List of Wikipedia controversies

Overview

Editing restrictions

Controversies

2000s

2002

• February 2002 – In late February 2002, the Spanish Wikipedia community decided to break away from Wikipedia to protest rumored plans by co-founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger to sell advertising on Wikipedia sites. The fork, set up by volunteer Edgar Enyedy, was hosted at the University of Seville under the name Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español. 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 . 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
• 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 "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 – 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, adding favorable information or "glowing" tributes, or by replacing articles in part or whole by staff-authored biographies. The staff of at least five politicians were implicated: Marty Meehan, Norm Coleman, Conrad Burns, Joe Biden and Gil Gutknecht. In a separate but similar incident the campaign manager for Cathy Cox, Morton Brilliant, resigned after being found to have added negative 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 that "t'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 the entire country's internet traffic is routed through a single IP address. Both TechCrunch and Slashdot reported that Wikipedia had banned all of Qatar from the site, a claim that was promptly denied by co-founder Jimmy Wales.
• * It was revealed that Microsoft had paid programmer Rick Jelliffe to edit Wikipedia articles about Microsoft products. In particular, Microsoft paid Jelliffe to edit, among others, 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 of 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.
• * Barbara Bauer sued the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the Wikipedia website, claiming that information on Wikipedia critical of her abilities as a literary agent harmed her business. The Electronic Frontier Foundation defended Wikipedia and the case was dismissed in July 2008.
• * On February 17, 2007, Taner Akçam, one of the first Turkish academics to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, was detained in Canada at the airport in Montreal for nearly four hours after arriving on a flight from the United States. Taner Akçam said that Canadian authorities had justified this detainment using a libelous Wikipedia article on Akçam from around December 24, 2006 as evidence. The article had allegedly been persistently vandalized by anonymous contributors intent on labeling Akçam as a terrorist. In response to Akçam's account of his border encounter, Jimmy Wales said the website contributors "deeply regret every error".
• March 2007 – The Essjay controversy was sparked when The New Yorker magazine issued a rare editorial correction saying that a prominent English Wikipedia editor and administrator known as "Essjay", whom they had interviewed and described in a July 2006 article as a "tenured professor of religion at a private university" who held a "Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law", was in fact a 24-year-old who held no advanced degrees. Essjay had invented a completely false identity for his pseudonymous participation in Wikipedia. In January 2007, however, Essjay became a Wikia employee and divulged his real name, Ryan Jordan; this was noticed by Daniel Brandt of Wikipedia Watch, who communicated Essjay's identity to The New Yorker. Jordan held trusted volunteer positions within Wikipedia known as "administrator", "bureaucrat", "checkuser", "arbitrator", and "mediator". Responding to the controversy, Jimmy Wales stated that he viewed Essjay's made-up persona like a pseudonym and did not really have a problem with it: "Essjay has always been, and still is, a fantastic editor and trusted member of the community... He has been thoughtful and contrite about the entire matter, and I consider it settled." The incident caused wide-ranging debates in the Wikipedia community, and saw Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger challenge Wales: "Jimmy, to call yourself a tenured professor, when you aren't one, is not a 'pseudonym'. It's identity fraud. And the full question is not why you appointed Essjay to ArbCom, but: why did you ignore the obvious moral implications of the fact that he had fraudulently pretended to be a professor – ignoring those implications even to the point of giving him a job and appointing him to ArbCom – until now?" As a result of the controversy, Wales eventually invited Jordan to relinquish his responsibilities on Wikipedia, which he did; Jordan also quit his job at Wikia.
• August 2007 – It became known that Virgil Griffith, a Caltech computation and neural-systems graduate student, had created WikiScanner, a searchable database that linked changes made by anonymous Wikipedia editors to companies and organizations from which the changes were made. The database cross-referenced logs of Wikipedia edits with publicly available records pertaining to the internet IP addresses edits were made from. Griffith was motivated by the edits from the United States Congress, and wanted to see if others were similarly promoting themselves. He was particularly interested in finding scandals, especially at large and controversial corporations. He said he wanted to "create minor public relations disasters for companies and organizations I dislike to see what 'interesting organizations' are up to." He also wanted to give Wikipedia readers a tool to check edits for accuracy and allow the automation and indexing of edits. Most of the edits Wikiscanner found were minor or harmless, but the site was mined to detect the most controversial and embarrassing instances of conflict of interest edits. These instances received media coverage worldwide. Included among the accused were the Vatican, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Democratic Party's Congressional Campaign Committee, the U.S. Republican Party, Britain's Labour Party, Britain's Conservative Party, the Canadian government, Industry Canada, the Department of Prime Minister, Cabinet, and Defence in Australia, the United Nations, the United States Senate, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Montana Senator Conrad Burns, Ohio Governor Bob Taft, Prince Johan Friso and his wife Princess Mabel of the Netherlands, the Israeli government, ExxonMobil, Walmart, AstraZeneca, Diebold, Dow Chemical, Disney, Dell, Anheuser-Busch, Nestlé, Pepsi, Boeing, Sony Computer Entertainment, EA, SCO Group, MySpace, Pfizer, Raytheon, DuPont, Anglican and Catholic churches, the Church of Scientology, the World Harvest Church, Amnesty International, the Discovery Channel, Fox News, CBS, The Washington Post, the National Rifle Association of America, News International, Al Jazeera, Bob Jones University, and Ohio State University. Although the edits correlated with known IP addresses, there was no proof that the changes actually came from a member of the organization or employee of the company, only that someone had access to their network. Wikipedia spokespersons received WikiScanner positively, noting that it helped prevent conflicts of interest from influencing articles as well as increasing transparency and mitigating attempts to remove or distort relevant facts. In 2008 Griffith released an updated version of WikiScanner called WikiWatcher, which also exploited a common mistake made by users with registered accounts who accidentally forget to log in, revealing their IP address and subsequently their affiliations. As of March 2012, WikiScanner's website was online, but not functioning; WikiScanner is no longer online.
• September 2007
• * Auren Hoffman was noted by VentureBeat in 2007 as having edited his own Wikipedia profile under a pseudonym. Hoffman responded that he was editing his profile to remove inappropriate comments.
• * One thousand IPs were blocked in Utah in order to prevent further edits from a highly active user who had been banned from editing Wikipedia.
• October 2007 – In their obituaries of then recently deceased TV theme composer Ronnie Hazlehurst, many British media organizations reported that he had co-written the S Club 7 song "Reach". In fact, he had not, and it was discovered that this information had been sourced from a hoax edit to Hazlehurst's Wikipedia article.
• December 2007 – In December 2007, it became known that the Wikimedia Foundation had failed to do a basic background check and hired Carolyn Doran as its chief operating officer. Doran had criminal records in three states for theft, drunken driving and fleeing the scene of a car crash. According to The Register, Doran left her position after yet another arrest for DUI; the Wikimedia Foundation lawyer, Mike Godwin, was quoted as saying, "We've never had any documentation of any criminal record on Carolyn Doran's part at all. As far as I'm concerned, I have no direct knowledge of yet... We have, in our records, no evidence of any such thing." The Associated Press also reported that Doran had wounded her boyfriend "with a gunshot to the chest".