By The Mather Group, LLC

The Chaos Index is our proprietary metric for measuring turbulence throughout Wikipedia and tracking the community’s current sentiment towards corporate-related pages. The index measures community actions such as editing frequency, content deletion, message board posts, and many other activities that contribute to unstable corporate page environments.

This month, the Wikipedia Chaos Index sits at 65, as the high period of activity from April and May has begun to calm down a bit. This is typical – as public companies report to shareholders in April, there is often a lot of activity on corporate pages, which spurns a lot of edits, COI posts and the like. In addition, editorial activity remains at a high point around fighting promotionalism; with an uptick in COI-related activity (from posts to investigations) across the board. And, continuing a trend we’ve seen throughout 2023, sockpuppet investigations continue at extremely high levels for the third month in a row, a prescient reminder of the handful of dedicated editors fighting vandalism and promotional editing on the platform.

With over 300 different language editions available throughout the world, Wikipedia is one of the most translated sources of information in human history, an expansive project held together by humanity’s collective desire to share knowledge and connect with each other around the world. But how do 300 different languages and hundreds of thousands of editors maintain their editorial standards?  The answer is a lot more complicated than it sounds and has stepped into the spotlight more in 2023 – in part thanks to Wikipedia’s new visual design, which makes it much easier to access every existing language edition of a specific article (for example: the New York Yankees have Wikipedia pages in 53 different languages). But just because these language editions are so closely linked together, does not mean their content – or how that content is managed editorially – is. Every language edition of Wikipedia has its own set of independent editorial guidelines, which can make managing multiple language editions at the same time extremely difficult. Did you know every edit to the Persian Wikipedia has to be reviewed before it goes live? Or how about the Italian Wikipedia, and how it pulls website links into its infoboxes from Wikidata?

When considering monitoring or editing a non-English Wikipedia article, there are many variables to consider; every new language demands its own highly individualized strategy, from finding localized sourcing to managing editorial discussions and international vandalism attempts. With so many unique virtual landscapes to navigate, having a plan in place is key – and as always, we’re here to help as a partner in forming a holistic strategy to updating and maintaining one’s Wikipedia presence… no matter what language edition it might show up on, from English to Dzongkha to Uzbek (and everything in between).

The Mather Group, LLC is a Capitol Communicator sponsor.