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The fact that anyone can edit Wikipedia should mean it's rife with disinformation. But editors say it's the reason the online encyclopedia works so well.
Every second, more than 8000 people read Wikipedia. Every minute, there are about 350 edits to the site. It's the most-read reference ever.
This, of course, is according to Wikipedia - a sentence that would have been unlikely to appear in an article even a few years ago.
But in a world where Meta has removed fact-checkers and AI gives laughably inaccurate answers, Wikipedia has emerged as a surprisingly reliable and increasingly respected source of information.
"It's comparable if not better than other encyclopedia sources and people have come to realise more recently - because of disinformation efforts and more knowledge about the efforts going on to sort of hijack information on the internet - how reliable Wikipedia can be," says a Kiwi Wikipedia editor Siobhan Leachman.
Axel Downard-Wilke has been editing the site for about 15 years, and he says that in that time, perceptions have changed. In a recent conversation with a visitor to New Zealand, he learned that her German university told students not to use the site.
"I said 'wow, that is really quite an outdated thinking. It's quite common for an institution [to have] had this view say 10 years ago, but it has really shifted quite significantly over the last decade where Wikipedia has become much more accepted as a reliable source.'"
In today's episode of The Detail, Kiwi 'Wikipedians' Leachman and Downard-Wilke explain the process behind editing the site, the checks in place to keep the site factual, and how perceptions of its reliability have changed over the years.
The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit that hosts Wikipedia, among other sites. But they aren't responsible for the content. That's the job of some 126,000 'active', volunteer editors around the globe.
Here in New Zealand, there are 480 active editors.
"Anyone can be an editor," says Downard-Wilke.
"It says on the homepage 'welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit'. And it's true. You don't even have to have an account on Wikipedia before you can edit, you can just have a go.
"So how can this possibly work? And I've heard somebody say that Wikipedia is this thing on the internet that in theory cannot possibly work, but in practice it does. And the reason that it does work is that there are so many editors who keep an eye on things that if something crops up that is outside of the rules or shouldn't be there then it gets removed again, and so that's how it regulates itself."
There are also automated processes to keep the site clean.
"There are usually bored teenagers who add the word poo to articles, and it doesn't even need human intervention, so there's automated processes that reliably remove those kinds of vandalism within seconds," says Downard-Wilke.
But 'poo' isn't the big worry when it comes to the site.
There's a long list of examples of misinformation being planted, sometimes by individuals and sometimes by organisations or governments.
"Unlike social media, Wikipedia has quite solid processes in place and so content is supposed to be backed up with reliable secondary sources. So that in itself is a very steep hurdle to overcome for those who try and add disinformation in article."
There are rules about 'edit wars' and processes for solving disputes. When the macron started appearing in more New Zealand newspapers several years ago, Downard-Wilkes was one of the editors here who started introducing it to Wikipedia.
But not everyone agreed with that decision - there was another editor who kept removing the macrons, so eventually the dispute went through a process and was sent to an uninvolved editor in the UK to make the decision.
Despite the fact that there are millions of articles on Wikipedia (nearly 7 million in English alone), Leachman says it's hard for disinformation to hide, even in highly specific corners of the site. She is most interested in biodiversity, and edits articles about endemic moths.
"This is a very niche area for editors to be involved in and the articles could easily have information in them which is not accurate. But because there are people like me who are passionate about those particular areas, we're very careful about watching the page histories and editing those articles. If we spot information like that in there, if you can't back it up, there are processes to be able to revert or remove information that's not accurate."
But even with all these processes in place, she says it's important for readers to stay vigilant.
"You should always check and just be a little bit suspicious of what you're reading and just double check your sources or the sources that the person who [is] presenting you that information is giving you, so that you make sure that you know where the information is coming from."
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