Consumer Rights Wiki - User contributions [en]

Wikipedia

2025-11-08T21:19:45Z

2406:DA18:492:9301:DBAB:91F:A88D:8C56: /* Monopoly */

{{StubNotice}}
{{InfoboxCompany
| Name = Wikipedia
| Type = Private, although under non-profit Wikimedia Foundation
| Founded = 2001
| Industry = Web encyclopedia
| Official Website = https://wikipedia.org/
}}

'''Wikipedia''' is a digital encyclopedic platform which was founded in 2001 and is currently operated by American non-profit organization Wikimedia Foundation.

==Consumer-impact summary==
The encyclopedia is a major destination for consumers/readers to access information about any given topics, ranging from natural sciences to political fields. Theoretically, the encyclopedia is open for editing by anyone, meaning that consumers/readers can become producers/editors at any time.<ref>https://www.techpolicy.press/what-attacks-on-wikipedia-reveal-about-free-expression/</ref>

===Monopoly===
Although Wikipedia formally enshrines the right to fork contents from them in order to start a new encyclopedia, it has been reported that Wikipedia effectively operated as a ''de facto'' monopoly among online encyclopedias for a long time, and Wikipedia had received privileged positions by various search engines such as [[Google]] on their search results. Social media service [[TikTok]] included similar information from Wikipedia in their search results. Besides that, Wikipedia is one of the top sources for AI chatbots.<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:PROJFORK</ref><ref>https://quillette.com/2023/12/11/introducing-justapedia/</ref><ref>https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/13/23871880/tiktok-search-engine-wikipedia-snippets-google</ref><ref>https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/ai-chatbot-learning/?ref=quillette.com</ref>

Consequently, Wikipedia's monopoly had generated significant downstream effects where Wikipedia had played crucial roles in shaping medical decisions, economic outcomes, scientific publications, and perhaps judicial rulings.<ref>https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/doctors-1-source-for-healthcare-information-wikipedia/284206/</ref><ref>https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jems.12421</ref><ref>https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3039505</ref><ref>https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4174200</ref><ref>https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4365219</ref> Wikipedia is even included among longtermist knowledge preservation initiatives such as the Arch Mission's The LEO (Low Earth Orbit) library, The Lunar Library I on the failed Beresheet lunar lander, The Lunar Library II on the failed Astrobotic Peregrine lander, The Galactic Legacy Archive on a successful Intuitive Machines moon lander mission, and The Pyramid Library on the successful Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander mission.<ref>https://www.archmission.org/leo-library-1</ref><ref>https://www.archmission.org/spaceil</ref><ref>https://www.archmission.org/lunar-library-2</ref><ref>https://www.archmission.org/galactic-legacy-archive</ref><ref>https://www.archmission.org/galactic-legacy-archive</ref>

==Incidents==
This is a list of all incidents, especially those related to consumer protection, that this platform is involved in. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the [[:Category:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|{{PAGENAME}} category]].

===Hostility against newcomers===
According to a 2016 VICE News article, Wikipedia is reportedly being notorious for being an unwelcome place for newcomers while having a dizzying list of guidelines, principles, and rules that are disproportionately applied across the site. Many individuals who edited Wikipedia shared the concern, including Kevin Forsyth who reportedly quitted the site due to "constant harassment from his fellow editors and lack of consequences for those who were openly combative on the site." Because of that, there was even a suicide attempt which was averted thanks to interventions by the authorities.<ref>https://www.vice.com/en/article/wikipedia-editor-says-sites-toxic-community-has-him-contemplating-suicide/</ref>
===Deletionism===
Wikipedia has been reported by some sources to be grappled by deletionism, causing the absence of coverage of many obscure and niche topics and a decline of participation activities among experts and high-value editors.<ref>https://gwern.net/inclusionism</ref><ref>https://boingboing.net/2017/02/14/watching-wikipedias-extincti.html</ref>
==="Name and shame" pages===
On Wikipedia, there are publicly-visible "name and shame" pages such as "Sockpuppet investigation" casepages (SPI) and Long-term abuse pages (LTA) whose ostensible aims are for assisting anti-vandalism purposes.<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations</ref><ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse</ref> Pages in the latter category often contain personally-identifiable attributes of users who're branded as "long term abusers" (LTA) for supposedly engaging in disruptions against the Wikipedia over a long period, including IP addresses, full legal names. In at least one case where a user accused of being an LTA is an apparent juvenile, no special measures to consider their privacy rights (i.e. hiding LTA pages to only audiences with Wikipedia accounts) are apparently observed. <ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Long-term_abuse/Archive_6#Should_we_really_be_including_personal_information_in_LTA_reports?</ref><ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Ananny</ref><ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Bambifan101</ref><ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Tirgil34</ref> Such practices may risk violating GDPR as there's also a case where scientific researchers based in Czech Republic and Slovakia were doxxed that way due to accusations that they had engaged in self-promoting edits on Wikipedia. At a glance, little to no fact-checking and quality checking processes were observed in the LTA page creation process, which may mean that some or all accusations in some if not all of LTA pages may be inaccurate and could therefore constitute defamation/libel.<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Europeanhematology</ref><ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/DEATH_TO_COVID</ref>

===Orangemoody scandal===
On September 2015, Wikipedia was hit by the Orangemoody blackmail scandal, as it came to light that hundreds of businesses and minor celebrities had faced demands for payment from rogue editors to publish, protect or update Wikipedia articles on them.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/wikipedia-rocked-by-rogue-editors-blackmail-scam-targeting-small-businesses-and-celebrities-10481993.html|title=Wikipedia rocked by 'rogue editors' blackmail scam targeting small businesses and celebrities|last=Merrill|first=Jamie|work=[[The Independent]]|date=September 2, 2015|access-date=September 3, 2017|archive-date=September 13, 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150913220528/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/wikipedia-rocked-by-rogue-editors-blackmail-scam-targeting-small-businesses-and-celebrities-10481993.html|url-status=live}}</ref>

===Scots Wikipedia scandal===
On August 2020, a Reddit user publicized that a prolific Scots Wikipedia administrator did not speak the Scots language; tens of thousands of articles were in fact English with eye dialect spellings to suggest a Scottish accent, or word-by-word machine translations of articles from English Wikipedia. Wikimedia users debated recruiting fluent speakers of Scots to repair the articles, reverting all edits from the administrator in question, or – as the latter would entail removing nearly half the articles in the encyclopedia – even deleting and restarting Scots Wikipedia afresh. ''The Guardian'' attributed the problem to systemic issues in Wikipedia culture, suggesting that some administrators are afforded effectively unchecked power based on sheer volume of edits (rather than the quality of their work). Robyn Speer, chief scientist at Luminoso, expressed concern that artificial intelligence corpora which used Wikipedia for language-training data had been corrupted by the pseudo-Scots.<ref name="inews">{{cite web |last1=McDonald |first1=Karl |title=Scots Wikipedia taken over by American teenager who wrote thousands of 'very odd' articles without learning language |url=https://inews.co.uk/news/scotland/scots-wikipedia-language-articles-native-speaker-mistakes-610689 |website=inews.co.uk |access-date=August 26, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200826132225/https://inews.co.uk/news/scotland/scots-wikipedia-language-articles-native-speaker-mistakes-610689 |archive-date=August 26, 2020 |language=en |date=August 26, 2020 |url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |last1=Brooks |first1=Libby |last2=Hern |first2=Alex |title=Shock an aw: US teenager wrote huge slice of Scots Wikipedia |url=https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia |website=[[The Guardian]] |access-date=August 26, 2020 |date=August 26, 2020}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |last1=McCarthy |first1=Kieren |title=Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles |url=https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/ |website=[[The Register]] |access-date=August 26, 2020 |language=en |date=August 26, 2020}}</ref>

==References==
{{reflist}}

[[Category:Wikipedia]]

Wikipedia

2025-11-08T21:17:05Z

2406:DA18:492:9301:DBAB:91F:A88D:8C56: /* Monopoly */

{{StubNotice}}
{{InfoboxCompany
| Name = Wikipedia
| Type = Private, although under non-profit Wikimedia Foundation
| Founded = 2001
| Industry = Web encyclopedia
| Official Website = https://wikipedia.org/
}}

'''Wikipedia''' is a digital encyclopedic platform which was founded in 2001 and is currently operated by American non-profit organization Wikimedia Foundation.

==Consumer-impact summary==
The encyclopedia is a major destination for consumers/readers to access information about any given topics, ranging from natural sciences to political fields. Theoretically, the encyclopedia is open for editing by anyone, meaning that consumers/readers can become producers/editors at any time.<ref>https://www.techpolicy.press/what-attacks-on-wikipedia-reveal-about-free-expression/</ref>

===Monopoly===
Although Wikipedia formally enshrines the right to fork contents from them in order to start a new encyclopedia, it has been reported that Wikipedia effectively operated as a ''de facto'' monopoly among online encyclopedias for a long time, and Wikipedia had received privileged positions by various search engines such as [[Google]] on their search results. Social media service [[TikTok]] included similar information from Wikipedia in their search results. Besides that, Wikipedia is one of the top sources for AI chatbots.<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:PROJFORK</ref><ref>https://quillette.com/2023/12/11/introducing-justapedia/</ref><ref>https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/13/23871880/tiktok-search-engine-wikipedia-snippets-google</ref><ref>https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/ai-chatbot-learning/?ref=quillette.com</ref>

Consequently, Wikipedia's monopoly had generated significant downstream effects where Wikipedia had played crucial roles in shaping medical decisions, economic outcomes, scientific publications, and perhaps judicial rulings.<ref>https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/doctors-1-source-for-healthcare-information-wikipedia/284206/</ref><ref>https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jems.12421</ref><ref>https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3039505</ref><ref>https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4174200</ref><ref>https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4365219</ref> Wikipedia is even included among longtermist digital archival missions such as the Arch Mission's The LEO (Low Earth Orbit) library, The Lunar Library I on the failed Beresheet lunar lander, The Lunar Library II on the failed Astrobotic Peregrine lander, The Galactic Legacy Archive on a successful Intuitive Machines moon lander mission, and The Pyramid Library on the successful Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander mission.<ref>https://www.archmission.org/leo-library-1</ref><ref>https://www.archmission.org/spaceil</ref><ref>https://www.archmission.org/lunar-library-2</ref><ref>https://www.archmission.org/galactic-legacy-archive</ref><ref>https://www.archmission.org/galactic-legacy-archive</ref>

==Incidents==
This is a list of all incidents, especially those related to consumer protection, that this platform is involved in. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the [[:Category:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|{{PAGENAME}} category]].

===Hostility against newcomers===
According to a 2016 VICE News article, Wikipedia is reportedly being notorious for being an unwelcome place for newcomers while having a dizzying list of guidelines, principles, and rules that are disproportionately applied across the site. Many individuals who edited Wikipedia shared the concern, including Kevin Forsyth who reportedly quitted the site due to "constant harassment from his fellow editors and lack of consequences for those who were openly combative on the site." Because of that, there was even a suicide attempt which was averted thanks to interventions by the authorities.<ref>https://www.vice.com/en/article/wikipedia-editor-says-sites-toxic-community-has-him-contemplating-suicide/</ref>
===Deletionism===
Wikipedia has been reported by some sources to be grappled by deletionism, causing the absence of coverage of many obscure and niche topics and a decline of participation activities among experts and high-value editors.<ref>https://gwern.net/inclusionism</ref><ref>https://boingboing.net/2017/02/14/watching-wikipedias-extincti.html</ref>
==="Name and shame" pages===
On Wikipedia, there are publicly-visible "name and shame" pages such as "Sockpuppet investigation" casepages (SPI) and Long-term abuse pages (LTA) whose ostensible aims are for assisting anti-vandalism purposes.<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations</ref><ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse</ref> Pages in the latter category often contain personally-identifiable attributes of users who're branded as "long term abusers" (LTA) for supposedly engaging in disruptions against the Wikipedia over a long period, including IP addresses, full legal names. In at least one case where a user accused of being an LTA is an apparent juvenile, no special measures to consider their privacy rights (i.e. hiding LTA pages to only audiences with Wikipedia accounts) are apparently observed. <ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Long-term_abuse/Archive_6#Should_we_really_be_including_personal_information_in_LTA_reports?</ref><ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Ananny</ref><ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Bambifan101</ref><ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Tirgil34</ref> Such practices may risk violating GDPR as there's also a case where scientific researchers based in Czech Republic and Slovakia were doxxed that way due to accusations that they had engaged in self-promoting edits on Wikipedia. At a glance, little to no fact-checking and quality checking processes were observed in the LTA page creation process, which may mean that some or all accusations in some if not all of LTA pages may be inaccurate and could therefore constitute defamation/libel.<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Europeanhematology</ref><ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/DEATH_TO_COVID</ref>

===Orangemoody scandal===
On September 2015, Wikipedia was hit by the Orangemoody blackmail scandal, as it came to light that hundreds of businesses and minor celebrities had faced demands for payment from rogue editors to publish, protect or update Wikipedia articles on them.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/wikipedia-rocked-by-rogue-editors-blackmail-scam-targeting-small-businesses-and-celebrities-10481993.html|title=Wikipedia rocked by 'rogue editors' blackmail scam targeting small businesses and celebrities|last=Merrill|first=Jamie|work=[[The Independent]]|date=September 2, 2015|access-date=September 3, 2017|archive-date=September 13, 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150913220528/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/wikipedia-rocked-by-rogue-editors-blackmail-scam-targeting-small-businesses-and-celebrities-10481993.html|url-status=live}}</ref>

===Scots Wikipedia scandal===
On August 2020, a Reddit user publicized that a prolific Scots Wikipedia administrator did not speak the Scots language; tens of thousands of articles were in fact English with eye dialect spellings to suggest a Scottish accent, or word-by-word machine translations of articles from English Wikipedia. Wikimedia users debated recruiting fluent speakers of Scots to repair the articles, reverting all edits from the administrator in question, or – as the latter would entail removing nearly half the articles in the encyclopedia – even deleting and restarting Scots Wikipedia afresh. ''The Guardian'' attributed the problem to systemic issues in Wikipedia culture, suggesting that some administrators are afforded effectively unchecked power based on sheer volume of edits (rather than the quality of their work). Robyn Speer, chief scientist at Luminoso, expressed concern that artificial intelligence corpora which used Wikipedia for language-training data had been corrupted by the pseudo-Scots.<ref name="inews">{{cite web |last1=McDonald |first1=Karl |title=Scots Wikipedia taken over by American teenager who wrote thousands of 'very odd' articles without learning language |url=https://inews.co.uk/news/scotland/scots-wikipedia-language-articles-native-speaker-mistakes-610689 |website=inews.co.uk |access-date=August 26, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200826132225/https://inews.co.uk/news/scotland/scots-wikipedia-language-articles-native-speaker-mistakes-610689 |archive-date=August 26, 2020 |language=en |date=August 26, 2020 |url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |last1=Brooks |first1=Libby |last2=Hern |first2=Alex |title=Shock an aw: US teenager wrote huge slice of Scots Wikipedia |url=https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia |website=[[The Guardian]] |access-date=August 26, 2020 |date=August 26, 2020}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |last1=McCarthy |first1=Kieren |title=Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles |url=https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/ |website=[[The Register]] |access-date=August 26, 2020 |language=en |date=August 26, 2020}}</ref>

==References==
{{reflist}}

[[Category:Wikipedia]]

Wikipedia

2025-11-08T21:15:50Z

2406:DA18:492:9301:DBAB:91F:A88D:8C56: /* Consumer-impact summary */

{{StubNotice}}
{{InfoboxCompany
| Name = Wikipedia
| Type = Private, although under non-profit Wikimedia Foundation
| Founded = 2001
| Industry = Web encyclopedia
| Official Website = https://wikipedia.org/
}}

'''Wikipedia''' is a digital encyclopedic platform which was founded in 2001 and is currently operated by American non-profit organization Wikimedia Foundation.

==Consumer-impact summary==
The encyclopedia is a major destination for consumers/readers to access information about any given topics, ranging from natural sciences to political fields. Theoretically, the encyclopedia is open for editing by anyone, meaning that consumers/readers can become producers/editors at any time.<ref>https://www.techpolicy.press/what-attacks-on-wikipedia-reveal-about-free-expression/</ref>

===Monopoly===
Although Wikipedia formally enshrines the right to fork contents from them in order to start a new encyclopedia, it has been reported that Wikipedia effectively operated as a ''de facto'' monopoly among online encyclopedias for a long time, and Wikipedia had received privileged positions by various search engines such as [[Google]] on their search results. Social media service [[TikTok]] included similar information from Wikipedia in their search results. Besides that, Wikipedia is one of the top sources for AI chatbots.<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:PROJFORK</ref><ref>https://quillette.com/2023/12/11/introducing-justapedia/</ref><ref>https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/13/23871880/tiktok-search-engine-wikipedia-snippets-google</ref><ref>https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/ai-chatbot-learning/?ref=quillette.com</ref>

Consequently, Wikipedia's monopoly had generated significant downstream effects where Wikipedia had played crucial roles in shaping medical decisions, economic outcomes, scientific publications, and perhaps judicial rulings.<ref>https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/doctors-1-source-for-healthcare-information-wikipedia/284206/</ref><ref>https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jems.12421</ref><ref>https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3039505</ref><ref>https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4174200</ref><ref>https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4365219</ref> Wikipedia is even included among longtermist digital archival missions such as the Arch Mission's The LEO (Low Earth Orbit) library, The Lunar Library I on the failed Beresheet lunar lander, The Lunar Library II on the failed Astrobotic Peregrine lander, The Galactic Legacy Archive on a successful Intuitive Machines moon lander mission, and The Pyramid Library on the successful Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander mission.<ref>https://www.archmission.org/leo-library-1</ref><ref>https://www.archmission.org/spaceil</ref><ref>https://www.archmission.org/galactic-legacy-archive</ref><ref>https://www.archmission.org/galactic-legacy-archive</ref>

==Incidents==
This is a list of all incidents, especially those related to consumer protection, that this platform is involved in. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the [[:Category:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|{{PAGENAME}} category]].

===Hostility against newcomers===
According to a 2016 VICE News article, Wikipedia is reportedly being notorious for being an unwelcome place for newcomers while having a dizzying list of guidelines, principles, and rules that are disproportionately applied across the site. Many individuals who edited Wikipedia shared the concern, including Kevin Forsyth who reportedly quitted the site due to "constant harassment from his fellow editors and lack of consequences for those who were openly combative on the site." Because of that, there was even a suicide attempt which was averted thanks to interventions by the authorities.<ref>https://www.vice.com/en/article/wikipedia-editor-says-sites-toxic-community-has-him-contemplating-suicide/</ref>
===Deletionism===
Wikipedia has been reported by some sources to be grappled by deletionism, causing the absence of coverage of many obscure and niche topics and a decline of participation activities among experts and high-value editors.<ref>https://gwern.net/inclusionism</ref><ref>https://boingboing.net/2017/02/14/watching-wikipedias-extincti.html</ref>
==="Name and shame" pages===
On Wikipedia, there are publicly-visible "name and shame" pages such as "Sockpuppet investigation" casepages (SPI) and Long-term abuse pages (LTA) whose ostensible aims are for assisting anti-vandalism purposes.<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations</ref><ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse</ref> Pages in the latter category often contain personally-identifiable attributes of users who're branded as "long term abusers" (LTA) for supposedly engaging in disruptions against the Wikipedia over a long period, including IP addresses, full legal names. In at least one case where a user accused of being an LTA is an apparent juvenile, no special measures to consider their privacy rights (i.e. hiding LTA pages to only audiences with Wikipedia accounts) are apparently observed. <ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Long-term_abuse/Archive_6#Should_we_really_be_including_personal_information_in_LTA_reports?</ref><ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Ananny</ref><ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Bambifan101</ref><ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Tirgil34</ref> Such practices may risk violating GDPR as there's also a case where scientific researchers based in Czech Republic and Slovakia were doxxed that way due to accusations that they had engaged in self-promoting edits on Wikipedia. At a glance, little to no fact-checking and quality checking processes were observed in the LTA page creation process, which may mean that some or all accusations in some if not all of LTA pages may be inaccurate and could therefore constitute defamation/libel.<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Europeanhematology</ref><ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/DEATH_TO_COVID</ref>

===Orangemoody scandal===
On September 2015, Wikipedia was hit by the Orangemoody blackmail scandal, as it came to light that hundreds of businesses and minor celebrities had faced demands for payment from rogue editors to publish, protect or update Wikipedia articles on them.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/wikipedia-rocked-by-rogue-editors-blackmail-scam-targeting-small-businesses-and-celebrities-10481993.html|title=Wikipedia rocked by 'rogue editors' blackmail scam targeting small businesses and celebrities|last=Merrill|first=Jamie|work=[[The Independent]]|date=September 2, 2015|access-date=September 3, 2017|archive-date=September 13, 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150913220528/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/wikipedia-rocked-by-rogue-editors-blackmail-scam-targeting-small-businesses-and-celebrities-10481993.html|url-status=live}}</ref>

===Scots Wikipedia scandal===
On August 2020, a Reddit user publicized that a prolific Scots Wikipedia administrator did not speak the Scots language; tens of thousands of articles were in fact English with eye dialect spellings to suggest a Scottish accent, or word-by-word machine translations of articles from English Wikipedia. Wikimedia users debated recruiting fluent speakers of Scots to repair the articles, reverting all edits from the administrator in question, or – as the latter would entail removing nearly half the articles in the encyclopedia – even deleting and restarting Scots Wikipedia afresh. ''The Guardian'' attributed the problem to systemic issues in Wikipedia culture, suggesting that some administrators are afforded effectively unchecked power based on sheer volume of edits (rather than the quality of their work). Robyn Speer, chief scientist at Luminoso, expressed concern that artificial intelligence corpora which used Wikipedia for language-training data had been corrupted by the pseudo-Scots.<ref name="inews">{{cite web |last1=McDonald |first1=Karl |title=Scots Wikipedia taken over by American teenager who wrote thousands of 'very odd' articles without learning language |url=https://inews.co.uk/news/scotland/scots-wikipedia-language-articles-native-speaker-mistakes-610689 |website=inews.co.uk |access-date=August 26, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200826132225/https://inews.co.uk/news/scotland/scots-wikipedia-language-articles-native-speaker-mistakes-610689 |archive-date=August 26, 2020 |language=en |date=August 26, 2020 |url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |last1=Brooks |first1=Libby |last2=Hern |first2=Alex |title=Shock an aw: US teenager wrote huge slice of Scots Wikipedia |url=https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia |website=[[The Guardian]] |access-date=August 26, 2020 |date=August 26, 2020}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |last1=McCarthy |first1=Kieren |title=Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles |url=https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/ |website=[[The Register]] |access-date=August 26, 2020 |language=en |date=August 26, 2020}}</ref>

==References==
{{reflist}}

[[Category:Wikipedia]]

Wikipedia

2025-11-08T20:17:16Z

2406:DA18:492:9301:DBAB:91F:A88D:8C56: /* Consumer-impact summary */

Inactive account deletion

2025-10-30T13:47:59Z

2406:DA18:492:9301:DBAB:91F:A88D:8C56: /* How it works */

Inactive account deletion is where accounts get deleted after being unused, with the timeframe often being from 6 months to 5 years.

==How it works==
Often, companies delete or purge inactive accounts, citing various reasons such as cost issues, privacy/security factors and the desire for environmental sustainability.

==Why it is a problem==

* Inactive account deletion policies will adversely affect those who had good reasons to become inactive for a long time, such as hospitalization, prison incarceration, and being in totalitarian countries (i.e. Afghanistan) which are found to have implemented prolonged internet shutdowns, and other unforeseen factors such as the 2023 Hamas hostage crisis and being trapped in scam factories in Southeast Asia for a long period.

* In the case of email services, deletion of inactive accounts could result in major inconvenience for users who used the accounts as multiple factor authentications for important services such as banking.

* Many accounts and contents that were created or owned by now-deceased users are likely affected under such policies. This could mean that immense amounts of valuable or historical significant contents will be lost over time.

* Ultimately, in both the short and long term, such policies will cause serious erosion of historical integrity, which is especially paramount as in the era of deepfakes, lies and misinformation are just as likely as to arise from the absence of data than the presence of it.

==Examples==
* [[Discord]] has a deletion policy on inactive accounts in which accounts that are not used for 2 years or more may be scheduled to be deleted. Before the deletion of the inactive account, users may get an email or text message warning that their account is scheduled to be deleted.
* [[Google]] has deleted inactive accounts, often citing 'privacy reasons' as a reason for doing it.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Barker |first=Shane |title=Google's Inactive Account Deletion policy: What You Need To Know |url=https://expertbeacon.com/googles-inactive-account-deletion-policy-what-you-need-to-know/ |access-date=29 Oct 2025 |website=Expert beacon}}</ref> The rationale has been ridiculed with some comparing it to a hypothetical scenario where a bank should be burned down if it is not secure against robbers.
* [[Microsoft]] has a deletion policy on inactive accounts in which accounts that are not used for 2 years or more may be scheduled to be deleted. Any account that has been locked for more than two years will also be considered "inactive" and will be closed. Before the deletion of the inactive account, users may get an email or text message warning that their account is scheduled to be deleted.
* [[Protonmail]] announced a policy in 2022 which entails the deletion of inactive accounts, resulting in a major controversy where many users voice their concerns on the decision. In response to these concerns, Protonmail added an exemption where the inactive account policy would not apply to any accounts which had premium subscriptions at one point, although the exemption was revoked as of 2024. Protonmail accounts that were created before April 9, 2024 has a two year grace period before being subjected to the policy, as opposed to one year for newer accounts.

==References==
{{reflist}}

[[Category:Common terms]]