September 30, 2007
Wikipedia wars in Darfur
There have been lots of stories recently about companies and individuals getting caught red-handed altering their entries on Wikipedia. (Just in case you don't know, Wikipedia is a free encyclopaedia, made up of millions of entries written and re-written by internet users across the globe. Anyone can go online at any time and tweak or completely re-write any entry.)
I was reading a story about one company which had been exposed for deleting some embarrassing paragraphs in its Wiki profile, when I suddenly thought 'Wouldn't it be a great story if I could catch someone trying to sabotage or censor Wikipedia's entry on the Darfur conflict'.
[This is what is known in the trade as blue-sky journalism. You lie back and think ‘Wouldn't it be a good story if X happened' then go out and try and prove that X happened. Sometimes it works (‘Bill Clinton was around in the 60s… Wouldn't it be a great story if we could get him to admit he smoked dope…'). Mostly it doesn't.]
So back to Darfur and Wikipedia.
There has been a huge propaganda battle running in the background of the Darfur conflict since soon after it began. Campaigners on all sides of the conflict have used every platform at their disposal to push their arguments on to the public. They have promoted different analytical algorithms to estimate the number of dead - anywhere from 9,000 to half a million depending on which study you believe. They have launched treatises and books and websites about definitions of genocide, about who started which battle, about who bombed who when, with whose military hardware. Google Earth got together with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to map attacks. Even the over-hyped virtual world Second Life joined in with its own virtual Camp Darfur.
So it wouldn't be beyond the bounds of reason, I thought, for one of these interested parties, perhaps on the pro-government side of the argument, to have used the world's largest interactive encyclopaedia to push its position. Wikipedia is widely read and respected and believed. Whoever controls its entries potentially controls a large slice of public opinion. All you would have to do would be to go to the site and anonymously edit the death count figures or change a few paragraphs.
So I tracked down the tool that was used to expose most of the corporate Wikipedia-editing scandals - WikiScanner - and set it going analysing the Darfur conflict entry in question.
And after many hours of checking Wikipedia edit records, I can now exclusively reveal that there have in fact been a series of concerted campaigns to sabotage the Wikipedia entry on the Darfur conflict. But, as far as I can tell, they haven't been mounted by the Sudanese government or the online arm of the Janjaweed.
According to data collected, the most persistent sabotage effort on the Darfur entry to date was mounted by the students of the Oakland Schools of Farmington, Michigan, U.S.A. Through February this year, and on one occasion last year, people logged on to their computer network made 18 changes to the Wikipedia entry on Darfur. They had great fun inserting the word "not" into sentences like "While a recent British Parliamentary Report estimates that over 300,000 people have already died" - changing it to "While a recent British Parliamentary Report estimates that over 300,000 people have not already died". Others enjoyed themselves spraying the entry with Wiki graffiti - "{{main|History of Darfur}} (chow has a very small penis)".
Close behind with 10 changes to the Darfur conflict entry were the young people of Collegeville, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. There they got creative with the passage that described the start of the conflict:
The conflict began in Lance's house when his father and mother rebeled against the school lunch ladies. The lunch ladies caught by surprise, had very few spoons in the region, and — since a large proportion of the Sudanese soldiers were of Darfur origin — distrusted many of its own units…
Another 10 edits were made by the computer users of Austin Independent School District (Austin, Texas, U.S.A). They used the tried and tested Wiki graffiti method - '''Genisis Maycheck smells like rotton seaweed'''
Yet another ten changes came from Broome - Tioga Boces (Binghamton, New York) - "This is a fake page. All information is false" - "So who really cares about all this? Seriously? Anybody? Didnt think so." Their edits were topped off with a quick re-spelling of ‘Janjaweed' as ‘Ganjaweed'.
And so on and on and on.
So what have we learned from this exercise - apart from the fact that most Wikipedia "editors" are infantile American teenagers with too much time on their hands? (And that blue-sky journalism really doesn't work.)
One thing I did learn, after a bit more digging, is that there actually is a decent article or study to be written about how the Darfur conflict has been recorded on Wikipedia.
Just look at the first ever entry on the conflict written in May 2004.
The Darfur Genocide is an ongoing, continual bombardment of the city of Darfur in Southern Sudan by the Janjaweed, the Sudanese government's armed militia.After two groups (the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice & Equality Movement) accused the Sudanese government of favoritism toward Arabs, President Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir dispatched the Janjaweed, which carried out massive ground and aerial attacks. More than 1 million civilians were uprooted from their homes, and thousands of civilians have been killed; however, this seemed to legitimatize the aforementioned groups' claims; Arabs were relatively unaffected.
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan recently authorized force by the UN peacekeepers in Darfur, if any "imminent danger" is spotted toward civilians. The Janjaweed has committed many human rights violations, including murder, rape, and the UN states that the Janjaweed is systematically starving the refugees. In many ways, this genocide is similar to the Rwandan genocide that eventually killed over 800,000 Rwandan civilians, and led to a coup-d'état.
[Just so you know, Darfur isn't a city and it isn't in southern Sudan.]
And compare it to the current entry - 8,265 words long with 155 footnotes and 26 sub-sections.
[Obviously infinitely better - but not perfect. It is no longer possible, if it ever was, to boil down Darfur to a fight between two "sides".]
Thanks to the openness of Wikipedia's system, you can track every step and edit from the first entry all the way though to the present day. The change logs are effectively a minutely detailed record of the shifts in the popular understanding of the conflict. Over time, the recorded death count figures have surged and plummeted, different academic sources have risen in prominence then sunk into oblivion. Different celebrities have emerged as leading spokespeople for the Save Darfur Coalition, then lost interest. Paragraphs, whole passages, sub-clauses, sentences and emotive adjectives have appeared, disappeared, shifted around and been re-interpreted. And no doubt, there has also been a bit of propaganda pushing going on in there somewhere.
Each of those changes could be mapped against real-time events on the ground and shifts in international attitudes and responses to the conflict. It would make a fascinating article stroke mini academic study.
If only I had the time to research and write it.
Posted by aheavens at September 30, 2007 7:44 PM
Comments
You're right, it would make for a fascinating study -it has already made a great post.
I wonder what percentage of articles are edited by American high school students, and if the majority of these fall into homework topics.
Posted by: William Deed at October 1, 2007 12:00 AM
Man, this is VERY interesting Andrew. Someone should look into this a little more - there's got to be a good story here.
Posted by: Erik Hersman at October 2, 2007 6:42 AM