Wikipedia

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Wikipedia

Basic information
Founded	2001
Legal structure	Private
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.

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.

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. 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.

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 Wikipedia 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.

Deletionism

Wikipedia has been reported by some sources as being 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.

"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. 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. 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.

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.

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.