To fix Wikipedia’s Holocaust denial, we must start by naming names
Anonymity on the do-it-yourself encyclopedia fuels constant misinformation
The Wikipedia homepage. Photo by iStock
Editor-at-Large Robin Washington June 29, 2023
According to Wikipedia:
- The actors and comedians Paul Reiser and Sinbad died 15 years ago.
- Irene Morgan, a Black woman who refused to give up her seat on a bus 11 years before Rosa Parks, was born in Toronto.
- The Nazis sent 200,000 non-Jewish Poles to a gas chamber in Warsaw.
None of those statements are true, but all of them appeared at some point on Wikipedia, the online write-it-yourself encyclopedia. They’re among countless dubious and frequently ridiculous “facts” that make Wikipedia possibly the most widespread source of disinformation in human history.
Which is why I’m surprised to see Shira Klein, a respected scholar, devote any energy into proving that entries about the Holocaust are false. More baffling is her attempt to correct them by diving into Wikipedia’s rabbit warren of arcane rules for article review — administered by volunteer site police who gleefully hide behind pseudonyms.
I say that as someone who called out Wikipedia’s misinformation to its founder, Jimmy Wales, when I first stumbled on it in 2003, only two years after its creation. At the time, the entry for Rosa Parks said that no Black women who refused to give up their seat on a bus before her historic 1955 protest had cases deemed worthy of representation by the NAACP.
“That’s completely wrong!” I railed to Wales. Irene Morgan’s arrest on an interstate bus in Virginia was taken up by Thurgood Marshall, who took it to the Supreme Court. Their landmark 1946 ruling outlawed segregation in interstate transportation — facts I knew from having produced a PBS documentary about Morgan.
Wales wrote back, apologizing and telling me Parks’ page had been corrected and an entry added for Morgan. (Not knowing how Wikipedia worked then, I assumed he wrote it, though the author appears only as “Rosafan.”)
He invited me to contribute, writing: “I can only promise that editing Wikipedia is fun, and addictive,” signing it “Jimbo.”
Over the next few years, I did, creating entries for the 1947 and 1961 Freedom Rides, among other interests.
Over time, however, I saw the entries deteriorate, with dozens of unrelated people added to Freedom Ride rosters. Some changes made absolutely no sense: One gave Morgan’s birthplace as Toronto (it was Baltimore), and an inexplicably malicious attack in 2005 said Congress of Racial Equality co-founder George Houser died of AIDS (he lived in remarkably good health before passing in 2016 at 99).
Who gets their jollies doing this stuff?
For a few years, I attempted to correct the errors in the pages I created, and even succeeded in getting some of the pages locked down, at least temporarily. But eventually, I gave up.
I did respond, however, to a scurrilous rewrite of my own Wikipedia entry. I’ll spare the fallacious details, except to note that it said I was born in “the famously corrupt city of Chicago.” I suspect the rewrite was made by a disgruntled reader of a newspaper I edited, although I can’t prove it, as it was done anonymously.
I am hardly the only critic of Wikipedia’s veracity. Most media entities I have worked for have banned Wikipedia as an attributable source, though many allow it as a starting point in order to explore the resources cited in its pages. Wikipedia requires footnotes to support asserted facts in its entries, and these can be helpful resources of primary information.
“Wikipedia requires sourcing. It can be good to look at the sources,” said Paul Glader, a longtime Wall Street Journal staffer and current director of the McCandlish Phillips Journalism Institute at The King’s College in New York.
But citing Wikipedia itself is still banned in Glader’s classes — a restriction increasingly difficult because Wikipedia is often the first item that shows up in a Google search.
“Popularity doesn’t mean it has more veracity,” Glader added.
And that’s the heart of Klein’s problem. “Wikipedia’s strength lies in its enabling anyone to edit, democratizing knowledge like never before,” she writes — but she fails to realize that widespread accessibility is no guarantee of truth.
More critically, what good is an arbitration committee to evaluate those widely accessible entries if it allows its members to hide behind the same anonymity as hit-and-run posters? Though traditional encyclopedias had their biases (my childhood edition of World Book included the entry “N—–toe; see Brazil nut”), they were at least transparent about who their editors were, and their qualifications.
“Academia must also play its part to keep Wikipedia accurate,” Klein continues. “Scholars should uncover Wikipedia’s weaknesses and flag them for editors to fix, instead of snubbing Wikipedia as unreliable.”
While I absolutely understand Holocaust denial as something to be constantly combated, I respectfully disagree. By participating in Wikipedia’s laborious processes of review, academics give legitimacy to an inherently flawed enterprise.
If Wiki-aficionados truly want the site to earn credibility, they can start by requiring everyone, occasional contributors and arbitration committee members alike, to use their real names, period. It’s a campaign Klein and other academics would better spend their energy on.
In its millions of entries, Wikipedia does have one unimpeachable statement, however: “Wikipedia is not a reliable source for citations elsewhere on Wikipedia,” reads a posting about the site itself. “As a user-generated source, it can be edited by anyone at any time, and any information it contains at a particular time could be vandalism, a work in progress, or simply incorrect.”
That’s according to Wikipedia — and for once, it’s correct.
Correction: The original version of this article incorrectly stated Washington’s Wikipedia page had been vandalized with the words “notoriously corrupt city of Chicago.” It has been updated with the actual quote as “famously corrupt.”
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