JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
With over 7 million English language entries, Wikipedia, the entirely volunteer-edited online encyclopedia, has been called the biggest database of human knowledge in the world. It is consistently one of the most visited websites in the world, and in its nearly 25-year history, the huge variety of topics on the site have been criticized for being crowdsourced, frivolous and inaccurate. But in his recent article for The Verge, Josh Dzieza argues that Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of objective, accurate information to be found on the internet. And he says that Wikipedia is under attack from political forces who want to shape its content. Josh joins us now. Welcome.
JOSH DZIEZA: Hi.
SUMMERS: So before we get started, I do just want to acknowledge that NPR's CEO Katherine Maher was previously the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. Josh, your piece opens with this anecdote. It's from Inauguration Day back in January, and that is when a prominent Trump ally, Elon Musk, made straight-arm gestures at an inauguration event. And those gestures, to many observers, appeared to be a Nazi salute. And I'm sure many people probably remember there was this massive global debate over how to interpret what Musk did. And that was a bit that was also playing out on Wikipedia. Can you just tell us what it looked like there?
DZIEZA: Yeah, it was interesting. The debate on Wikipedia looks a lot like the debate everywhere else initially. You had people who believed strongly it was Nazi salute, people who believed that it wasn't. It was a huge amount of debate. It ended up being about 7,000 words over several days to settle a couple sentences. But it was remarkable, given what was happening in the rest of the media and on social media, that people more or less came to a consensus about something they could all live with.
SUMMERS: Now, this is, of course, just one incident, one moment in time, but what does it tell us more broadly about the type of community that Wikipedia is?
DZIEZA: Wikipedia is governed by process. It's developed a lot of rules over the years, kind of in response to all the challenges of open online discourse. And the core ones are basically that any assertion needs to have a source. It should be evaluated for its reliability. You should try to stay neutral, and that you can't do your own original research. And that, coupled with a bunch of ground rules of how you should discuss things - that you should work towards consensus, that you should avoid personal attacks, things like that - means that really contentious topics kind of steers towards some consensus rather than splitting apart into factions or dissolving into anarchy.
SUMMERS: Wikipedia is supported by donations. So that means, as you note in the piece, that there is no existing government funding to cut off. There are no advertisers to boycott. And even so, the site, as well as its editors that are volunteers, have come under threat from government officials around the world. Can you give us some examples of what that has looked like elsewhere outside of the United States?
DZIEZA: Yeah, so at the outset of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, you had accusations from politicians and state-aligned media that the site was biased, anti-Russian, promulgating fake news, things like that. At the same time, you had online vigilantes who were exposing and harassing editors of Wikipedia. You had legal action. The state declared one editor a foreign agent. You had some of the people who were doxed be arrested. And so it was kind of this multipronged attack. At the same time, you had people trying to edit it towards a Russian perspective.
SUMMERS: The Trump administration has directly challenged the legitimacy of Wikipedia. Why do you think that is?
DZIEZA: I think you can see it as part of a larger attack against independent media, against journalism, against academia. Wikipedia is one of these institutions that, you know, it's quite stubbornly fact-based, and it's tremendously popular and tremendously influential. I mean, it's the first thing many people say, even at a time when many people don't trust the media. People generally trust Wikipedia.
SUMMERS: We've been speaking with Josh Dzieza of The Verge. Thank you so much.
DZIEZA: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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