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The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is now investigating Wikipedia. They want to know how Wikipedia responds to bad actors who try to insert disinformation into Wikipedia articles, in particular to anti-Semitic and anti-Israel edits and "pro-Kremlin and anti-Western" manipulation of articles by "foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion" according to the letter sent to Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) CEO Maryana Iskander. The letter seems to reflect several misunderstandings of Wikipedia, so I offer some basic information on how the Wikipedia community is organized, the limited role of the WMF, and how the English-language Wikipedia deals with disinformation.
This basic information is something the committee should understand before investigating Wikipedia. Any opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Signpost or its staff, the WMF, or any other Wikipedia editor.
Since 2001 Wikipedia has been an international movement with encyclopedias in several languages. Jimmy Wales has expressed our goal as "to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language". The basic unit of content production and governance is the individual language version of the encyclopedia. The community of editors of each version, which includes anybody in the world who can write in that language and follow our rules, decides questions by consensus. They created those rules by themselves, often using the rules created for the English Wikipedia by its users as a model.
The English language community has delegated some functions such as dispute resolution and article deletion to administrators, the Arbitration Committee, and for some specialized functions such as checkusers and bureaucrats. The community generally starts the dispute resolution process on article talk pages or on noticeboards. Admins enforce the community-written policies and guidelines, for example by blocking disruptive editors or limiting the editing of controversial pages to experienced editors. Along the way, they get feedback from the community. If it goes further, ArbCom is almost always the final step in this process. Anybody can give evidence in an ArbCom proceeding. During the entire dispute resolution process, the admins and arbitrators decide based only on editor behavior, not on article content. Individual editors ultimately decide on content based on their consensus.
The WMF raises money for the encyclopedia, provides the computer platform, programming, and the terms of use. It employs legal, accounting and research staff as well and makes grants to editors and affiliate organizations. It rarely interferes with an encyclopedia's governance except for violations of the terms of use, or abuse that affects several encyclopedias, or threatens the safety of editors.
The WMF’s Trust and Safety office rarely comments on its activities in order to give victims and others anonymity. Only when they take action (or are about to take action) such as blocking or banning editors will they make limited information available. They do consult the legal department with the final approval coming from the CEO stating that all their internal procedures have been followed.
I hope that the WMF has a strategy and tools to deal with hidden interference in our content by large state actors. But I do understand that revealing those to the editors and the public would greatly limit their usefulness.
One example of the WMF's hesitancy to get involved in the governance of an encyclopedia was The Curious Case of Croatian Wikipedia, which involved a neo-Nazi takeover by the administrators of the Croatian Wikipedia. It took over a decade for the WMF to become publicly involved in the matter and then only as administrators from other Wikipedia versions were coming to a solution.
Diversity, equity and inclusion are core values across the movement. How else would the encyclopedia be able to attract enough writers and editors to cover all the needed content in all the needed languages? Doxxing, or exposing an editor's name or workplace and other personal details is against the rules. It would expose editors to harassment by the bad actors, including some of those in governments around the world who would like to censor the encyclopedias.
Maintaining a neutral point of view (NPOV) is also a key value but it has a special meaning and importance to most Wikipedians. It means that editors try to include all widely held points of view about a particular topic that can be documented in reliable sources, but not including extreme minority fringe viewpoints. Editors spend much of their time trying to ensure that our NPOV policy is upheld. This does not mean that if a POV in an article is questioned, then Wikipedia is biased. Every editor has a POV, but just because your POV is different from mine doesn't mean that either your POV or mine is correct. That's simply not what our NPOV policy is about.
Almost all Wikipedians do recognize that there are non-neutral POVs being pushed on Wikipedia, for example by employees of various governments, politicians, and public relations firms and their commercial employers.
All editors and the public at large can participate in Wikipedia’s discussions on disinformation.
Removing disinformation, like most processes on Wikipedia, happens with individual editors acting alone or as a result of talk page discussions. Wikipedia:Conflict of interest noticeboard (WP:COIN) is also an important starting point. Especially controversial cases may be discussed at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard WP:AN.
Admins might block editors at this point if the community consensus is clear. Quite often though a sockpuppet investigation (WP:SPI) is needed. Sockpuppets are editors who create multiple accounts in order to deceive other editors. An SPI is often needed when disinformation insertion is suspected. The editor who reports suspected socking needs to show through behavioral evidence that at least two accounts are being run by the same person. Checkusers can then check, for example, whether two accounts are editing from the same computer. While the checkusers’ toolset is generally kept secret, they often are able to find dozens of sockpuppets working together.
Almost all governments have large communications departments that try to provide information to the public. For example, the census bureau provides population data and Wikipedia uses it intensively, posting much of it on articles about almost all U.S. states and territories, counties, cities, towns, townships, boroughs, and many census-designated places. Also, Congress conveniently provides short biographies about almost every congressperson since 1790.
Together, just these two government databases provide information that almost any American would be interested in and can easily access on Wikipedia. Thank you!
But that's not what Congress is investigating. They want to know how governments can secretly influence the content of Wikipedia. Political institutions, parties, and movements, as well as individual politicians can also influence content in much the same way. Businesses and individuals try to exercise similar influence in similar ways, often employing commercial firms or paid editors much as governments employ their own operatives.
Many of these efforts have been unmasked and reported in Wikipedia articles, and in The Signpost, Wikipedia's independent newspaper. A short introduction to these records follows. You can find more Signpost articles on similar topics at our archives.
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The Wikipedia article on the Great Firewall gives a good overview Chinese government interference and states that "In May 2015, China indefinitely blocked access to the Chinese-language Wikipedia. … As of May 2019, all language versions of Wikipedia have been blocked by the Chinese government."
Relevant Signpost articles include:
The Russian government has temporarily blocked Wikipedia several times and has fined the WMF multiple times. It's not clear whether the WMF has paid or even been able to pay these fines due to international financial sanctions on Russia.
The Wikipedia page List of Wikipedia pages banned in Russia lists well over 100 Wikipedia articles and over a dozen images from Wikimedia Commons that have been blocked in Russia.
Perhaps the largest Russian effort to restrict Wikipedia has been to fork the real Russian Wikipedia, resulting in an ersatz censored version being published called Ruwiki.
But does the Russian government or its proxies edit the English language Wikipedia? There's no official list, but the Wikipedia article International recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is quite likely to have been written mostly by Russian propaganda efforts. It is ridiculously long and one-sided. Written by 811 editors in 3,729 edits, it is much longer than the Foreign relations of the United States article, but could accurately be condensed into one paragraph saying that only Nicaragua and Venezuela currently recognize the Russian-sponsored break-away regions, and that Syria, Nauru, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu once did. (Disclosure – I've edited the article.)
Most of the article is just trivial, misleading detail. But it has been featured on the main page five times: in "In the news" on August 27, 2008 and in "On this day..." on August 26, 2013, 2016, 2018, and 2021.
A later-convicted unregistered Russian agent, Maria Butina, was widely accused of editing the article about herself.
Some Russian oligarchs appear to have paid for edits in the articles about themselves.
Congress may not be too interested in investigating how the CIA edited Wikipedia, if only because it involves material discovered by WikiScanner. More from this source will be discussed in the next section.
Both the Senate and House of Representatives have a long history of staffers secretly editing Wikipedia. There are two separate encyclopedia articles on this activity.
There is also an internal article, Wikipedia:Congressional staffer edits, to help editors identify further activity. The internal article lists 149 articles that were affected by House staff editing. It also lists 176 IP addresses attributed to the Senate which edited Wikipedia.
More generally, the article List of political editing incidents on Wikipedia gives more than a dozen examples of improper editing of political articles.
The Signpost has extensive coverage of this editing.
Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign chairman, an Acting Attorney General, state officials, a Congressman, city officials, and even a presidential candidate all made, or appeared to make, some contributions.
Many businesses secretly create or edit articles about themselves, sometimes using individual employees who just copy from the company's website making for a very bad encyclopedia article. OceanGate who operated the Titan submersible which imploded and killed its five occupants, used this method. They went beyond advertising (which is prohibited on Wikipedia). The information about safety went beyond being misleading, it was disinformation. Wikipedians did a good job removing the advertising and the copyright violations, but it lasted too long in the article. This type of disinformation is one of the smallest challenges we face.
A much more serious type of hidden business editing, is typified by the PR firm Bell Pottinger. In 2011 they were caught on tape by investigative reporters promising to use "dark arts" to edit Wikipedia to people they thought represented a repressive government. Bell Pottinger also had contracts with the U.S. Defense Department – not related to Wikipedia. In 2017 the company got caught working for the Gupta family in South Africa using racial hatred as a PR tool. Bell Pottinger quickly collapsed. One of their contractors on the South African job, an Israeli firm known as Veribo and later as Percepto, showed up in another Signpost investigation involving possible corruption in the Canadian government, as well as editing for Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs. A list on an internal Wikipedia page shows that a dozen editors connected to them edited at least sixty articles, including some related to governments and businesses, South Africa, Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, at least one Royal, and an investigative journalist. This type of paid editing is more difficult to catch than the simple menthod used by OceanGate.
The work of other commercial editing organizations is shown in these investigations.
A special group of purveyors of disinformation is convicted sex offenders. The two that The Signpost has reported on are Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Nygard. While their motives are very different than those of people described above, their methods were fairly similar to the simplest model. A very few people, perhaps only two or three in Epstein's case, seem to have done the editing.
It does look like Wikipedia has a problem with disinformation. And there are likely hundreds, perhaps thousands, more articles every year that are affected by disinformation. So it’s not surprising that Congress wants to investigate the problem. But please remember that there are over 7 million articles on Wikipedia so that the articles with disinformation are still a very small fraction of the total. Editors here are very experienced at making articles NPOV.
If Congress' investigation of Wikipedia results in a way to decrease disinformation, it will be a victory for everybody. We could definitely use some help countering Chinese and Russian disinformation. Much of the rest the Wikipedia community handles pretty well. But, many different types of people try to insert disinformation, using many different methods. We should try to understand and counter all of them. For example, congresspeople and other politicians can be encouraged by their peers and their constituents to follow our rules. They must not secretly edit articles about themselves. If they hire an editor to help them change an article, those paid editors must declare that they are paid and name their employers and clients. No exceptions!
I doubt that Wikipedia editors are going to change our rule on maintaining a neutral point of view. The government can openly provide documentation for its point of view to the whole community, but editors don’t have to accept that POV as being the whole truth. We want to show all widely held well documented POVs.
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