Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-05-01/Disinformation report

Disinformation report

At WikiCredCon, Wikipedia editors and Internet Archive discuss threats to trust in media

Since its foundation, Wikipedia has attracted a globally networked community of hundreds of thousands of editors who share the vision of producing freely available truth that is verifiable through reliable sources. While there are many other trustworthy information sources, Wikipedia also has an extraordinarily large audience that helped it become a major influence on global media. Wikipedia editors use several fact-checking processes and other editorial practices to maintain Wikipedia's quality. Readers come to Wikipedia because it has information that they like and trust, and editors post to Wikipedia because they want to serve those readers.

Wikipedia invites anyone with complaints about the site's limits to join in as editors themselves, and to participate in the platform's online, public and transparent editorial process. Complaints are welcome as part of the civil discourse and editorial process of building the encyclopedia. On the other hand, unfortunately, there are some entities who attack Wikipedia without civility and in bad faith. These may be individuals, organizations, corporations, or even governments, who all criticize Wikipedia because it shares information or media that they dislike. Sometimes, they may demand that editors bypass the usual editorial process to make an exception for presenting special content. At other times, there is no pretense of negotiation, and those targeting Wikipedia simply make demands that Wikipedia publish only statements or content that reflect a particular point of view, to the exclusion of other stakeholders. Sometimes, the attacks just take the form of harassment without a clear motivation.

While criticism can be valid, negativity never is, and Wikipedia remains one of the world's few attempts, if not the only one, at producing a community-governed, community-fact-checked, free of cost, multilingual and multicultural reference source for general interest.

Pointing to evidence of increased acts of hostility against Wikipedia editors is difficult to explain with digital media metrics alone. Still, the Wikimedia community is a network of actual humans who talk to each other, and enough of them have been observing a trend of increased attempts to spread misinformation in the media and bring that same misinformation into Wikipedia, as well as increased push-back against editors for applying our fact-checking process to those instances.

From 14 to 16 February, the Internet Archive hosted Wikipedia editors at WikiCredCon 2025 in person in San Francisco, where they gathered to discuss threats to trust in the media and threats to our editors. The Internet Archive and Wikipedia have common goals and common concerns, as both are non-profit organizations that provide free public access to their content, and both rely on crowdsourced contributions. The two organizations already collaborate in various ways: Wikipedia editors frequently access publications at Internet Archive to verify information, whereas since 2016 the Internet Archive has actively backed up digital links, which editors can cite in Wikipedia by using the InternetArchiveBot. While wiki editors convened at Internet Archive's headquarters to discuss common goals and obstacles, here are videos of people^[a] talking about the things that they thought were most important to share.

Conflict between politics and media

Jamie Flood – government censorship
Craig Newmark – Wikipedia is where facts go to live
Lane Rasberry – Editing Wikipedia is not a crime
Mary Mark Ockerbloom – disinformation threatens trust
Vic Sfriso – Wikimedia Argentina against misinformation
Quincy – disinformation in climate change

Community networking increases safety

Robin Isadora Brown – birds flock for safety
Colby Webster – social connections
Fabian Garcia – if you don't see yourself represented, then represent yourself
B – defend Wikipedia and journalism

Wikipedia + Internet Archive

Rosie Stephenson-Goodnight – Wayback Machine for multilingual fact-checking
Mark Graham – Internet Archive's Wayback Machine for fact-checking in Wikipedia
Sawood Alam – Wayback Machine Turn all References Blue
Maximilian Doerr – InternetArchiveBot archives sources for Wikipedia
Peter Meyer – Wikipedia and Internet Archive are allies

Wikipedia content development

Mahmoud Hashemi – Wiki Loves Monuments
Vipin SJ – Wikipedia Library
Kevin Payravi – WikiPortraits
Netha Hussain – misinformation and knowledge gaps in health information
Deena Larsen – electronic literature

Allies

Lane Rasberry – Universal Life Church
Sally Lehrman – Trust Project
Harsha Madhyastha – FABLE for Finding Aliases for Broken Links Efficiently
Swapneel Mehta – SimPPL for trust in media
Nevin Thompson – Hacks Hackers WikiCredCon Credibility Coalition for countering misinformation
Gaute Kokkvoll – Factiverse
Michael Nelson – Robust Links

Footnotes

^ Some of the people listed use pseudonyms for privacy, which are used for identification in the captions.

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1 May 2025 (all comments)

Disinformation report

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Could someone clarify what is meant by 'fact-checking process'? I ask, because I can think of nothing in Wikipedia editorial practice that either mandates such a thing, or even approximates it - it least as the term is normally used. Content certainly isn't normally 'fact-checked' before it is published, and in as much as it ever gets checked at all, it is generally only as a result of an individual choosing to do so, generally after noticing an issue. The general disclaimer sums this up nicely: Please be advised that nothing found here has necessarily been reviewed by people with the expertise required to provide you with complete, accurate, or reliable information, and I really don't think we should be claiming otherwise. AndyTheGrump (talk) 22:32, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There is Wikipedia and fact-checking, to which I contributed greatly. I would be happy to say all this in my own voice as an opinion piece, but there are lots of accurate ways to communicate that Wikipedia does much more fact checking than any other media organization. Bluerasberry (talk) 15:36, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Citation needed. AndyTheGrump (talk) 15:42, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Did you bother to check the 22 references given in the article Blue Rasberry linked for you. If you are going to blather on about fact checking, you should do some for yourself. (more below after dinner!) Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:45, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Which of those sources states that "Wikipedia does much more fact checking than any other media organization"? Not that it really matters, since it isn't how much you do, but how effective the process is that matters. AndyTheGrump (talk) 01:36, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think Bluerasberry is loosely using the term "fact checking" to mean "verifiability" when he says Wikipedia editors use several fact-checking processes. It doesn't mean that the verifiability has actually been carried out 100% of the time, i.e. verifiable≠verified. A word or two could be changed for more technical correctness, Wikipedia editors ~~use several fact-checking processes~~ enable verification and fact-checking with several processes, but I don't think that is particularly readable or necessary. In fact the more I think about it, I think the original is more correct: editors include all editors who ever improve the article, not just the first editor(s) who create an imcompletely fact-checked article. Surely that larger set of editors use several fact-checking processes. ☆ Bri (talk) 17:13, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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