The price we pay for a free encyclopaedia

Wikipedia’s rules have turned the great gift of freedom against itself. Rather than defeat gatekeeping, Wikipedia encourages a particularly invidious form of it

- Rahul Sagar

Wikipedia's leaders are conscious of the threat of bias (as co-founder Jimmy Wales's intervention shows). The problem is that they try to combat bias through procedural rules.

(AP)

The second most viewed page on Wikipedia in the past week was its entry on the blockbuster Dhurandhar 2. The excitement was the result of media coverage of a tussle between editors of the entry over whether to label the film “propaganda”.

So intense was the “edit war” that Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, was compelled to remind the editors in favour of describing the film as “propaganda” that the website is meant to uphold a “neutral point of view”. When challenged, Wales conceded to the disgruntled editors that they could note that “reliable sources” had described the film as propaganda. Thereupon, these editors began copiously citing reviews in Left-wing publications that described the film as “propaganda”. Consequently, the term “propaganda” now appears over 25 times in the entry on Dhurandhar 2. By contrast, the term appears three times on the page for Wolf Warrior 2. and only once for Top Gun: Maverick — films that were actively endorsed by governments in China and America.

The Dhurandhar 2 imbroglio underscores serious deficiencies in the Wikipedia enterprise. The first is blindness to self-interest. Wikipedia prides itself on being a “free encyclopedia” What this really means is that its editors perform unpaid labour. Now, unless Wikipedia has miraculously solved the eternal question of how to make humans genuinely selfless, we must assume that editors who devote countless hours to writing, editing, and disputing entries on “contentious” topics have a strong interest in them — in other words, they are likely ideologues or partisans.