Wikipedia has had many controversies since its inception in 2001. Wikipedia's open-editing model, which allows any user to edit its encyclopedic pages, has led to concerns such as the quality of writing, the amount of vandalism, and the accuracy of information on the project. Media have covered controversial events related to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Common subjects of coverage include false information, public figures, corporations for which they have a conflict of interest, paid Wikipedia editing, and interactions between Wikipedia users and public figures.
The Seigenthaler biography incident led to increased media criticism of the reliability of Wikipedia. The incident dates back to May 2005, with the anonymous posting of a hoax Wikipedia article containing false and negative allegations about John Seigenthaler, a well-known American journalist. In March 2007, Wikipedia was again the subject of media attention with the Essjay controversy, which involved a prominent English Wikipedia editor and administrator who claimed he was a "tenured professor of religion at a private university" with a "Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law" when in fact he was a 24-year-old who held no advanced degrees.
The 2012 scandals involving paid consultancy for the government of Gibraltar by Roger Bamkin, a Wikimedia UK board member, and potential conflicts of interest have highlighted Wikipedia's vulnerabilities. The presence of inaccurate and false information, as well as the perceived hostile editing climate, has been linked to a decline in editor participation. Another controversy arose in 2013 after an investigation by Wikipedians found that the Wiki-PR company had edited Wikipedia for paying clients, using "an army" of sockpuppet accounts that purportedly included 45 Wikipedia editors and administrators. In 2015, the Orangemoody investigation showed that businesses and minor celebrities had been blackmailed over their Wikipedia articles by a coordinated group of fraudsters, again using hundreds of sockpuppets. Controversies within and concerning Wikipedia and the WMF have been the subject of several scholarly papers. This list is a collection of the more notable instances.
Overview The nature of Wikipedia controversies has been analyzed by scholars. The sociologist Howard Rheingold says that "Wikipedia controversies have revealed the evolution of social mechanisms in the Wikipedia community"; a study of the politicization of socio-technical spaces remarked that Wikipedia "controversies... become fully-fledged when they are advertised outside the page being debated"; and one college discusses Wikipedia as a curricular tool, in that "recent controversies involving Wikipedia [are used] as a basis for discussion of ethics and bias".
Editing restrictions Despite being promoted as an encyclopedia "anyone can edit", the ability to edit controversial pages is sometimes restricted because of "edit wars" or vandalism. To address criticism about restricting access while minimizing malicious editing of those pages, Wikipedia has also tried measures such as "pending changes protection", which allows open editing of contentious articles, with the caveat that an experienced editor must approve new users' edits before they become visible to the public.
Controversies
2000s
2002 February 2002 – In late February 2002, the Spanish Wikipedia community decided to break away ("fork") from Wikipedia to protest rumored plans by co-founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger to sell advertising on Wikipedia sites.; also see Jimmy Wales, February 2002 post to wikipedia-l , and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia, a memoir , Slashdot The fork, set up by volunteer Edgar Enyedy, was hosted at the University of Seville under the name Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español.Lih 2009, p. 138 Most of the Spanish volunteers followed Enyedy, producing over 10,000 articles within a year. As a result, the Spanish Wikipedia was virtually inactive until mid-2003. Since this incident, the question of advertising has been a sensitive subject on Wikipedia. In an interview with Wired in January 2011, Wales categorically denied having supported the plans for advertising, prompting a public dispute with Sanger. "The suggestion that I demanded ads and that Jimmy Wales was opposed to them is, I am afraid, yet another self-serving lie from Wales", wrote Sanger. As late as 2006, Wales refused to deny that there would ever be advertising on Wikipedia. In January of that year he told a reporter from ClickZ that "the question is going to arise as to whether we could better pursue our charitable mission with the additional money [ads would bring]. We have never said there would absolutely never be ads on Wikipedia." October 2002 – Derek Ramsey increased the number of Wikipedia articles by about 40% with the creation of a bot called Rambot that generated 33,832 Wikipedia stub articles from October 19 to 25 for every missing county, town, city, and village in the United States, based on free information from the United States Census of 2000. In The Wikipedia Revolution, Andrew Lih called it "the most controversial move in Wikipedia history".
2005 September 2005 Jar'Edo Wens hoax: In May 2005, an anonymous user created a Wikipedia article named "Jar'Edo Wens" claiming that he was an Australian Aboriginal god created by the Altjira whose purpose was to ensure that people did not get too "arrogant" or "self-conceited" having earthly knowledge and physical might. It was spotted in November 2014 and eventually deleted in March 2015. It was the longest-lasting hoax article on Wikipedia at the time. The Seigenthaler incident was a series of events that began in May 2005 with the anonymous posting of a hoax article in Wikipedia about John Seigenthaler, a well-known American journalist. The article falsely stated that Seigenthaler had been a suspect in the assassinations of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Additionally, the article erroneously stated that Seigenthaler had lived in the Soviet Union for 13 years beginning in 1971. Seigenthaler, who had been a friend and aide to Robert Kennedy, characterized the Wikipedia entry about him as "Internet character assassination". The perpetrator of the hoax, who was trying to fool a coworker as a prank, was identified by Wikipedia critic Daniel Brandt and reporters for The New York Times. The hoax was removed from Wikipedia in early October 2005 (although the false information stayed on Answers.com and Reference.com for another three weeks), after which Seigenthaler wrote about his experience in USA Today. Professional book indexer Daniel Brandt started the now-defunct Wikipedia criticism website "wikipedia-watch.org" in response to his unpleasant experience while trying to get his biography deleted. November/December 2005 – The IP address assigned to the United States House of Representatives was blocked from editing Wikipedia because of a large number of edits comprising a "deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of the encyclopedia". According to CBS News, these changes included edits to Marty Meehan's Wikipedia article to give it a more positive tone. The edits to Meehan's article prompted a former director of the United States Office of Government Ethics to say that "[t]hat kind of usage, plus the fact that they're changing one person's material, is certainly wrong and ought to be at a minimum the focus of some disciplinary action". December 2005 – Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales was found to be editing his own Wikipedia article. According to public logs, he had made 18 edits to his biography, seven of which were alterations of information about whether Larry Sanger was a co-founder of Wikipedia. It was also revealed that Wales had edited the Wikipedia article of his former company, Bomis. "Bomis Babes", a section of the Bomis website, had been characterized in the article as "soft-core pornography", but Wales revised this to "adult content section" and deleted mentions of pornography. He said he was fixing an error, and did not agree with calling Bomis Babes soft porn. Wales conceded that he had made the changes, but maintained that they were technical corrections.
2006 February 1, 2006 – The Henryk Batuta hoax was uncovered by editors on the Polish Wikipedia. Batuta, an entirely made-up person, was claimed to be a Polish Communist revolutionary who was an associate of Ernest Hemingway. The article was published for 15 months and referenced in seventeen other articles before the hoax was uncovered. The hoax article was written by a group of Polish Wikipedia editors calling themselves the "Batuta Army". One of the group's members, who called himself "Marek", told The Observer that they had created the hoax article in order to draw attention to the ongoing use of the names of Soviet officials for streets and other public areas in Poland. Marek stated that "Many of these people were traitors and murderers who do not deserve such an honor". March 2006 – Wikipedia critic Daniel Brandt found 142 instances of plagiarism on Wikipedia, arguing that the problem plagued the site. Early to mid-2006 – A series of U.S. Congressional staff edits to Wikipedia were revealed in the press. These mostly involved various political aides trying to whitewash Wikipedia biographies of several politicians by removing undesirable information (including pejorative statements quoted, or broken campaign promises), adding favorable information or "glowing" tributes, or replacing articles in part or whole with staff-authored biographies. The staffs of at least five politicians were implicated: Marty Meehan, Norm Coleman, Conrad Burns, Joe Biden and Gil Gutknecht. In a separate incident, the campaign manager for Cathy Cox, Morton Brilliant, resigned after being found to have added disparaging information to the Wikipedia entries of political opponents.
July 2006 – MyWikiBiz was founded by Gregory Kohs and his sister to provide paid editing services on Wikipedia. Although Kohs, after some research, concluded that there were no Wikipedia policies forbidding this activity, his Wikipedia account was blocked shortly after the August publication of a press release announcing the establishment of the business. The salient Wikipedia policies were soon edited to regulate the kinds of activities in which MyWikiBiz was engaging. Jimmy Wales defended this decision and the permanent exclusion of Kohs from Wikipedia, even as he acknowledged that surreptitious paid editing continually occurred, saying: "It's one thing to acknowledge there's always going to be a little of this, but another to say, 'Bring it on.
2007 January 2007 In January 2007, English-language Wikipedians in Qatar were briefly blocked from editing by an administrator, following a spate of vandalism, since they did not realize that at the time, a significant portion of the entire country's internet traffic was routed through a single IP address allocated by Qtel, which had a monopoly at the time. Both TechCrunch and Slashdot reported that Wikipedia had banned all of Qatar from the site, a claim promptly denied by co-founder Jimmy Wales. It was revealed that Microsoft had paid programmer Rick Jelliffe to edit Wikipedia articles about Microsoft products, including the article on Office Open XML. A spokesman for Microsoft explained that the company thought the articles in question had been heavily biased by editors at Microsoft rival IBM and that having a seemingly independent editor add the material would make it more acceptable to other Wikipedia editors. February 2007 On February 13, 2007, American professional golfer Fuzzy Zoeller sued the Miami foreign-credential evaluation firm Josef Silny & Associates. The lawsuit alleged that defamatory statements had been edited into the Wikipedia article about Zoeller in December 2006 by someone using a computer at that firm.