Wikipedia Was Never Better Than This
The Wikipedia experiment has always been about testing whether passion is more valuable than knowledge in the realm of information. The answer has never been yes, though the popular crowdsourced encyclopedia hopes it isn’t too obvious.
High-profile controversies, such as the recent one over Wikipedia’s explosion in anti-Zionist disinformation, make it more obvious. Wikipedia’s value is not in its accuracy but in the transparency of its sourcing because when it comes to information, passion always has to answer eventually to knowledge.
Wikipedia’s vulnerability to manipulation isn’t confined to controversial geopolitics. Take this 2023 story in The Critic about controversial Cambridge professor Priyamvada Gopal. A superfan of the prof with the username PostcolonialLitNerd spent years “tenderly editing her Wikipedia article, removing anything that might be offensive to the reputation of” Gopal. “Negative information about Gopal, and there is a lot of it, was systematically erased or twisted.” The user was eventually banned when “administrators had discovered that one of the editors who, like PostcolonialLitNerd, only edited Gopal’s article and nothing else, was in fact none other than PostcolonialLitNerd herself.” The user kept registering new “sock puppets” while the site’s administrators played whack-a-mole keeping them banned.
What happens when such zealots become editors of Middle East topics? The battles spill out into the open, where the politicization of Wikipedia pages becomes more and more pronounced.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25628030/shine2.jpg)
