Wikipedia referees Scientology debate

Posted by: Douglas MacMillan on May 29

On its surface, Wikipedia would seem to be the Wild West of the Web, a site where everyone is invited to write and edit articles about almost any topic. But every once in a while, a light shines on the army of volunteers and litany of bureaucratic policies actually needed to keep Wikipedia running, and the illusion of freedom is broken.

On Friday, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee voted to bar several IP addresses linked to the Church of Scientology from making edits to some or all articles on the site, as The Register first reported. The committee, a senior group of volunteers who frequently review matters related to controversial and high-activity articles, found these users to be in frequent violation of the site’s “neutral point of view” principle – defined as content added or edited “as far as possible without bias” – among other policies.

A Wikipedia representative says the verdict was the result of an extended period of review, and that the committee “looked at all sides of the situation” before making a decision. Indeed, the committee also banned some Wikipedia users for making edits to the “Scientology” article that were critical of the organization. Bans on IP addresses are not permanent; site administrators can lift them or make other concessions.

Most of Wikipedia is edited by around 10,000 voracious volunteers. Some of them dedicate themselves to certain subject areas; others take on certain roles, like patrolling for bad grammar. Within that group, some 1,200 people are given administrative privileges to block individuals, and a highly-select panel of about 15 people arbitrate on matters where there’s a lot of disagreement. (For a colorful look at what kinds of people make up the “Wikisociety,” I highly recommend Jonathan Dee’s New York Times Magazine article from July 2007, “All the News That’s Fit to Print Out”.)

As the Scientology decision shows, policing the site involves making big, sometimes unpopular decisions as much as it does keeping a careful watch. Karin Puow, spokeswoman for the Church of Scientology, says her organization regularly monitors the Internet for wrong information about its belief system and members. After this ruling, Puow says there remain “gross inaccuracies” on the Scientology article on Wikipedia that she hopes will eventually be corrected. But for the time being, her group’s ability to do that have been weakened.

Many companies have also seen IP addresses blocked from Wikipedia for having employees edit articles about their own brands and products, or pages about competitors. Self-serving edits are fine, but only if they’re “adding valuable context” says Jay Walsh, head of communications for Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia.

Where you draw the line between valuable context and bias is not always clear. Can a PR agency routinely add info about a client’s new products? Should rival software makers edit out assertions on each others’ articles they believe to be false?

The job of policing Wikipedia has escalated to these larger questions of ethics. Earlier in the life of the site, the challenges were more technological. In 2004, a hacker with the handle “Willy on Wheels” began adding the words “on wheels” to the titles of thousands of articles on the site.

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.businessweek.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/