A difficult line: the volunteer editors rewriting Wikipedia's arms trade pages
Roughly two dozen volunteer Wikipedia editors gathered at a London wikithon last week to improve the encyclopedia's arms trade pages, tackling subjects such as Palantir, Project Maven and Nitro-Chem.
A difficult line: the volunteer editors rewriting Wikipedia's arms trade pages
Inside the London wikithon
Last week, two dozen volunteers huddled around laptops in a central London classroom, sharing vegan Ethiopian food while editing Wikipedia's arms trade pages. Some of the wikipedia editors were veterans in their 70s; others were young students who had never registered an account before. Their targets include subjects such as Palantir, Project Maven and Nitro-Chem.
- Palantir
- Project Maven
- Nitro-Chem
The event was started by fellows from the n-Space programme at Somerset House Studios, with the aim of putting better-quality arms industry information into the public domain. Agnes Cameron, the group's co-founder, said Wikipedia pages about the arms industry are not always super-detailed.
Staying inside Wikipedia's rules
The organisers are careful to frame the event as factual editing rather than activism. Cameron stressed that attenders must follow Wikipedia's standards to the letter.
"This is not an anti-arms industry campaigning event. This is an event really about factual information on Wikipedia"
Wikipedia's rules forbid original research and drawing conclusions, so the wikithon's main goal is to gather publicly available information from other sources into one place. Cameron acknowledged that the group was toeing quite a difficult line, adding that difficult lines are important to toe. The organisers also prefer not to advertise the details of their edits, concerned that other editors could undo the work in bad faith.
Who edits Wikipedia
Wikipedia is written by roughly 270,000 active volunteers who decide what merits a page in the encyclopedia. The site has long faced questions over wikipedia editor diversity: just 19% of its biography entries are for women, and it has been accused of geographical bias towards the US and western Europe. In 2018, the physicist and Nobel prize winner Donna Strickland was deemed "not important enough" for a Wikipedia entry.
Hannah Cobb, another co-founder of the event, argued that the wikithon's diverse attendance helps rebalance that editor base.
- Previous arms industry wikithons in Manchester and London drew more than 60 would-be Wikipedians at a time
- Attendees have included activists, journalists, Quaker members and Cameron's mother
- Cobb said newcomers felt a sense of powerlessness when it comes to countering the narrative by big tech, by governments, and that editing Wikipedia is empowering
The conflict of interest question is not hypothetical. Editor Ksenia Coffman made extensive edits to remove what she found to be flattering and sympathetic entries about Nazi party officials. In 2021, the Croatian-language version of Wikipedia was found to have been commandeered by nationalist, far-right organisers making ideologically motivated edits. Cameron has said that "Wikipedia is fundamentally anti-fascist".
Next step: a formal WikiProject
Cameron hopes the meetings can be formalised into a WikiProject and adopted by WikiProject Military history, which she called far and away the most active project on Wikipedia by miles, and amazingly well run. The London wikithon is to continue for another session in the winter.
