“I’m now forever the girl who changed ‘is’ to ‘was’ on Henry Kissinger’s Wikipedia article,” reads the bio of the Wikipedia user Asticky, who updated her bio after editing Kissinger’s page on 8:46 PM EST on Wednesday. Since then, dozens of users have responded with messages of support and congratulations to Asticky on being the first to edit the page.

“We will never forget your historic contribution to humanity,” wrote one Wikipedia user on the talk section of Asticky’s editor page. “I just know that some historian is gonna cite this page in his or her journal article in the distant future. LOL,” wrote another user. “Congrats to Asticky for becoming an instant legend overnight.”

Other users awarded Asticky with “Barnstars,” a kind of digital merit badge that Wikipedia users can present to other editors for a job well done. Some of the Barnstars awarded to Asticky include “The Barnstar of Diligence” and “The Special Barnstar,” along with messages expressing awe for her quick work. “[F]or when you eventually get your rightful admin spot,,, WE STAN YOU QUEEN,” wrote another user, who sent Asticky an aspirational “Admin’s Barnstar.”

Henry Kissinger’s death was already a meme long before it actually happened. The former presidential advisor and U.S. Secretary of State is widely known as a war criminal for the bombing of Cambodia and shaping decades of foreign policy linked to the deaths of millions, most prominently while expanding the Vietnam War under Richard Nixon. Over the years, left-leaning social media users have shared countless memes remarking on Kissinger’s uncanny longevity, perhaps most famously a comic depicting a frustrated grim reaper trying to find Kissinger inside a claw machine game. 

Wikipedia editors are known for their speed and diligence amidst world-changing events, so it makes sense that the first person to update the site with the fact of Kissinger’s death would be celebrated. On Thursday morning, the Twitter account “Depths of Wikipedia” followed up with another Kissinger-related update: the Wikipedia article for “Hangover” had seen a three-fold increase in traffic.

The post Wikipedia Editor Who First Noted Henry Kissinger’s Death Has Become an ‘Instant Legend’ appeared first on VICE.

View on X

These are, of course, questions that it’s remarkably easy to answer that betray an incomprehensible ignorance of the Wikimedia Foundation or the idea of operating a service as a public good rather than a for-profit institution. But harping on Wikipedia is a hobby horse that Musk keeps returning to, putting the widely-used resource on blast and fomenting conspiracy theories about it to his audience of millions. 

Wikipedia is one of the last good places on the internet. It’s a vast treasure trove of knowledge, copyright-free images, and important discussions. People across the planet can get a quick survey understanding of almost any topic in an instant in multiple languages. That this is still done in 2023 without dozens of ads littering the screen is nothing short of a miracle. A miracle made possible, in part, by donations from users.

And those users aren’t just readers. Wikipedia is far more than its public-facing website. Every day, millions of people gather on Wikipedia to fight over the facts displayed. Wikipedia doesn’t just preserve the some 22.14 GB worth of text displayed on its pages, it’s also preserving years of edits and arguments about how those words were written. Every page on the site is argued over, fussed about, and tweaked constantly. All those discussions are here, and can be pored over.

Running an ad-free website where millions of people gather every day to discuss facts and update scores of pages is a monumental task. It’s incredible that Wikipedia doesn’t often go down and has few technical problems. Most of the time, Wikipedia works without issue. The same is not true for X, formerly Twitter.

And where does the money go? The Wikimedia Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that publishes its financial records that are routinely audited by third parties. Every year, it publishes portions of this financial audit for the public. According to its 2022 report, it received about $160 million in donations. It spent $88 million of this on salaries and wages for its employees, $2.7 million on internet hosting, and about $1.2 million on travel. It’s very easy to see these reports with a cursory search. A community note on Musk’s own post says as much. 

How to fund Wikipedia has been a source of debate among its editors for almost the entirety of its run. There’s even a Wiki page that lays out the history of the debate, complete with a history of all the edits made to the page over the past two decades.

Wikipedia has issues, like any other website. But it’s obviously spending money on servers to keep things stable. And, unlike X under Musk, it’s not charging users $8 a month for the privilege of algorithmic placement, and $1 for basic functions, on top of running ads.

The post Elon Musk Still Doesn’t Understand How Wikipedia Works appeared first on VICE.

On May 12, Twitter announced it was restricting access to some content in Turkey. Twitter didn’t specify which voices it decided to suppress, but reports from Turkey indicated that it was Erdoğan’s political opponents and some journalists who’ve been critical of him.

Musk has spent the ensuing days beefing with critics and generally proclaiming that he runs the free-est and bravest social media platform. “We’ve pushed harder for free speech than any other internet company, including Wokipedia,” Musk said in one tweet.

“Wokipedia” is a reference to Wikipedia, a website that famously fought Turkey’s censorship for two years before winning an important case in its Supreme Court.

As many have pointed out, Musk’s claims that his version of Twitter cares more about free speech isn’t true; his commitment to free speech starts and ends wherever authoritarian governments tell him it should. There is actually a pretty decent example of a social media company that was more willing to stand up to authoritarian government censorship: Twitter before Elon Musk.

In 2014, when Turkey banned access to Twitter, the company challenged it in court. In a blog post explaining move at the time, former Twitter executive Vijaya Gadde wrote the action was a “disproportionate and illegal administrative act of access banning the whole of Twitter, we expect the government to restore access to Twitter immediately so that its citizens can continue an open online dialogue ahead of the elections to be held at the end of this week.”

The company won in court two days after its challenge. A Turkish court ruled that “Freedom of speech and expression and the right to spread thoughts and opinions are fundamental rights and freedoms, which are under the Constitutional protection similar to all democratic countries … Governmental bodies should avoid all acts and actions which restrict such freedom of people.” Twitter was unblocked in the country soon after. Gadde, it should be noted, was constantly criticized by Musk for her apparent hatred of free speech and was fired immediately after he took control of the company.

Then, in September 2016, the company refused a Turkish court order that demanded it censor 17 accounts, including that of D.C.-based journalist Mahir Zeynalov.

Twitter used to publish a transparency report that detailed the take-down requests it got from individual governments. In its most recent report, from the last six months of 2021, showed that Turkey issued a massive amount of takedown requests. “97% of the total global volume of legal demands originated from only five countries (in decreasing order): Japan, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, and India,” the report said. It should be noted that since Musk has taken over, the company has not published a transparency report (though Musk has tweeted repeatedly that the company is “rapidly improving transparency”) and has generally made it harder for researchers to access some types of information.

According to information from Lumen, which tracks government takedown requests, requests have gone up since Musk took over the company. In the first six months since his takeover, Twitter complied with 80% of government takedown requests. That number is up from 50%.

Twitter isn’t the only company that Turkey has repeatedly pressured into changing its policies and removing content. Erdoğan has used social media to help him stay in power, but has also banned Reddit, Wikipedia, Facebook, and other sites when he believes they’re helping those who would challenge his power. It’s so common that there’s a website, Turkey Blocks, that tracks what sites are live in the country at any given time.

Other companies and organizations, however, have fought when Turkey has asked them to censor information. “What Wikipedia did: we stood strong for our principles and fought to the Supreme Court of Turkey and won,” Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said on Twitter in response to Musk’s whining about limiting access to some tweets. “This is what it means to treat freedom of expression as a principle rather than a slogan.”

On April 29, 2017, Turkey blocked access to Wikipedia. As justification, authorities cited a law that allowed them to block a website that’s deemed obscene or a threat to national security. Rather than capitulate to Ankara’s demands, Wikipedia fought. After more than two and a half years, the Turkish Constitutional Court restored access to the site.

Wikipedia’s fight with Turkey was public. While it worked its way through the courts, its community banded together and hosted a decentralized version of the site in Turkey. Wikimedia’s lawyers filed a petition to the European Court of Human Rights, saying that the ban was a human rights violation.

Wikimedia took the lessons it learned in Turkey and began to think about the future in the United States. “The question of whether the Wikimedia Foundation should have a hot switch option, so that if a ‘disaster’ strikes in America, we could continue running Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons from other countries has been raised on this list several times over many years,” one longtime Wiki user and organizer, said on the Wikimedia-L, a highly active listserv about Wikimedia governance. “The [Wikimedia Foundation] and its employees are heavily invested in staying in Silicon Valley, and that will stay true unless external risks become extreme.”

Musk once claimed he wanted to purchase Twitter to ensure that speech remained free on the platform. His immediate bowing to Turkey without a public fight indicated just how dedicated to the principal he is, and when Matthew Ygelsias called him on this, Musk whined.

“Did your brain fall out of your head, Yglesias?” Musk said on Twitter. “The choice is to have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?”

Dealing with censorious nations and autocratic governments is one of the trickiest things that social media companies do. There are no hard-and-fast rules about what the best course of action is when given the option between blocking an entire country or taking down a few offending posts. It’s not easy, but Musk seems to think it is, and that he’s doing it better than anyone else ever has.

But Musk does not seem to ever put up a fight when a government blocks access to Twitter or asks him for special treatment. In February, Turkey blocked access to Twitter in the aftermath of an earthquake that killed more than 11,500 people. A month earlier, Twitter censored links to a BBC documentary about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi after New Dehli asked him too. Here, too, Twitter’s previous leadership showed more courage. Jack Dorsey’s Twitter sued India over censorship; Musk’s Twitter blocks posts critical of Modi. While trying to get out of buying Twitter, Musk’s lawyer said that the India lawsuit was “risky” and that “while Musk is a proponent of free speech, he believes that moderation on Twitter should ‘hew close to the laws of countries in which Twitter operates.’”

The election in Turkey was so close that it’s going to a runoff. In two weeks time, the people of the country will return to the polls to choose between Erdoğan and his rival Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Twitter will, once again, be at the center of the conversation around the election. If the past is any indication, Musk will once again bow to Erdoğan’s demands for censorship during a critical election period.

Wikipedia remains up in the country, as does its decentralized mirror. Musk spent much of his weekend online comparing billionaire philanthropist George Soros to the fictional supervillain Magneto and making jokes about the Anti-Defamation League.

The post Free Speech Warrior Elon Musk Weaker on Government Censorship Than the Twitter Execs He Fired appeared first on VICE.

Some have suggested he “buy” Wikipedia, the global, collective non-profit encyclopedia that serves as an international commons for knowledge online. 

There is just one problem, however, it’s not for sale. Wikipedia has long espoused as one of its core principles that it’s not for sale and will be operated exclusively through Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit foundation behind the encyclopedia. Still that hasn’t stopped Musk fans from insisting Musk turns his eyes there—or that the website may become (or already be) a hotbed of censorship without the South African billionaire’s intervention.

Why, exactly, do people want Musk to buy Wikipedia? Because several Wikipedia editors debated—as they do for essentially every new article—whether Musk’s “Twitter Files” deserved its own article page, or whether the information contained in Musk’s latest publicity stunt should simply be assimilated into other relevant articles. 

Over the past week, there’s been a weird row that has emerged in debates over how to deal with the “Twitter Files” editorially.

Last week, Musk promised to unveil a trove of internal company documents showing how Twitter had suppressed reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents during 2020. “The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself. The public deserves to know what really happened …” Musk tweeted on November 28. The dump was uneventful, delayed from its original time then shown to have revealed little if anything new.

Enter what became a weird little debate among Wikipedia editors about whether the Twitter Files warranted their own page, should be amended to previous pages about Hunter Biden’s laptop, or deleted altogether.

What was initially an obscure internal debate, which, again, is how a collective, open-source encyclopedia worlds, ballooned after Ian Miles Cheong tweeted that the Twitter Files were being censored by Wikipedia editors, and Musk responded.

“Wikipedia is voting on the deletion of the entry for Elon Musk’s Twitter Files because the editors have deemed it a “nothing burger” that is “not notable” because the media didn’t give it enough coverage. These people work hand in hand with the MSM to shape the narrative.”

“Most of Earth: ‘The MSM is biased.’ Wikipedia: ‘Cite MSM source to confirm this claim.’ Wikipedia has a non-trivial left-wing bias. @jimmy_wales, what are your thoughts?,” Musk tweeted.

It is possible, actually, to discuss bias on Wikipedia in a way that understands how Wikipedia works and why it might have specific biases, and what those biases may be. In fact, there is an article on Wikipedia called “Ideological Bias on Wikipedia,” which engages with this topic directly, and cites various academic papers that have been published on the subject. 

Because Musk has shown a recent propensity to pretend that the only politics in the world are woke warriors vs free speech absolutists in the United States (to acknowledge other countries would be to admit that Musk’s free speech absolutism starts and ends in the United States), perhaps he has read the nuanced, academically rigorous papers that have shown there is a slight Democratic bias on Wikipedia on several topics of U.S. politics, particularly on issues such as civil rights and corporations. Wikipedia has a rightward slant on issues such as immigration.

This is because, again, Wikipedia is a volunteer encyclopedia edited by people who feel inspired by Wikipedia’s mission, people who have an intense interest in specific topics, and, critically and crucially, people who live all over the world, including places that are not the United States. Researchers have found that Wikipedia has a slight Democratic bias on issues of US politics because many of Wikipedia’s editors are international, and the average country has views that are to the left of the incredibly centrist Democratic party on issues such as healthcare, climate change, corporate power, capitalism, etc. 

This bias disappears as more people edit an article (which always happens on Wikipedia), does not hold for all topics, is less than it was in the early days of Wikipedia, and does not exist in the same way for international politics. In fact, several non-English language Wikipedias have faced scandal over overtly right-wing, fascist, and Holocaust-denying content on, for example, the Croatian and Japanese versions of Wikipedia. 

So, maybe Musk knew all that and wanted to start a thoughtful conversation about representation on Wikipedia, the fact that most articles are written by 1 percent of editors, the fact that Wikipedia is losing editors, the issues of obsession from some administrators and editors who won’t allow edits to pages they feel ownership over. Or maybe the world’s (former?) richest man saw that a pseudonymous Wikipedia editor from Panama or Germany dared to have an opinion that differed from his on the internet, saw a chance to own the woke leftists, and started a war on perhaps the single most useful collective informational undertaking in the history of humankind. Or maybe he just wanted to continue to court Ian Miles Cheong, a known simp and troll.

Anyways, because it should matter to anyone who actually cares about how Wikipedia works, it’s worth talking about what actually happened here. Last week, Musk released the “Twitter Files.” Someone then wrote a very short, half-assed Wikipedia article called “The Twitter Files.” Wikipedians then discussed whether the information in that article, as it stood in its underdeveloped state, should remain a standalone article or whether it should be merged into other existing articles on Twitter and Hunter Biden’s laptop. As many conversations like this on Wikipedia are, the topic was contentious, but very quickly administrators decided that the “Twitter Files” did deserve its own page, and it does still have its own page today. In other words, a couple mostly random people on the internet suggested that the article should be deleted, were quickly overruled, and the page remains up and was never in serious threat of actually getting deleted. Cheong cherry picked a few people who suggested that the article be deleted, screenshotted their thoughts (again, these people lost), and tweeted them as evidence of a conspiracy against Musk and the right. It would have been equally as easy to screenshot the many Wikipedia editors arguing to keep the article as somehow being evidence of a right-wing bias. 

“A ‘delete’ consensus after seven days strikes me as practically impossible, given that most ‘delete’ opinions were offered at the very start of the [Articles for Deletion] when the article was very underdeveloped, and that almost no ‘delete’ opinions were provided towards the end,” Sandstein, the Wikipedia editor who ultimately decided to close debate on the article, wrote.  

In actuality, debates about what should go into an article and whether the article itself should exist is just how Wikipedia works, has always worked, and probably will always work. 

Musk and Cheong’s tweets, of course, did have the intended effect of starting a balanced conversation about the fact that Wikipedia is indeed very important but has some flaws we should all work on, together: 

“It is not considered ‘routine’ for a political entity, namely a political party acting in the interest of a particular candidate for office, to conspire with Big Tech companies to suppress and injure the confidences of the United States enfranchised citizenry, nor to suppress possible evidence of criminal activity by that candidate or their children,” one participant argued. “The content of these Files constitutes the assertions of a person with actual knowledge of the material fact at issue. The material facts at issue point to possible imputation of government agent status to the Twitter company, to clandestinely act on the requests of a US government-connected entity, for improper search as well. Thus, the 4th Amendment may be implicated.”

Well then!

Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of Ian Miles Cheong.

The post We Are Watching Elon Musk and His Fans Create a Conspiracy Theory About Wikipedia in Real Time appeared first on VICE.

So, what’s the non-paying job for the 34-year-old British scientist who works as a research fellow in the Department of Materials at the Imperial College in London? 

Read Next

I Look For the Weirdest and Wildest Things on Wikipedia. Here’s What I’ve Learned.

Since 2017, it’s been writing a Wikipedia entry every day, sometimes even two, to highlight the achievements of women scientists whose contributions to the world have either gone unnoticed or remain largely unacknowledged, no thanks to the systemic racial bias in Wikipedia’s coverage as well as that of mainstream media. 

Wade had been thinking of “equity and representation in science” for a really long time, which is what led her to undertake what would later become an increasingly ambitious project. Having completed both her undergrad and PhD courses in physics, Wade was mindful to the extent her field of study remains largely accessible to people from more privileged socio-economic backgrounds. It’s also a field that is largely dominated by white men.

“It is these racial and socio-economic barriers to entry that negatively impact science by and large and impede our ability to discover, innovate, and come up with new ways to save humanity,” she said. 

Wade believes that diversity matters in the scientific community because diverse minds come up with diverse solutions, and not operating from the privileged white male gaze affords them viewpoints into other ways of living that perhaps need scientific innovation. This is why highlighting the achievements of women scientists, in a field largely dominated by white men, became essential to Wade. 

It bears mentioning that the scientists Wade writes about are not relegated to obscurity within the science community. They have won medals, their works have been widely cited in important research papers and, in some cases, they’ve even had streets named after them. Yet the supposedly democratic and widely accessible world of Wikipedia was oblivious to the contributions of these brilliant women. An important first step in addressing this disparity was by ensuring that these women had entries on Wikipedia, to begin with, believes Wade.

“If [most people are] using Wikipedia as their reference source, then we have a responsibility to make it accurate, complete, and equitable,” she said. “In 2017, I was exposed to just how important this [free online encyclopaedia] is, and since then I have written one entry every day.” 

On certain days, Wade logs not one, but two entries, writing after she’s done working her full-time job and even on weekends. But how does she go about selecting the scientists that merit a Wikipedia entry? Is the list of unacknowledged women scientists really that long? Turns out, it is. 

“When I first started working on the entries in 2017, I was only focused on women scientists in the UK and that’s a really finite list,” she said. “However, that’s [also] when I realised that they were all white, so I decided to actively look for women scientists of colour.” 

Learning the ropes

A few of Wade’s early entries, however, had to be taken down by Wikimedians, resident Wikipedia editors. “When I started writing, I was a little naïve and thought that everyone who was cool should have a Wikipedia page. [But] there is a notability test that has to be fulfilled,” said Wade referring to the Wikipedia policy of having a team of editors decide whether or not a person or subject merits its own entry. She also had to ensure that every sentence could be cited (“and not with a LinkedIn page”), and that the tone of the writing was neutral. “A few entries were deleted, others were remade by Wikipedia editors. It’s hard because society does such a bad job of highlighting [these women] online.”

One such entry was that of African American nuclear chemist Clarice Phelps who was part of the team of researchers who discovered tennessine (element 117), a new element in the periodic table. The page on Phelps, written by Wade, was initially taken down because there weren’t enough citations on Phelps’ tennessine contribution. This was largely because not enough publications had written about Phelps at the time. After much back and forth, Phelps’ entry passed the notability test and she now has her own page on Wiki.

Wade, however, doesn’t get deterred by occasional setbacks and instead views them as challenges that can be worked through in various ways – from approaching topics differently to working on her writing tone. She jokes that it’s probably easier to work on a Wikipedia page if “you’re at VICE because you have to be so cool all the time.” Compliment (?) noted. 

Wade’s research process includes mining the internet to locate women scientists of colour, going through important research papers where their works are cited, checking the names of speakers at important conferences, and digging through the archives of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the United States to find names of scientists who had been inducted into important societies of the science community. Wade chose HBCUs as they are institutions of higher education in the U.S. founded with the intention to serve the people of the African American community, who were denied higher education in other established institutions because of racial discrimination. As these institutions were established before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – a landmark law that forbids discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex, and national origin – Wade was likely to find leads in their archives that she might not have elsewhere.

“I’ve always had someone to write about,” she said. “You start to notice trends, too.”

One of the trends that Wade found was that most African American communities were closely linked to certain churches. This close sense of community ensured that ideas were exchanged more seamlessly, they could help each other, had each other’s backs when one of them needed help, and used this common network to encourage younger scientists to enter the scientific community, too. 

She also discovered that most Indian scientists studied in the same engineering colleges in India, such as the various Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) colleges, to only later be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. 

For Wade, this was symbolic of the fact that engineering education, particularly in the premier colleges of India such as the IITs, has always been way ahead of the curve, giving talented scientists from low-income backgrounds a platform to hone their skills. “This makes for such a rich history because it’s not just writing about the technical details of their work – this is someone’s life you are writing about and that’s a very powerful thing.” 

Unearthing new stories

Wade is always pleasantly surprised when she comes across names of scientists whose works have had a far-reaching impact, but who yet remain unacknowledged on Wikipedia. She mentions Indian-origin scientist Sumitra Mitra, who is now widely considered a pioneer of nanomaterials, as one such example. 

“The formulation of nanomaterials that [Mitra] came up with has been used in almost all the fillers in dental procedures across the world,” said Wade. “No one had profiled her in mainstream media or Wikipedia, in spite of the fact that her inventions have been used in billions of dental procedures.” 

Mitra’s example is not a one-off. When Wade was going through the list of recent fellows inducted into the National Academy of Medicine, an American nonprofit organisation, she discovered that only a few had their own Wikipedia page. 

“One of them is the American physician Yvette Calderon whose parents were immigrants,” Wade said. “Her father fought for the Puerto Rican army in the Korean War. She grew up poor in Hell’s Kitchen, a neighbourhood in New York City, only to be later [taken under the wing of] a philanthropist who guided her towards medicine.”

Calderon has helped tackle the disparity in the treatment of HIV patients in New York during the peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and ceaselessly worked to save lives during the coronavirus pandemic. After Calderon lost her own father to COVID-19 and was unable to be there for him in his final moments, she wanted to ensure that patients, especially those who were gravely ill, were at least able to speak with and see their families virtually. Members of Calderon’s team would call patients’ families on iPads and hold the devices up to a patient’s ear to enable communication between the patient and their family. 

“When you read about people like her, you think, ‘Whoa! I’ve experienced nothing in my life!’ You also realise that we don’t honour these people enough on Wikipedia or even otherwise. Sure, she’s won a few awards, but she should have been winning awards all her life.”

Will there come a time when the entries will stop, when the ground will be covered, and the exclusion gap narrowed? Not really, said Wade, as the history of exclusion is too vast to be fixed any time soon, at least on Wikipedia. 

She believes that future generations want a more just world, a representative curriculum (one that is based on solving actual life problems), and an inclusive society. As grown-ups, Wade believes, it’s our responsibility to go back and right the historical wrongs because we have the capacity and power to do so.

“Everyone needs to play their part in building a more equitable future. I don’t see a world where I’m not part of this effort. Yes, we want to save the planet, but we also want to celebrate and honour people that history has not,” said Wade. “There’s never gonna be a story not to tell.” 

Follow Arman on Twitter and Instagram. 

The post I’ve Made More Than 1,700 Wikipedia Entries on Women Scientists and I’m Not Yet Done appeared first on VICE.

The scam was exposed last month by Chinese novelist Yifan, who was researching for a book when he came upon an article on the Kashin silver mine. 

Discovered by Russian peasants in 1344, the Wikipedia entry goes, the mine engaged more than 40,000 slaves and freedmen, providing a remarkable source of wealth for the Russian principality of Tver in the 14th and 15th centuries as well as subsequent regimes. The geological composition of the soil, the structure of the mine, and even the refining process were fleshed out in detail in the entry.

Read Next

A Massive Police Database of Allegedly 1 Billion Chinese Citizens Is Being Sold Online

Yifan thought he’d found interesting material for a novel. Little did he know he’d stumbled upon an entire fictitious world constructed by a user known as Zhemao. It was one of 206 articles she has written on Chinese Wikipedia since 2019, weaving facts into fiction in an elaborate scheme that went uncaught for years and tested the limits of crowdsourced platforms’ ability to verify information and fend off bad actors.

“The content she wrote is of high quality and the entries were interconnected, creating a system that can exist on its own,” veteran Chinese Wikipedian John Yip told VICE World News. “Zhemao single-handedly invented a new way to undermine Wikipedia.”

Yifan was tipped off when he ran the silver mine story by Russian speakers and fact-checked Zhemao’s references, only to find that the pages or versions of the books she cited did not exist. People he consulted also called out her lengthy entries on ancient conflicts between Slavic states, which could not be found in Russian historical records. “They were so rich in details they put English and Russian Wikipedia to shame,” Yifan wrote on Zhihu, a Chinese site similar to Quora, where he shared his discovery last month and caused a stir.  

The scale of the scam came to light after a group of volunteer editors and other Wikipedians, such as Yip, combed through her past contributions to nearly 300 articles. 

One of her longest articles was almost the length of “The Great Gatsby.” With the formal, authoritative tone of an encyclopedia, it detailed three Tartar uprisings in the 17th century that left a lasting impact on Russia, complete with a map she made. In another entry, she shared rare images of ancient coins, which she claimed to have obtained from a Russian archaeological team.  

One article she tampered heavily with was on the deportation of Chinese in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and ’30s. It was so well-written it was selected as a featured article and translated into other languages, including English, Arabic, and Russian, spreading the damage to other language editions of Wikipedia.

Among the first users to interact with her, Yip almost couldn’t believe himself when he learnt how she’d tricked the system. Like many others, he was previously impressed with Zhemao’s knowledge on the obscure topic and her dedication, as she made edits almost every other day. 

“Her entries appeared comprehensive, with proper citations, but some were made up, while others had page numbers that did not add up,” Yip said. For instance, she frequently quoted from “History of Russia From Earliest Times”, a colossal work with 29 volumes by well-known Russian historian Sergei M. Soloviev. But the Chinese translation she cited turned out to be bogus. 

Editors normally presume writers are contributing in good faith, said Yeh Youchia, a volunteer editor who plays the roles of a patroller and a rollbacker, and who helped contain the fallout. 

Read Next

He Pushed for Democracy in China for Decades. Now He’s Accused of Spying for China.

“When surveying new content, we only check whether it is blatant plagiarism and if it has proper sources. She understood the format of Wikipedia very well and provided sources that were very difficult to verify,” Yeh said. 

The content is only one aspect of her invention.

To create an air of credibility, Zhemao described herself as the daughter of a Chinese diplomat stationed in Russia who married a Russian man and listed her academic credentials on her user profile, including a doctoral degree in world history from the Moscow State University. Recently, she added that she was a pacifist and attached a petition her husband supposedly signed in protest of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Though Zhemao occasionally feigned humility and expressed disgust with “online circle-jerking,” the investigation also found that she controlled at least four sock puppets, alternative accounts she used to create an illusion of support. “Please don’t call me boss, I am just an ordinary student,” Zhemao wrote in reply to one of them. 

With another sock puppet, she posed as a doctoral student in world history at Peking University who had studied in Russia, and claimed to know Zhemao in real life. Though one account, the Inquisitive Amateur, was active since 2010, the investigation suggested she only seized control of it in 2019. 

Zhemao’s convincing persona as a modest scholar won her the trust of the community. 

“I thought she was a rare talent, as the site lacked writers knowledgeable in medieval Russia,” Eric Liu, a history student involved with Wikipedia since 2015, told VICE World News. He awarded her with a Wikipedia barnstar earlier this year to thank her for her contributions. 

“I deeply regret not realizing her nonsense and even gave her support. It feels like I was an accomplice to her scheme,” Liu said. The incident dealt a heavy blow to the site’s dwindling credibility and many users are now paranoid about potential fraud, he added.

Read Next

Chinese Women Look at Eileen Gu and Do Not See Themselves

As a punishment, Zhemao and her affiliated accounts were suspended permanently. Most of her articles were deleted based on community consensus. Some Wikipedians even wrote to experts, seeking help to separate the wheat from the chaff.

“Volunteers are continuing to review additional articles that may have been affected,” a spokesperson of the Wikimedia Foundation told VICE World News in an email. 

“Vandalism or other negative behavior can happen from time to time on Wikipedia, as is expected with any open, online platform that is available for everyone to contribute to. With that said, this specific type of behavior on Wikipedia is not common,” they added. 

So who is Zhemao in real life? She came clean in an apology letter issued on her Wikipedia account last month. She speaks neither English nor Russian and is a housewife with only a high school degree.

The hoax started with an innocuous intention. Unable to comprehend scholarly articles in their original language, she pieced sentences together with a translation tool and filled in the blanks with her own imagination. “As the saying goes, in order to defend a lie, you must tell more lies,” she wrote. Before long, they had accumulated into tens of thousands of characters, which she was reluctant to delete.

Read Next

Chinese Drone Maker DJI Halts Sales in Russia and Ukraine

The alternative accounts were imaginary friends she “cosplayed” as she was bored and alone, given her husband was away most of the time and she didn’t have any friends. She also apologized to actual experts on Russia, whom she had attempted to cozy up to and later impersonated.

“The knowledge I have right now is not enough to make a living. In the future I will learn a craft, work conscientiously, and not do pointless things like this any more,” she added. 

Follow Rachel Cheung on Twitter and Instagram.

The post A Bored Chinese Housewife Spent Years Falsifying Russian History on Wikipedia appeared first on VICE.

“Of course, objective, important, in-depth information that’s been gathered properly and skillfully…this is in great demand,” Putin said, according to a translation of the video by journalist Kevin Rothrock. “And that’s why you can’t just use Wikipedia. And we know the quality of the information there. But when you have talented people who are professionals whose opinions you can trust, that is, of course, worth a lot. It’s like an encyclopedia, but living and breathing.”

The 30 second clip appeared on the social media accounts of RIA, a Kremlin-owned news organization. Putin is, presumably, upset that Russians still have a place online where they can go to learn the details of their country’s disastrous war in Ukraine.

Putin has long sought to discredit Wikipedia and has repeatedly attacked the site and threatened to block it in Russia. In March, Moscow’s censorship office sent a letter to Wikipedia promising to block the site if it didn’t delete information about Russian casualties in Ukraine. Wikipedia refused to capitulate. 

In neighboring Belarus, police are arresting Wikipedia editors. After the arrest of one editor in Belarus, several of the articles they had edited were accessed and changes made. In one example, someone removed sections of an article about the personal sanctions against Belarussian president Alexander Lukashenko. 

In a 2019 speech, Putin outlined a plan to establish a new Wikipedia. Putin bemoaned foreign attacks on the Russian language and noted the need for an encyclopedia written, first and foremost, in Russian. “It’s better to replace it with the Great Russian Encyclopedia in electronic form,” he said. “That information will at least be reliable, presented in good modern form.”

It’s getting harder every day for Russians to get information about the world around them that doesn’t come directly from state-backed sources. Twitter and Facebook are blocked for anyone who isn’t using a Tor browser. Wikipedia remains up, but is constantly fighting with the Kremlin. Why the site remains up is a mystery. The Kremlin briefly blocked Wikipedia in 2015 after demanding the site limit access to articles about drugs.

The post Vladimir Putin Explains Why State Media Is Better Than Wikipedia appeared first on VICE.

As a result, Rauwerda spent much of her childhood on Wikipedia, the crowdsourced online encyclopaedia that sheds light on everything from historical figures to how the high-five gained popularity. That’s where her enchantment with the open-source platform began. 

Read Next

The World’s Second Largest Wikipedia Is Written Almost Entirely by One Bot

“Sometimes, I would make up assignments on topics like Mongolia so I could spend more time on Wikipedia, and then even turn them into powerpoint presentations,” Michigan-based Rauwerda, now 22, told VICE. 

Rauwerda always had an affinity for the free online learning resource. Today, she’s turned that deep fascination into Depths of Wikipedia, an Instagram account with more than half a million followers, where she turns the weirdest, wildest and most unexpected Wiki facts into bite-sized content for the social media generation. 

“It started with me just wanting to dump all the screenshots I had in my phone’s camera roll to make it less messy,” she said. When the pandemic and its mandatory quarantines first began to overturn our lives, Rauwerda made her first post, documenting how scientific research had found that Disney’s Big Thunder Mountain ride was helping patients pass their kidney stones.

“I made my first post in April 2020. By July, I had gained more than 3,000 followers. That’s when I realised that other people were also interested in these facts.” 

From the origin story of “exploding trousers,” where an agricultural weed would cause farmers’ trousers to burst into flames, to the explanation of “Nuclear Gandhi,” an urban legend and internet meme that claims Mahatma Gandhi went nuclear crazy, to a list of unexplained sounds like “bloop,” @depthsofwikipedia scours the free online resource to find content that can leave you shocked, awed or in splits. Though there are older pages that post about the freakiest shit found on Wikipedia – such as the 48,000 member-strong Facebook group Cool Freaks’ Wikipedia Club – Rauwerda’s account is a Gen Z interpretation that combines meme culture with knowledge. Her posts often incorporate Gen Z humour defined by post-irony, a state where earnest and ironic sentiments are muddled, and meta-irony by presenting facts as is and allowing her audience to interpret it in their own way. 

Some of the Gen Z creator’s favourite posts include a topic on Timothy Dexter, a man who made his money off sarcastic dares and nonsensical businesses; a list of Donald Trump’s nicknames from Boot-edge-edge to Lyin’ Ted to Disaster from Alaska; the bald-hairy pattern of Russian readers; and guerrilla gardening, where people sneak onto abandoned properties to plant gardens. 

“I always try to find things that are funny, unexpected but also relatable,” Rauwerda said, explaining how she chooses what goes on her page. Rauwerda added that the key to making her content go viral was picking out topics that people were already familiar with, but tapping into specific aspects of these topics that remain relatively unknown. “So it would be things like a square watermelon, or maybe even a picture of a cow that reads ‘this healthy cow lying on her back is not immobilised.’” 

In the initial days of the page, Rauwerda built an audience by following meme pages and influencers. “I would follow a bunch of random Instagram accounts and then unfollow them. But the page really blew up after I got into kind of a beef with Caroline Calloway, a New York-based influencer, a few months into the page.” 

Calloway came across a post on Rauwerda’s page, where she had posted a screenshot of the influencer’s Wikipedia page that listed her job as “nothing.” “I posted it because I found it funny. She then reposted it on her story and called it ‘ridiculous’. Eventually, someone edited her Wikipedia page to change her job listing, and I posted about that as well. After that, she became a super big fan and began resharing other posts as well.” 

Today, @depthsofwikipedia’s 528,000-strong community includes celebrities like Emma Roberts, John Mayer, Kiernan Shipka, Olivia Wilde and Troye Sivan. The massive popularity of the page on Instagram also pushed Rauwerda to start her own TikTok channel, where she reacts to some of the weirder entries on Wikipedia. “One of my most viral posts on Instagram was about Diego the tortoise, who saved his species by having too much sex,” she said. 

Rauwerda explained that while she has figured out the formula for what works on Instagram (“anything unexpected or even a little naughty”), she is still learning the ropes of TikTok. With over 9.7 million views, her most popular TikTok was about anti-Barney humour, a topic that talked about how school kids across the world were dissing the popular purple dinosaur from the kids television show Barney & Friends. “These kids would sing their own version of the show’s theme song, which said ‘I hate you, you hate me, let’s go kill Barney’. More than 30,000 people commented to say that they had never heard about this, even though it’s a thing that’s been around since before we even had the internet!” 

Rauwerda stressed that though her page was dedicated to finding the dumbest or funniest facts on Wikipedia, it was also a way to raise awareness for a meme-obsessed audience. While she doesn’t follow any specific process to find her content, she admitted that it involves spending at least an hour a day on Wikipedia, time she also dedicates to editing entries on the online resource.

“Wikipedia is just this massive source of facts, and since it is crowdsourced, the posts have a lot more personality than a platform like Britannica,” she said. 

While most of us are probably acquainted with Wikipedia as a quick hack that totally saves our asses when we have a looming assignment, Rauwerda’s relationship with the online resource is rooted in one of its more offbeat aspects: Wikiracing. 

Read Next

Finding a Place for Pride on Wikipedia

“Wikiracing is when you basically compete with others to see how many hyperlinks on Wikipedia you can click in a specific time frame,” she explained. “In sixth grade, my friends and I would spend hours Wikiracing each other, and though it didn’t give me time to read topics in detail, I would learn so much just by skimming through them. We would start at a topic like the ‘pope mobile’ and end up at a list of penguins, so it’s difficult not to get lost in a topic.” 

Endless hours of Wikiracing made Rauwerda a pro on the online platform, enabling her to navigate the rabbit hole of information to find the most striking facts. 

Today, Rauwerda is part of the worldwide volunteer community of Wikipedia editors, and has also hosted an edit-a-thon, an event where she teaches prospective Wiki editors how to accurately describe topics on the online platform. “I think the staff at Wikipedia likes me. After my Instagram account went viral, Wikipedia even gave me a hat that says ‘As Seen on Wikipedia.’ There’s no bad blood between us, thankfully.” 

Rauwerda also insisted that since Wikipedia is a volunteer-based project, she doesn’t like to profit off her content. “Having said that, I do get paid from Instagram and TikTok creator funds, and sometimes when a post does really well, I’ll print it out on mugs and sell them,” she said. 

Currently, Rauwerda is a student of neuroscience at the University of Michigan, though she admitted to being more interested in a future career in teaching, freelance writing or hosting comedy shows. She is also in the process of turning her learnings from Wikipedia into a trivia-style comedy show, believing that through this format, she can raise awareness among an internet-obsessed audience. 

“There’s this trend on Twitter especially where brands will speak in overly casual tones, post cringe content and shitpost like they’re 19-year-olds to be more relatable to their audience,” she said. “I think for nonprofits to do something similar and tap into the social media generation, they too need to embrace meme culture but with facts, the way Depths of Wikipedia does.” 

Follow Shamani on Instagram and Twitter.

The post I Look For the Weirdest and Wildest Things on Wikipedia. Here’s What I’ve Learned. appeared first on VICE.

The trouble began when Wales posted an announcement about the auction on his user talk page—a kind of message board where users communicate directly with each other. Wikipedia has strict rules against self-promotion and some editors felt that Wales’ announcement violated that rule.

“Am I crazy? Jimbo has posted a thread on his user talk page promoting an auction of some of his stuff, which he has refused to confirm would not benefit him personally,” editor Floquenbeam said on December 3.. “This is self-promotion 101, right? I’ve told him if he doesn’t remove it, I will. That’s policy, right? There’s no Founder carve-out, is there? Just because the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) told him to post to his user talk page…doesn’t mean he can actually do it, overriding our self-promotion policy, right? Can I get some quick feedback on the appropriateness of my removing this thread, if he doesn’t? And whether (I can’t believe I have to say this) I’d be justified in blocking him from his talk page if he restores it? If any one of us tried to pull this, they’d get a warning and a block.”

Wales pushed back, saying he’d spoken to the WMF communications and legal departments and that they’d agreed a simple post about the auction on his user talk page would be fine. “Characterizing this as ‘self-promotional’ or ‘advertising’ is frankly silly, as I don’t think anyone would plausibly imagine that I’m hoping some random talk page reader is going to be the buyer,” Wales said. “I can equally imagine that if I had defied the board and refused to communicate with the community about it, someone would be getting inflamed over that.”

The editors weren’t having it. “I wouldn’t go so far as to call it ‘frankly silly,’ and I don’t see how the latter part changes anything,” editor XOR’easter said. “Who would want such an NFT? A big fan of Wikipedia, probably, and one who’s invested (emotionally) in its history and inside baseball.”

The conversation went on like this for about a day before another editor shut it down, saying it was “past the point of productive discourse.” The thread announcing the auction on Wales’ talk page was removed but another thread remains where he’s answering questions about the auction and NFTs from other users. An email thread on the Wikimedia-L listserv is more measured but still has some pedantic arguments that is common with Wikimedia drama. Some users are concerned that he’s taking something from Wikimedia and could use the money to fund his commercial enterprise WT:Social. Another user said “The concept of NFT seems to go against the very principles of Wikipedia. On one hand, we share our work freely, both in terms of access and by using a copyleft license. On the other hand, this NFT takes something that was shared freely and then restricts it so that it can be sold.”

“I don’t understand how a Wikimedia trustee using Wikimedia websites, Wikimedia branding, and this Wikimedia supported email list to promote a funding event for their own commercial project, i.e. ‘WT:Social,’ fits with the bylaws which include:

‘The property of this Foundation is irrevocably dedicated to charitable purposes and no part of the net income or assets of this Foundation shall ever inure to the benefit of any Trustee or officer thereof or to the benefit of any private individual other than compensation in a reasonable amount to its officers, employees, and contractors for services rendered.’ 

Could someone explain why the Wikimedia Foundation gave permission to one of their trustees to do this in contravention of their own bylaws? Hopefully asking questions does not automatically get you branded as an ‘idealogue’ or ‘attention-seeker.’”

The NFT Wales is selling is a website that allows users to relive the moment of Wikipedia’s creation. The site looks like Wikipedia did in its fledgling moments, and whoever wins the auction can edit it as they will. The second big controversy among Wikipedia’s editors was whether Wales had the right to auction off something like this and if he was even recreating the site correctly at the moment of its inception.

The discussion devolved into a lengthy conversation about who owns the rights to what they edit on Wikipedia and the state of servers and timestamps from 2001. It’s worth mentioning here that Wales’ NFT is a recreation of a memory and not an actual editable bit of code that will be reflected on Wikipedia in any way. Eventually, all sides relented.

“There is at least one good thing that should be coming out of this,” editor Smallbones said. “The community has made it very clear that anything that is considered to be promotional or an advertisement, even if it is for a charitable cause, on any page in Wikipedia, posted by any editor—even the most senior and most respected—may be removed by any editor at any time.”

A blow-by-blow of the drama and discussion will appear in The Signpost, a monthly newspaper produced by Wikipedia users and published at the end of every month.

The post Wikipedia Editors Very Mad About Jimmy Wales’ NFT of a Wikipedia Edit appeared first on VICE.

On January 15, 2001, Wales launched Wikipedia. When the website went up he made the first edit to the open source project by publishing “Hello World!” on the site. The NFT that Wales and Christie are selling is not just a JPEG capture of the website at this time, but an interactive experience with a dedicated webpage. Whoever wins the NFT can edit the page however they want and, with the click of a button, revert the page back to that moment on January 15 when all it said was “Hello World!”

You can see the site right now at https://www.editthisnft.com/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi. “You can’t edit right now because we didn’t want to let it be live during the auction,” Wales told Motherboard on the phone. “I did. Saner heads prevailed.”

Wales said he held onto the Strawberry iMac because he thought it might be worth something someday. “Not because I owned it,” he said. “Because it’s this beautiful Strawberry iMac, it’s an iconic part of the rebirth of Apple…amusingly, up until just a few months ago, it was my printer stand.”

Wales got the idea for the auction when he saw Twitter founder Jack Dorsey had minted his first Tweet as an NFT and sold it for $2.9 million in crypto. “How about my Strawberry iMac I used when I launched Wikipedia?” He said on Twitter at the time. “It isn’t an ‘NFT’ but it’s real and I could bring it to you and sing Sweet Home Alabama.”

Wales reached out to Christie’s to set up the auction and they started talking about NFTs. Then Wales noticed Tim Berners-Lee had sold a piece of web history as an NFT and he started to learn more about the technology. “I thought I wanted to do something a bit more than just a picture or a JPEG of how Wikipedia looked to me on the day when I was installing the software,” he said.

The Wiki NFT auction is not just a picture of the moment of creation, but an experience. Whoever wins the auction can relive the moment of being the first person to edit a Wiki, over and over again at their leisure. The auction winner will gain access to the code and database underlying the current URL. They can move it wherever they wish or park it at a different URL. Opensea is set up to display HTML, so it can even be displayed on that public market.

Wales acknowledged that this is an ersatz experience, a recreation of the moment of creation. “It’s certainly a recreation,” he said. “The first thing you do is you go back and try to look at it and it’s not there, obviously. The interface of the website has completely changed. In order to recreate it, I had to find the earliest known version of the software we used.”

Even then, redesigning the site as it was back then with modern machines required some tweaks and updates. “I couldn’t figure out how to set a password for editing to log in,” he said. “It just wasn’t working and I couldn’t understand why. I finally found in the code when it sent the cookie, it was sent with an expiration date of 2010. Which in 2001 must have seemed like an infinite time in the future.”

Wales tweaked the code to make the site work properly. “To recreate that experience required contemporary work,” he said. “You can’t travel in time.”

A lot of people hate NFTs for a lot of different reasons. Wales said he understands and feels there’s a speculative bubble around the trading of JPEGs right now, but he’s bullish on the technology in general. “There’s going to be a lot of stupid stuff and lots of bad stuff,” he said. “But there is something quite interesting in all of it as well.”

On the subject of the culture war between NFT bros and right-clickers, he said that not all JPEG auctions are created equally. “Let’s take the example of the disaster girl meme,” he said, referencing the famous meme of a young girl standing in front of a burning house turned to the camera with a perfect look of satisfaction on her face.

“Here’s this picture. It’s very striking. It’s perfect for memeing. Everybody’s seen it millions and millions of times. It’s completely free. You can print it out and put it on the wall,” he said. “But there’s no real way to enforce intellectual property rights when something goes viral. You can’t just sue everybody on the internet.”

In April, Zoë Roth—the disaster girl herself—sold an NFT of the photograph for $500,000. She told The New York Times she planned to use the money to pay off her student loans. “The creator got some money,” Wales said. “They created this bit of culture that’s become part of the fabric of the internet…and it’s valuable because they gave it away. They uploaded it and it went viral.”

Wales plans to use the proceeds from the auction to fund wt.social, a social network he’s designing to be less toxic than Twitter and Facebook. “The idea is rather than optimize the site for engagement and how many ads you see, it’s to optimize around the best people in the community curating interesting links and content and trying to push the moderation out into the community,” he said.

The post Jimmy Wales Is Auctioning His First Wikipedia Edit As an NFT appeared first on VICE.