State of Wikipedia report for November 2024
This month’s Wikipedia Chaos Index sits at 62, a 5% decrease from October.
After two months of increased submissions, the rate of new page submissions subsided slightly in October – which have also helped with the wait times for new pages, which are currently averaging approximately six weeks after submitting.
Conflict of interest investigations saw an increase in October; this is from a combination of submission reviews, and a few aggressive new editors working on investigations.
It is incredibly common for Wikipedia to get sued; specifically, it is common for the Wikimedia Foundation to be sued, as the non-profit organization who provides Wikipedia with its funding (and also manages the website’s technical infrastructure). However, as highlighted by a recent lawsuit filed by Indian newswire service ANI against the foundation, the process is often counterproductive, as the Wikimedia Foundation has no control over the site’s contents.
Their lawsuit, which accuses Wikipedia of publishing “defamatory content” about the newswire’s alleged subjectivity, is demanding roughly $237,000 in damages and ordering the foundation to take the page down – alongside demands for Wikipedia to reveal information about the users involved in the page (which Wikipedia has provided under sealed cover to the court).
All completely normal for a misguided lawsuit against Wikipedia – however, one aspect of the case has technology journalists and lawyers paying close attention. Following the Delhi court’s demands, the ANI Wikipedia page has been suspended, which has only happened in about 10 of 5,500 content takedown requests in the past 12 years (and none on the English Wikipedia before this). Though the outcome remains undecided, it will be an important case for anyone involved with the Wikipedia project to pay attention to, as companies and individuals look for more legal loopholes to try and influence the content found on the incredibly influential platform.
The Chaos Index is The Mather Group‘s 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.
