 1 2008 See Public and Private Figures Archived May 19 2016 at the Wayback Machine by the Digital Media Law Project for the legal distinction Lever Rob December 11 2005 Wikipedia Becomes Internet Force Faces Crisis Agence France Presse AFP Archived from the original on October 6 2007 Retrieved December 26 2007 Court overturns temporary restraining order against Wikimedia Deutschland Heinz Heise February 9 2006 Archived from the original on February 8 2007 Retrieved January 31 2014 Arthur Charles February 9 2009 Jimmy Wales in drive by shooting of Wikipedia The Guardian Archived from the original on October 6 2015 Retrieved August 31 2015 Mitchell Dan December 24 2005 Insider Editing at Wikipedia The New York Times Archived from the original on May 29 2015 Retrieved August 31 2015 Wikipedia Co Founder Creates Competing Site Infopackets com April 4 2007 Archived from the original on November 5 2013 Retrieved November 19 2013 Bergstein Brian March 26 2007 Building an alternative to Wikipedia NBC News Archived from the original on November 5 2013 Retrieved November 19 2013 Wikipedia Vs Citizendium org The Art of Competing with Oneself Yahoo Voices April 17 2007 Archived from the original on July 28 2014 Retrieved November 19 2013 Wikipedia Co Founder Unveils Rival Free Encyclopedia Fox News Channel Associated Press March 28 2007 Archived from the original on July 15 2014 Retrieved November 19 2013 a b c Bergstein Brian March 25 2007 Citizendium aims to be better Wikipedia USA Today Archived from the original on October 16 2012 Retrieved August 30 2015 Wood Mike January 9 2013 I Get Paid To Edit Wikipedia For Leading Companies Business Insider Archived from the original on November 23 2013 Retrieved November 19 2013 Paling Emma October 21 2015 How Wikipedia Is Hostile to Women The Atlantic Archived from the original on October 21 2015 Retrieved October 21 2015 a b Auerbach David December 11 2014 Encyclopedia Frown Wikipedia is amazing But it s become a rancorous sexist elitist stupidly bureaucratic mess Slate Archived from the original on December 16 2014 Retrieved December 17 2014 Hern Alex January 23 2015 Wikipedia votes to ban some editors from gender related articles The Guardian Archived from the original on August 26 2015 Retrieved August 30 2015 a b c d Auerbach David February 5 2015 The Wikipedia Ouroboros Slate Archived from the original on February 5 2015 Retrieved February 5 2015 Louise Maryam January 25 2015 GamerGate Wikipedia Ruling Bans Harassed Feminist Editors Outrage Ensues Inquisitr com Archived from the original on September 4 2015 Retrieved August 30 2015 Williams Lauren January 23 2015 Wikipedia Wants To Ban Feminists From Editing GamerGate Articles Think Progress Archived from the original on March 10 2016 Retrieved August 30 2015 Bennett Alanna January 24 2015 Wikipedia Has Banned Five Feminist Editors From Gamergate Articles amp More The Mary Sue Archived from the original on August 12 2015 Retrieved August 30 2015 Cush Andy January 23 2015 Wikipedia Purged a Group of Feminist Editors Because of Gamergate Gawker Archived from the original on September 13 2015 Retrieved August 30 2015 a b Dewey Caitlin January 29 2015 Gamergate Wikipedia and the limits of human knowledge The Washington Post Archived from the original on January 29 2015 Retrieved January 29 2015 a b Mandiberg Michael February 1 2015 The Affective Labor of Wikipedia GamerGate Harassment and Peer Production Social Text Archived from the original on February 22 2015 Retrieved February 21 2015 Cush Andy January 30 2015 The Gamergate Decision Shows Exactly What s Broken About Wikipedia Gawker com Archived from the original on February 17 2015 Retrieved February 17 2015 Beaudette Philippe January 27 2015 Civility Wikipedia and the conversation on Gamergate Wikimedia Foundation Archived from the original on January 31 2015 Retrieved January 28 2015 a b c d Jovanovic Djeco ne baratajte hrvatskom Wikipedijom jer su sadrzaji falsificirani Jovanovic Children do not use the Croatian Wikipedia because its contents are forgeries in Croatian Novi list Archived from the original on September 1 2019 Retrieved September 13 2013 Trolls hijack Wikipedia to turn articles against gays How pro fascist ideologues are rewriting Croatia s history a b c Jovanoviceva poruka ucenicima i studentima Ne koristite hrvatsku Wikipediju Jovanovic s message to the pupils and students Don t use Croatian Wikipedia in Croatian Index hr Retrieved September 13 2013 User Rights Log Wikipedia Arbitration Series Wikipedia Archived from the original on October 12 2017 Metz Cade May 26 2009 Sockpuppeting British politico resigns from Wikisupremecourt The Register Archived from the original on May 29 2009 Retrieved May 27 2009 Meta Steward requests Permissions Meta Wiki Archived from the original on January 15 2016 Retrieved August 15 2014 Welham Jamie Lakhani Nina June 7 2009 Wikipedia sentinel quits after using alias to alter entries The Independent Archived from the original on March 18 2010 Retrieved March 31 2010 Finkelstein Seth March 8 2007 Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive The Guardian Archived from the original on March 29 2007 Retrieved August 1 2007 At some point Essjay said he had sent a letter to a real life college professor using his invented persona s credentials vouching for Wikipedia s accuracy In the letter he wrote in part It is never the case that known incorrect information is allowed to remain in Wikipedia User Essjay Wikipedia Archived from the original on February 25 2006 Talk Five solas archived version Wikipedia org June 11 2005 Archived from the original on February 16 2016 Retrieved June 18 2007 Orlowski Andrew March 2 2007 Bogus Wikipedia Prof was blessed then promoted The Counterfactual History Man The Register Archived from the original on March 4 2007 Retrieved March 18 2007 Fake professor in Wikipedia storm BBC News March 6 2007 Archived from the original on March 8 2007 Retrieved March 8 2007 Bergstein Brian March 25 2007 Sanger says he co started Wikipedia The Washington Post Associated Press Archived from the original on November 12 2012 Retrieved March 26 2007 The nascent Web encyclopedia Citizendium springs from Larry Sanger a philosophy Ph D who counts himself as a co founder of Wikipedia the site he now hopes to usurp The claim doesn t seem particularly controversial Sanger has long been cited as a co founder Yet the other founder Jimmy Wales isn t happy about it Meyers Peter September 20 2001 Fact Driven Collegial This Site Wants You The New York Times Archived from the original on April 15 2009 Retrieved August 30 2015 I can start an article that will consist of one paragraph and then a real expert will come along and add three paragraphs and clean up my one paragraph said Larry Sanger of Las Vegas who founded Wikipedia with Mr Wales Mehegan David February 12 2006 Bias sabotage haunt Wikipedia s free world Boston Globe Archived from the original on May 12 2006 Retrieved July 30 2007 Sanger Larry March 1 2007 Wikipedia firmly supports your right to identity fraud Citizendium Blog Archived from the original on March 4 2007 Retrieved March 2 2007 User talk Jimbo Wales archived version Wikipedia org Archived from the original on February 16 2016 Retrieved September 1 2008 Sanger Larry March 3 2007 Jimmy Wales latest response on the Essjay situation Citizendium Blog Archived from the original on March 6 2007 Retrieved March 3 2007 Essjay s Wikia user page Wikia com Archived from the original on November 6 2007 Retrieved September 19 2007 Wolfson Andrew March 6 2007 Wikipedia editor who posed as professor is Ky dropout Man resigns post after controversy Louisville Courier Journal Retrieved March 7 2007 Alt URL Archived September 30 2007 at the Wayback Machine Wales Jimmy March 19 2007 Making amends The New Yorker p 24 Cohen Noam March 5 2007 A Contributor to Wikipedia Has His Fictional Side The New York Times Archived from the original on October 13 2007 Retrieved March 5 2007 ABC News broadcast on Essjay ABC News Archived from the original on March 10 2007 Retrieved March 8 2007 Bergstein Brian March 7 2007 After flap over phony professor Wikipedia wants some writers to share real names USA Today Associated Press Archived from the original on May 16 2009 Retrieved August 30 2015 Williams Martyn March 9 2007 Wikipedia Founder Addresses User Credentials PC World IDG News Service Archived from the original on September 24 2015 Retrieved August 31 2015 Wikipedia s credentials policy archived version Wikipedia org January 5 2008 Archived from the original on January 15 2016 Retrieved August 31 2015 a b Spicuzza Mary February 13 2008 Wikipedia Idiots The Edit Wars of San Francisco SF Weekly p 2 Archived from the original on September 11 2015 Retrieved August 30 2015 Privacy Wikipedia Arthur Charles December 14 2005 Log on and join in but beware the web cults The Guardian Archived from the original on May 3 2006 Retrieved July 14 2006 Stvilla Besiki Twidale Michael Smith Linda Gasser Les February 21 2008 Information Quality Work Organization in Wikipedia PDF Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology Archived from the original PDF on August 20 2007 Information Quality Work Organization in Wikipedia at Wiley Online Library subscription required Johnson Bobbie August 12 2009 Wikipedia approaches its limits The Guardian Archived from the original on March 1 2014 Retrieved May 25 2014 The battle for Wikipedia s soul The Economist March 6 2008 Archived from the original on September 24 2015 Retrieved August 31 2015 Hickman Martin Roberts Genevieve February 13 2006 Wikipedia separating fact from fiction The New Zealand Herald Archived from the original on September 29 2007 Retrieved April 17 2007 Such checking leads to a daily battle of wits with the cyber wreckers who insert erroneous ludicrous and offensive material into entries How frequently entries get messed about with depends on the controversy of their subjects This week the entry Muslim is being attacked dozens of times a day following the row about cartoons of Mohammed with angry denunciations of suicide bombing and claims of hypocrisy Prime Minister Tony Blair s entry is a favourite for distortion with new statements casting aspersions on his integrity Kleinz Torsten February 2005 World of Knowledge PDF Linux Magazine Archived from the original PDF on October 2 2015 Retrieved May 12 2007 The Wikipedia s open structure makes it a target for trolls and vandals who malevolently add incorrect information to articles get other people tied up in endless discussions and generally do everything to draw attention to themselves Wiki page on Three revert rule Wikipedia Archived from the original on July 13 2017 Shankbone David June 7 2008 Nobody s Safe in Cyberspace The Brooklyn Rail Archived from the original on August 28 2008 Retrieved July 10 2008 Koebler Jason May 17 2016 Wikipedia Editor Says Site s Toxic Community Has Him Contemplating Suicide Vice Archived from the original on April 5 2020 Retrieved February 28 2020 Wikipedia sets new rules to combat toxicity BBC News May 23 2020 Archived from the original on June 5 2020 Retrieved June 11 2020 Hill Benjamin Mako March 27 2013 The Institute for Cultural Diplomacy and Wikipedia mako cc eous Archived from the original on September 5 2015 Retrieved August 31 2015 Postril Virginia November 17 2014 Who Killed Wikipedia Pacific Standard Archived from the original on August 25 2019 Retrieved August 31 2015 a b Lanier Jaron May 30 2006 Digital Maoism The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism Edge Archived from the original on April 29 2007 Retrieved April 30 2007 Shirky Clay June 7 2006 Reactions to Digital Maoism Corante com Archived from the original on June 13 2006 Retrieved May 1 2007 Angwin Julia Fowler Geoffrey A November 27 2009 Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages The Wall Street Journal Archived from the original on October 25 2017 Retrieved July 28 2013 subscription required Simonite Tom October 22 2013 The Decline of Wikipedia MIT Technology Review Archived from the original on June 19 2015 Retrieved March 26 2015 a b Jemielniak Dariusz June 22 2014 The Unbearable Bureaucracy of Wikipedia Slate Archived from the original on July 1 2014 Retrieved July 1 2014 Wilson Chris February 22 2008 The Wisdom of the Chaperones Digg Wikipedia and the myth of Web 2 0 democracy Slate Archived from the original on March 20 2013 Retrieved January 14 2013 Kleeman Jenny March 25 2007 Wiki wars The Guardian Archived from the original on October 31 2013 Retrieved October 4 2007 Further reading EditJacobs Julia April 8 2019 Wikipedia Isn t Officially a Social Network But the Harassment Can Get Ugly The New York Times Keen Andrew The Cult of the Amateur Doubleday Currency 2007 ISBN 978 0 385 52080 5 substantial criticisms of Wikipedia and another web 2 0 projects Keen Andrew June 16 2007 Does the Internet Undermine Culture NPR Retrieved March 31 2010 Audio version with transcript of the NPR interview with Andrew Keen on June 16 2007 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint postscript link Rafaeli Sheizaf amp Ariel Yaron 2008 Online motivational factors Incentives for participation and contribution in Wikipedia In A Barak ed Psychological aspects of cyberspace Theory research applications pp 243 267 Cambridge UK Cambridge University Press Cyberpsych Yeda info Archived from the original on November 27 2012 Retrieved November 19 2013 Simonite Tom October 22 2013 The Decline of Wikipedia Even As More People Than Ever Rely on It Fewer People Create It MIT Technology Review Technologyreview com 116 6 Retrieved August 9 2014 External links Edit Wikiquote has quotations related to Criticism of Wikipedia A Compendium of Wikipedia Criticism Wikipediocracy The Geographically Uneven Coverage of Wikipedia Oxford Internet Institute University of Oxford Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Criticism of Wikipedia amp oldid 1132034476, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

article

, read, download, free, free download, mp3, video, mp4, 3gp, jpg, jpeg, gif, png, picture, music, song, movie, book, game, games.