Wikipedia’s biggest scandal: Industrial-scale blackmail

Is it possible to clean this house? Yes, but they won’t do it

Unfortunately, Wikipedia’s co-founder and figurehead Jimmy Wales probably isn’t the guy you’d go to to clean up corruption. In Kazahkstan, Wales effectively “licensed the Wikipedia brand” to former state bureaucrats, spontaneously creating a “Wikipedian of the Year” award (the first) for a former state media head. The consequence is that anything Kazahk-related is sympathetic to the controversial regime – at times, embarrassingly so.

Similarly, Wales long ago abandoned his devotion to neutrality and objectivity when one of his pet political causes is at stake – such as weakening individual data ownership rights to benefit large technology companies. Wales urged Wikipedia to “black out” three years ago, despite doing so under false pretences. Does anyone think Wikipedia today handles copyright topics fairly? Or Europe’s so-called right to be forgotten? If so, I have a bridge to sell you. Both Kazahkstan and SOPA undermine the claim that Wikipedia is the “encyclopedia anyone can edit”.

Wikipedia appears to be a miracle of collaboration – but without the right kind of governance structures, it was always ripe for gaming. There’s no reason a collaborative project should inevitably be gamed, if the necessary checks and procedures to prevent it are in place. But this is Wikipedia’s biggest problem: it prefers protecting its contributors above any other ethical concern. Given the choice between doing the right thing (producing a better Wikipedia) and protecting anonymity, the Wikipedia community has chosen anonymity every time.

Imagine if Wikipedia verified the identity of its contributors and did not permit anonymous editing, so every edit could be traced (not immediately, but eventually) to a real person. And also imagine that Wikipedia could sanction or ban contributors who violated its many rules, just as every other organisation on the planet does. The quality of the project would improve dramatically, while gaming it for fraud or blackmail would become extremely difficult. The individuals and businesses scammed recently had no way of checking if their email came from “a real Wikipedian”, because in Wikipedia’s eyes, everyone is “a real Wikipedian”. There’s no way of determining a contributor is a serial fraudster, because there is no identity checking. It’s against the “spirit of Wikipedia”. Wikipedia defines itself by its anonymity.

In fact, in a recent episode, one Wikipedian who reported another Wikipedian to the police for serious sexual charges found herself vilified by members of the “community” – the act had led to a fellow Wikipedian being "unmasked". And in the bizarre world of Wikipedia, no crime is greater.

The scams will go on, and on, and on – until the day comes when either Wikipedia is forked and run by grown-ups, or a new version harnesses all the useful parts of online collaboration, without the scams, frauds and petty crusades which anonymity permits. ®