Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-12-24/Special report

A couple weeks ago there was an article in Quillette about the English Wikipedia, in the context of our recent fork Justapedia. While there's plenty to discuss about the majority of the article — which can be read about in this month's In the media column — there is one particular rhetorical aside that caught my eye. It's brought up briefly, almost in passing, and the article moves on with its argument. But it's fairly interesting, and I think warrants some closer examination. Here is what it says:

An example of such a case, in which the problems with a Wikipedia article cannot be reduced to left vs. right, concerns the hacktivist “Cyber Anakin.” In 2022, Cyber Anakin launched an attack against Chinese computer networks that included government websites, satellite interfaces, and various industry- and infrastructure-related systems. In retaliation, most of the biographical details were removed from Cyber Anakin’s Wikipedia article, and the Taiwan News reports that this was likely done by employees or sympathizers of Xi Jinping's regime. These removals from the Wikipedia article provoked a further round of attacks against Chinese government websites by the hacker group known as Anonymous.

To an outside observer, removing information from someone’s biography in order to retaliate against a hacker looks like an abuse of Wikipedia. But from the standpoint of Wikipedia’s internal rules, the removals were done by means of (mostly) legitimate editing processes, with the perpetrators arguing extensively on the article’s talk page for why their removals were justified. Perhaps more importantly, the quantity of text posted to justify these removals was so immense that, in the words of one outside commenter, "most editors would walk away in an instant." For these reasons, the removals from Cyber Anakin's Wikipedia article have never been undone. But the removed material has been added back in his Justapedia article, and consequently, as of this writing, the Justapedia article about Cyber Anakin is around four times the Wikipedia article's length.