*Times of India : 'The vandals of Wiki'*
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/The-vandals-of-Wiki/articleshow/47…
( Article appeared on TOI Delhi on 5th July and Mumbai on 6th July print
editions. )
For the better part of June 30, Kolkata was India's largest city and Bangla
was the government's official language along with Hindi and Indian English.
The sly attempt at misinformation also featured the national motto
'Satyameva Jayate' written in Bangla script on Wikipedia's 'India'
page.
Many hours later, an administrator who goes by the username SpacemanSpiff
landed on the page, saw all the telltale signs of a vandal attack, and
scrubbed it clean of the errors. This was right after a round of
firefighting on the pages of Jawaharlal Nehru and his family, where an
anonymous vandal had tried to pass off the late PM's grandfather as a
Muslim.
Vandalism is a fact of life at Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that
anyone can edit. Administrators like Spacemanspiff are senior editors who,
over the years, have been entrusted by the Wikipedia community to protect,
delete or restore pages, and even block notorious editors.
As* SpacemanSpiff* reminded fellow volunteers on the India notice board
about the need to keep a watch on the Nehru wikis, another editor
remembered that similar attempts were made in 2014. "This is not a new meme
on or off-Wiki. Parallel attempts to establish that Feroze Gandhi was
Muslim are even more common," writes Abecedare.
The popular site sees vandals of all kinds, says* A Ravishankar*, program
director at the Wikimedia Chapter in India. Newbies sometimes click the
edit button on a page to make some trivial changes. Some vengeful ones go
on a rampage when editors reject their edits due to insufficient citation
or poor sourcing. Then there are the passionate hordes that descend on
their pet topics, mostly entries about religion and politics. The only way
to deal with vandalism is by remaining vigilant, says Ravishankar.
What's more insidious and hard to rein in are changes by editors who are
paid to twist the rules at Wikipedia so that their clients' pages sparkle.
"We've had PR agencies editing pages for their clients, including actors.
IIPM was a prime example of such paid editing," claims Ravishankar. The
now-defunct business school allegedly got help from a senior editor called
Wifione and an army of sock puppets (bogus user accounts) to keep out
negative information about it between the years 2010 and 2012. They were
reportedly reverted after severe backlash from within Wikipedia.
Internationally, blog writers for Wikipediocracy, a review site examining
Wiki's flaws, have criticized Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that
runs the site, for not doing much to allay allegations that Croatian and
Kazakh Wikipedias have been manipulated, sometimes by the government
machinery itself. Bots such as @parliamentedits (UK) and @congressedits
(US) came up to track anonymous edits done from official IPs after several
instances of tinkering by parliamentarians and Congressmen surfaced. A
similar bot from India, @AnonGoIWPEdits, linked the Nehru edits to an IP
address belonging to the National Informatics Centre.
The reason why so many people flock to get the content right on Wikipedia
is the number of page views it gets. Indian users account for 4.1% of the
total page views on the site. In December 2014 alone, there were 50,000
edits from the country with 'India' itself being the top edited entry for
that year.
Others on the most-edited list include wikis of actors Vijay, Shah Rukh
Khan, Rajinikanth and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. Curiously, Hyderabad, Mumbai,
Kerala, Mahatma Gandhi and Hinduism also made it to this list as per data
generated by the Centre For Internet and Society (CIS) from the Wikimedia
database. Trending news items also quickly make their way in. PM Narendra
Modi's estranged wife Jashodaben got a wiki last year; so did the first
Indian in NBA Satnam Singh Bhamara, says Tanveer Hasan, programme officer,
CIS-Access to Knowledge.
For all this buzz, India has followed a global trend of slowdown in the
number of edits on the English language Wikipedia. "When Wiki started in
2001, the first generation of editors was in their 20s. Many of them have
moved out due to family and professional commitments and not many new
editors have replaced them," says Ravishankar. Senior editor* Tinu Cherian
Abraham *remembers starting off in 2005 and creating entries from scratch
about anything and everything, from a historic fort near Bangalore to
villages in Kerala. He also used to organize meet-ups in various cities to
create awareness about the site and recruit more editors. Though he still
edits, he says he doesn't have much time for anything else.
For now, the action has shifted to Indian language Wikipedias, where
smaller and vibrant communities are busy creating pages and correcting
errors. There are nearly 2,600 editors in English and close to 10,000 in
Indian languages now. Either way, vandals have their hands full.
Regards
Tinu Cherian
Disclaimer: Non-commercial reproduction of the article by Sandhya Soman /
Times of India. All copyrights are respectfully acknowledged.