Wikipediocracy

Last updated

Wikipediocracy
Wikipediocracy.screenshot.png
Screenshot taken 10 October 2019
Type of site
Blog and forum
Available inEnglish
URL wikipediocracy.com
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional, required for some features
Users 1422 [1]
LaunchedMarch 16, 2012;12 years ago (2012-03-16)
Current statusActive
Content license
Copyright retained by authors

Wikipediocracy is a website for discussion and criticism of Wikipedia. [2] [3] Its members have brought information about Wikipedia's controversies to the attention of the media. The site was founded in March 2012 by users of Wikipedia Review, [4] another site dedicated to criticism of Wikipedia. [5] [6]

Contents

The site is "known for digging up dirt on Wikipedia's top brass", wrote reporter Kevin Morris in the Daily Dot . [7] Novelist Amanda Filipacchi wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the site "intelligently discusses and entertainingly lambastes Wikipedia’s problematic practices". [8]

History

Wikipediocracy was cofounded by Gregory Kohs [9] after being blocked by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales for founding MyWikiBiz, a service dedicated to writing entries for businesses. [10]

Website user activism

Wikipediocracy contributors have investigated problems, conflicts, and controversies associated with Wikipedia, some being reported by mainstream media. The site's stated mission is "to shine the light of scrutiny into the dark crevices of Wikipedia" and related projects. In a doctoral thesis, internet policy and law specialist Heather Ford commented on Wikipediocracy's role, saying, "as Wikipedia's authority grows, and more groups feel disenfranchised by its processes, the growth of watchdog groups like Wikipediocracy who act as translators of Wikipedia's complex structures, rules and norms for mainstream media and who begin to give voice to those who feel that they have been excluded from Wikipedia's representational structures will continue." [11]

Revenge editing

In 2013, Wikipediocracy members contacted Salon.com reporter Andrew Leonard to alert him about the "Qworty fiasco". [12] [13] Wikipedia user Qworty had attracted attention for his provocative comments in a debate on Wikipedia's treatment of female writers. [14] It emerged that many of his past contributions affected the site's treatment of, and targeted rivals of, writer Robert Clark Young. [2] [15] This background information led to Leonard's challenging Young in an article "Revenge, Ego, and the Corruption of Wikipedia", which identified Young as Qworty. Just before the publication of Leonard's article, Qworty had been banned from editing Wikipedia biographies of living persons due to this behavior. [2] [12]

Discussion of governments

Wikipediocracy contributors' criticisms of Wikipedia have been discussed in news stories covering Jimmy Wales's relationship with the government of Kazakhstan, [16] [17] [18] the Gibraltarpedia controversy, [19] [20] and an anonymous edit made from a U.S. Senate IP address that labelled whistle-blower Edward Snowden a "traitor". [21] [22]

In May 2014, The Telegraph , working with Wikipediocracy, uncovered evidence identifying the civil servant who had allegedly vandalized the Wikipedia articles on the Hillsborough disaster and Anfield. [23]

Wikimedia Foundation

A Wikipediocracy blog post reported in 2013 that Wikipedia was being vandalized from IP addresses assigned to the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). [7] [24] Responding to the allegations, WMF spokesman Jay Walsh stated that the IP addresses belonged to WMF servers and were not used by the WMF offices. He stated that the addresses were assigned to some edits by IPs due to a misconfiguration, which was corrected. [7]

Other issues

A Wikipediocracy forum discussion identified the Wikipedia account responsible for a hoax article Wikipedia administrators had recently deleted. The "Bicholim conflict" article described a fictitious 1640–41 Indian civil war. It was awarded Wikipedia's "Good article" status in 2007, and retained it until late 2012, when a Wikipedian checked the article's cited sources and found that none of them appeared to exist. [25]

A September 2013 story resulting from a Wikipediocracy tip-off concerned commercial plastic surgeons editing Wikipedia's plastic surgery articles to promote their services. Concerns with violations of conflict of interest guidelines and the provision of misinformation in the relevant articles had also been raised by Wikipediocracy members on Wikipedia itself. [26]

In February 2015, Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee banned a user after finding he had edited to promote the Indian Institute of Planning and Management and added negative material to the article on another university. The user's edits had been noted in Wikipediocracy in December 2013. [27]

In late 2020, Wikipediocracy raised issues about the accuracy of the Wikipedia page of Nicholas Alahverdian. [28] A Wikipediocracy blog team member said that multiple Wikipedia accounts created by Alahverdian edited his Wikipedia page, and that one of these accounts had tried to remove Alahverdian's image, replacing it with an image of another person. [28] A notice was added to Wikipedia that acknowledged that the "truthfulness of this article has been questioned". [28] In January 2021, The Providence Journal reported that American authorities in July 2020 investigated whether Alahverdian had really died in February 2020 as reported in the media. [28] Alahverdian was subsequently found alive in Scotland. [29]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikimedia movement</span> Group of global contributors to Wikimedia projects

The Wikimedia movement is the global community of contributors to the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. This community directly builds and administers these projects with the commitment of achieving this using open standards and software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jimmy Wales</span> Co-founder of Wikipedia (born 1966)

Jimmy Donal Wales, also known as Jimbo Wales, is an American Internet entrepreneur, webmaster, and former financial trader. He is a co-founder of the non-profit free encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and the for-profit wiki hosting service Fandom. He has worked on other online projects, including Bomis, Nupedia, WikiTribune, and WT Social.

Some edits to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia by staff of the United States Congress have created controversy, notably in early to mid-2006. Several such instances, such as those involving Marty Meehan, Norm Coleman, Conrad Burns, and Joe Biden, received significant media attention. Others, such as those involving Gil Gutknecht, were reported but received less widespread coverage.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Criticism of Wikipedia</span> Controversy surrounding the online encyclopedia Wikipedia

The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been criticized since its creation in 2001. Most of the criticism has been directed toward its content, community of established volunteer users, process, and rules. Critics have questioned its factual reliability, the readability and organization of its 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. 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, social stratification between a guardian class and newer users, excessive rule-making, edit warring, and uneven policy application.

References to Wikipedia in popular culture have been widespread. Many parody Wikipedia's openness, with individuals vandalizing or modifying articles in nonconstructive ways. Others feature individuals using Wikipedia as a reference work, or positively comparing their intelligence to Wikipedia. In some cases, Wikipedia is not used as an encyclopedia at all, but instead serves more as a character trait or even as a game, such as Wikiracing. Wikipedia has also become culturally significant with many individuals seeing the presence of their own Wikipedia entry as a status symbol.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reliability of Wikipedia</span>

The reliability of Wikipedia and its user-generated editing model, particularly its English-language edition, has been questioned and tested. Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteer editors, who generate online content with the editorial oversight of other volunteer editors via community-generated policies and guidelines. The reliability of the project has been tested statistically through comparative review, analysis of the historical patterns, and strengths and weaknesses inherent in its editing process. The online encyclopedia has been criticized for its factual unreliability, principally regarding its content, presentation, and editorial processes. Studies and surveys attempting to gauge the reliability of Wikipedia have mixed results. Wikipedia's reliability was frequently criticized in the 2000s but has been improved; its English-language edition has been generally praised in the late 2010s and early 2020s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikimedia Foundation</span> American charitable organization

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., abbreviated WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, the seventh most visited website in the world. It also hosts fourteen similar projects and supports the development of MediaWiki, the wiki software that underpins them all. The Foundation was established in 2003 in St. Petersburg, Florida by Jimmy Wales, as a non-profit way to fund his crowdsourced wiki projects. They had previously been hosted by Bomis, Wales's for-profit company.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vandalism on Wikipedia</span> Malicious editing of Wikipedia

On Wikipedia, vandalism is editing the project in an intentionally disruptive or malicious manner. Vandalism includes any addition, removal, or modification that is intentionally humorous, nonsensical, a hoax, offensive, libelous or degrading in any way.

Conflict-of-interest (COI) editing on Wikipedia occurs when editors use Wikipedia to advance the interests of their external roles or relationships. The type of COI editing that compromises Wikipedia the most is paid editing for public relations (PR) purposes. Several policies and guidelines exist to combat conflict of interest editing, including Wikipedia's conflict of interest guideline and the Wikimedia Foundation's paid-contribution disclosure policy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Justin Knapp</span> American Wikipedian (born 1982)

Justin Anthony Knapp, also known by his online moniker Koavf, is an American Wikipedia user who was the first person to contribute more than one million edits to Wikipedia. As of September 2021, Knapp has made over 2.1 million edits on the English Wikipedia. He was ranked No. 1 among the most active Wikipedia contributors of all time from April 18, 2012, to November 1, 2015, when he was surpassed by Steven Pruitt.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VisualEditor</span> Editor for Wikipedia and other MediaWiki websites

VisualEditor (VE) is an online rich-text editor for MediaWiki-powered wikis that provides a direct visual way to edit pages based on the "what you see is what you get" principle. It was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation in partnership with Fandom. In July 2013, it was enabled by default on several of the largest Wikipedia projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Heilman</span> Emergency physician and Wikipedia editor

James M. Heilman is a Canadian emergency physician, Wikipedian, and advocate for the improvement of Wikipedia's health-related content. He encourages other clinicians to contribute to the online encyclopedia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wiki Education Foundation</span> Nonprofit organization

The Wiki Education Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. It runs the Wikipedia Student Program, which promotes the integration of Wikipedia into coursework by educators in Canada and the United States.

On 24 April 2014, journalist Oliver Duggan, in the Liverpool Echo, reported that users of computers that used IP addresses registered to the Government Secure Intranet had added derogatory and offensive material to Wikipedia articles, particularly the article about the Hillsborough disaster. The vandalism was quickly re-reported by other media, and subsequent reports highlighted other acts of vandalism, on various articles, originated by computers using those IP addresses. After an investigation by The Daily Telegraph and Wikipediocracy, the person behind the edits was identified as a civil servant within the UK government and was dismissed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gender bias on Wikipedia</span> Gender gap problem in Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects

Gender bias on Wikipedia includes various gender-related disparities on Wikipedia, particularly the overrepresentation of men among both volunteer contributors and article subjects, as well as lesser coverage of and topics primarily of interest to women.

<i>The Signpost</i> English Wikipedias newspaper

The Signpost is the English Wikipedia's online newspaper. Managed by the volunteer community, it is published online with contributions from Wikimedia editors. The newspaper's scope includes the Wikimedia community and events related to Wikipedia, including Arbitration Committee rulings, Wikimedia Foundation issues, and other Wikipedia-related projects. It was founded in January 2005 by Wikipedian Michael Snow, who continued as a contributor until his February 2008 appointment to the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicholas Alahverdian</span> American sex offender and former fugitive (born 1987)

Nicholas Alahverdian, also known as Nicholas Rossi and Arthur Knight, among other aliases, is an American sex offender who faked his own death in 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LGBTQ and Wikipedia</span> Intersections of the LGBTQ community and Wikipedia

There are various intersections of the LGBTQ community and Wikipedia. LGBTQ people who edit the online encyclopedia often face cyberbullying and other types of harassment. Wikipedia content about LGBTQ individuals is often vandalized, but various Wikipedia user groups, WikiProjects, and the Wikimedia Foundation endorse campaigns to promote inclusion on Wikipedia. Availability of Wikipedia's LGBTQ content, in countries that otherwise suppress information about LGBTQ issues, has been praised.

References

  1. ↑ "Wikipediocracy – Index Page". wikipediocracy.com. Retrieved 26 December 2023.
  2. 1 2 3 Leonard, Andrew (17 May 2013). "Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia". Salon.com. Archived from the original on 31 May 2016. Retrieved 18 May 2013.
  3. ↑ Murphy, Dan (1 August 2013). "In UK, rising chorus of outrage over online misogyny: Recent events in Britain draw more attention to endemic hostility towards women online". The Christian Science Monitor . Archived from the original on 17 August 2013. Retrieved 1 August 2013.
  4. ↑ Hersch (15 March 2012). "Welcome". Mission statement and welcome to the public. Wikipediocracy. Archived from the original on 13 December 2019. Retrieved 26 June 2013.
  5. ↑ LaPlante, Alice (14 July 2006). "Spawn Of Wikipedia". InformationWeek . Archived from the original on 12 June 2011. Retrieved 1 September 2012.
  6. ↑ Shankbone, David (June 2008). "Nobody's safe in cyberspace". The Brooklyn Rail . Archived from the original on 28 August 2008. Retrieved 1 July 2008.
  7. 1 2 3 Morris, Kevin (23 April 2013). "Wikipedia says its staffers are not vandalizing Wikipedia". The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on 1 January 2020. Retrieved 24 May 2013.
  8. ↑ Filipacchi, Amanda (10 July 2013). "My Strange Addiction: Wikipedia". Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on 1 January 2020. Retrieved 11 July 2013.
  9. ↑ "Wikipedia abandons efforts to purge porn from online encyclopedia". Fox News . 25 March 2015.
  10. ↑ Stewart, Gavin (2009). "Selling Community: Corporate Media, Marketing and Blogging". In Gordon, Janey (ed.). Notions of Community: A Collection of Community Media Debates and Dilemmas. Peter Lang. p. 142. ISBN   9783039113743.
  11. ↑ Ford, Heather, "Fact factories: Wikipedia and the power to represent", Kellogg College, Oxford, August 2015, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.4068.9361 Archived 26 November 2015 at the Wayback Machine
  12. 1 2 Nichols, Martha; Berry, Lorraine (20 May 2013). "What Should We Do About Wikipedia?". Talking Writing. Archived from the original on 1 January 2020. Retrieved 20 May 2013.
  13. ↑ "Qworty: the fallout". Wikipediocracy. Archived from the original on 26 December 2019. Retrieved 4 September 2015.
  14. ↑ Leonard, Andrew (29 April 2013). "Wikipedia's Shame". Salon. Archived from the original on 30 April 2013. Retrieved 4 September 2015.
  15. ↑ Manhire, Toby (5 June 2013). "Wikipedia and the scourge of "revenge editors"". New Zealand Listener . Archived from the original on 21 April 2020. Retrieved 5 June 2013.
  16. ↑ Morris, Kevin (25 December 2012). "Wikipedia's odd relationship with the Kazakh dictatorship". The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on 25 May 2016. Retrieved 18 May 2013.
  17. ↑ Hermans, Steven (8 January 2013). "Critics question neutrality of Kazakh Wikipedia". NET PROPHET. Archived from the original on 28 April 2019. Retrieved 26 May 2013.
  18. ↑ Williams, Christopher (24 December 2012). "Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales restricts discussion of Tony Blair friendship". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 17 August 2019. Retrieved 26 May 2013.
  19. ↑ Alfonso, Fernando (25 October 2012). "Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales breaks silence on resurgence of influence-peddling scandal". The Daily Dot . Archived from the original on 29 October 2013. Retrieved 18 May 2013.
  20. ↑ Orlowski, Andrew (26 October 2012). "Wales: Let's ban Gibraltar-crazy Wikipedians for 5 years". The Register. Archived from the original on 1 January 2020. Retrieved 19 May 2013.
  21. ↑ Kloc, Joe (3 August 2013). "Is a U.S. senator trolling Snowden's Wikipedia page?". The Daily Dot . Archived from the original on 7 March 2016. Retrieved 4 September 2013.
  22. ↑ Franceschi-Bicchierai, Lorenzo (6 August 2013). "Wikipedia Editor Traced to U.S. Senate Changes Snowden's Bio to 'Traitor'". Mashable . Archived from the original on 1 January 2020. Retrieved 4 September 2013.
  23. ↑ Duggan, Oliver (21 May 2014). "Civil servants behind 'sickening' Hillsborough slurs identified". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 1 January 2020. Retrieved 21 June 2014.
    Gander, Kashmira (21 May 2014). "Hillsborough Wikipedia posts: Suspected civil servant a Merseyside resident". The Independent . Archived from the original on 1 January 2020. Retrieved 21 June 2014.
    Duggan, Oliver (17 June 2014). "Civil servant fired after Telegraph investigation into Hillsborough Wikipedia slurs". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 5 January 2020. Retrieved 21 June 2014.
    Tran, Mark (17 June 2014). "Civil servant sacked for offensive Wikipedia edits on Hillsborough". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 17 June 2014. Retrieved 17 June 2014.
    Duggan, Oliver (17 June 2014). "How The Telegraph identified the Hillsborough Wikipedia vandal". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 25 December 2019. Retrieved 21 June 2014.
  24. ↑ Hogsky, Roger (22 April 2013). "Busy day at the Wikimedia Foundation office?". Blog. Wikipediocracy. Archived from the original on 23 December 2019. Retrieved 24 May 2013.
  25. ↑ Morris, Kevin (1 January 2013). "After a half-decade, massive Wikipedia hoax finally exposed". The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on 10 April 2014. Retrieved 18 May 2013.
  26. ↑ Schroeder, Audra (20 September 2013). "Are plastic surgeons nip/tucking ads into high-profile Wikipedia articles?". The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on 1 June 2016. Retrieved 7 October 2013.
  27. ↑ Chari, Mridula (25 March 2015). "Wikipedia bans editor for consistent bias in favour of Arindam Chaudhuri's IIPM". www.scroll.in. Archived from the original on 30 April 2015. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  28. 1 2 3 4 Mooney, Tom. "He was reported dead, but the state police kept looking for Nick Alahverdian". The Providence Journal. Archived from the original on 27 January 2021. Retrieved 27 January 2021.
  29. ↑ Mooney, Tom. "Nicholas Alahverdian, suspected of faking his death, was found in Scotland. What we know". The Providence Journal. Archived from the original on 13 January 2022. Retrieved 26 January 2022.
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