The swirling controversy over how to define the term “recession” has now hit Wikipedia. After proponents engaged in a furious editing duel of affected pages, Wikipedia suspended most of the edits to the entry for “recession” as well as “business cycle.” Depending on one’s politics, the decision represents either a last-ditch effort to preserve the site’s neutrality or an abandonment to ideological interests. Whichever side you are on, you should be happy the fight is on…and confident that it will end soon.
Although Wikipedia, one of the most visited sites on the web, repeatedly insists that its articles should never be used as the sole source for any particular fact, the site’s pages are increasingly being treated as authoritative in news articles and scientific papers.
The good news is that we’ve been down this road before.
Much of the time.
Locking Wikipedia pages to prevent partisan editing is nothing new. Joe Biden’s entrance is partially locked after repeated episodes of what the site calls vandalism. The same goes for Hillary Clinton. The same goes for Donald Trump’s page, which the haters went on to take down in its entirety. And no one will be surprised to learn that the page designated “2021 United States Capitol Attack” is also partly locked. The fierce argument rages even over the name of the page.
Wikipedia editors also took action when battles erupted over issues other than electoral politics. In 2017, they locked down Garfield’s page (the cat, not the president) after a dispute over the cartoon character’s gender exploded into “a 60-hour edit war”. During Dave Gettelman’s tenure as GM of the New York Giants, edits to his page were put on hold after vandalism by angry fans, one of whom edited Gettelman’s job description to read “ruin.” the team. And let’s not forget the infamous episode where Wikipedia locked down the entry on the Whopper sandwich sold by Burger King after someone changed the ingredient list to read…well, let’s not get into that. .
But if angry arguments and the temporary suspension of editing are so frequent, why don’t we remember them?
Because they always settle.
We know this because social scientists, fascinated by Wikipedia’s belief that we can pull together the most abstruse or technical knowledge, have spent years studying how the site is edited.
For example, researchers have long understood that Wikipedia edits tend to increase sharply in response to intense politicization of a current issue, as well as in response to other major social disruptions, such as the appearance of ‘a sickness. But no matter how large the initial wave of Wikipedia edits when an event comes to public attention, over time editing patterns regress toward the mean.
On the other hand, although the editing bots on Wikipedia are engaged in a sustained and often destructive war, their influence may be waning. An analysis published in April 2022 reviewed all references added to Wikipedia articles up to June 2019 and found not only a large increase in sources referred to by identifiers such as ISBN or DOI, but also that the vast majority of uploads were made by humans (i.e., not bots) who were registered (i.e., not anonymous) users. In other words, regardless of the fights going on, finding the real facts seems to be getting better.
Yes, in the edition of Wikipedia as elsewhere, the Resistance lives. And as the recent struggle over the definition of recession reminds us, whatever one wishes to call the opposite sentiment also lives. The editors are volunteers. Some are experts, others amateurs; some are quiet, some are not. It’s no surprise that major arguments sometimes erupt and can sometimes turn petty and vicious.
But this inevitable truth should not be discouraging. When knowledge comes from the crowd, the strong disparities of point of view must be considered as a good. A 2019 study in Nature Human Behavior concluded that Wikipedia’s best articles often result when editors are politically biased — even when the articles in question aren’t about politics but about science. After examining “discussion” pages (where Wikipedians argue over content), the authors found that “ideologically polarized teams engage in longer, more constructive, competitive, and substantially focused yet linguistically diverse debates than teams of ideological moderates”.
Hmmm. Constructive, substantial and focused debate. Where do you find this online? Perhaps lurking in all of this data is a “median editor theory” that articles will move away from extremes toward consensus over time.
It is unfortunate that the dispute over what constitutes a recession has grown so heated that publishing has had to be suspended. But if history is our guide, cool heads will soon prevail, the Wikipedia entry will settle around a relatively neutral view, and those looking for a fight will move on to the next hot topic.
© 2022 Bloomberg L.P.
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