Wikidata: Melania Trump was a “former sex worker and porn star”

Guest post by Wikipedia editor Fram

Editor’s note: Fram submitted the essay below to Wikipediocracy on June 23rd, 2019, in lieu of a statement that had apparently been requested by one or more of our forum members regarding actions that had been recently taken against him by the Wikimedia Foundation. We declined to publish the essay immediately, however, since this might have been seen as our “officially” taking sides in the dispute. At this point, we don’t think that really matters anymore, so we’re publishing this updated version (modified by Midsize “Somey” Jake and one or two others who have chosen to remain nameless), which gives the durations of the “vandal-edit” examples cited in the original. Please note that at the time of the original submission, none of these vandal-edits had been fixed.

Melania Trump was a “former sex worker and porn star” — or at least that’s what people visiting Wikimedia Commons, Simple-English Wikipedia (aimed mostly at children), and Wikidata (the Wikipedia data repository) read for nine days after her Wikidata entry was vandalized on June 15th, 2019.

This is just one example of a problem that has faced Wikidata for years without ever being formally addressed: The almost-complete lack of vandal fighters on the site. Wikidata prides itself on the enormous number of items stored there (database dumps of all Wikipedia articles, bibliographic information on millions of scientific articles, and an unknown amount of random information of little or no value at all). Many edits are made there every day (though most of these are small, repetitive changes made by bots), and they are even accepted as an “authority source” by the Library of Congress and the like.

But the actual number of editors, people interested not in their own pet subject but in keeping Wikidata correct and vandalism-free, is very small. Since they are all volunteers, it’s perfectly understandable that they don’t want to spend their time on boring tasks. But at the same time, Wikidata administrators and the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) want to use Wikidata as a central repository of data that is automatically shown on every language-version of Wikipedia.

One of the things they’ve done, largely without the Wikipedia community being aware of it, has been to show the description “tag” from Wikidata at the top of Wikipedia pages in mobile view. Wikipedia editors don’t see this description, nor are they able to change this description from Wikipedia. This has removed key editorial decision-making from Wikipedians, as well as vandalism control — even though this description is the first thing mobile viewers see for each article subject, and is also displayed in search engines and when hovering over links.

This issue was raised with the WMF in August 2016, but was largely shrugged off by WMF employees and apologists with responses such as “It seems… like a problem that doesn’t actually exist in practice.”

I then raised the issue at en.wiki in March 2017.

After a Request for Comment and much stalling from the WMF, they turned off this “feature” on en.wiki, though it was later revealed that they only did that for some cases, not all. The history of this whole sorry episode is documented, and efforts to get rid of these descriptions on en.wiki are still ongoing, more than two years later.

Apparently, no one at the WMF realized that if the English Wikipedia had these problems, then all other language versions would have them as well. And sure enough, it is painfully easy to find severe attacks on living people at Wikidata which remain in place for days or weeks because no regular vandalism checks are done there. These are then shown to people on Simple and Commons, but also on other non-English Wikimedia sites, including the French, German, and (especially) Spanish Wikipedias.

Mrs. Trump’s entry is one of the more egregious examples; she’s hardly an obscure topic, regardless of what you might think of her or her husband. But for nine days starting on June 15th, 2019, she was described as “First Lady of the United States, former Slovenian model, former sex worker and porn star” on Commons and the Simple-English Wikipedia.

Similar problems often occur with less-visible pages, but for the persons involved it can be just as hurtful (and in many cases also demonstrates another of the WMF’s gender-related problems).

Ana Villafañe was tagged as a “pornographic actress” for nine weeks, starting on June 8th. She isn’t a highly-notable person like Melania Trump (her en.wiki article only gets about 100 page views per day), but she still deserves some basic respect and protection from a site that claims to be an “authority control” for the world.

The same goes for Sara Ali Khan, labeled an “Indian pornographic actress” for four weeks starting on June 5th. She’s a fairly major (and non-pornographic) star in India; her article gets 6,000 page-views per day on en.wiki alone. The vandalism was hidden at en.wiki on June 11th, when an editor added a local short description, but it remained elsewhere.

Other examples:

• On June 11th, Mexican actor César Bono got a new name and was tagged as a porn actor for eight weeks
• Starting on June 6th, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, a large stadium in Australia, was described as a “gaydium” for three weeks
• Actress Emily Browning was renamed to “Camila Medina” on June 7th (at the top of the infobox to the right) for three weeks
• Nicolas del Caño’s English and Spanish labels were changed to a Spanish-vernacular insult (“Coño,” often used as a euphemism for “shit”); starting on June 8th, this lasted for six weeks

Popular Mexican actress Violeta Isfel was first labeled a pornographic actress on June 16th, and edit-warring over this continues to this day. The description was finally suppressed on en.wiki, but the WMF hasn’t taken the next logical step of doing the same for Wikipedias in other languages, failing badly in their job to protect living persons against such defamatory material. The description is still visible for every mobile reader of her page in Spanish (and note that mobile users now account for more than 50% of all readers).

A better-known example to most Wikipediocracy blog readers is Jason Momoa (star of Aquaman, “Khal Drogo” from Game of Thrones, and the husband of Lisa Bonet). His Spanish Wikipedia article gets more than 2000 page-views per day. In the first line of that article, Spanish mobile readers saw him described as an “actor, escritor, productor, director, modelo , homosexualizador de hombres.” I’m not fluent in Spanish, but I don’t think “homosexualizador de hombres” is something one would expect to see at the top of an encyclopedia article, even if it’s meant to be more flattering than insulting. This change was made on the 10th of June and lasted for five weeks, so apparently it simply wasn’t spotted by any regular vandal-fighters who may have happened by.

In the Portuguese language, Brazilian actors Tony Ramos and Antonio Calloni were both tagged on June 14th as porn actors for two weeks. (The latter was referred to as a “Russian porn actor and sunscreen,” according to Google Translate.)

Teala Dunn is a young actress with 3.6 million subscribers to her Youtube channel who has never appeared in an adult film, but not according to her Spanish Wikidata tags. There, she was tagged in December of 2017 as a “porn actress,” and that lasted for 18 months.

Max Berliner, an Argentine actor, was tagged in August of 2017 as a “porn actor” in English. Guess what — he still is, as of today (Sept. 6th).

Lastly, did you know that in the Mapuche language (spoken in Chile and Argentina), Billy Ray Cyrus has been described by Wikidata as a “chaman, actris porno y cantante de regaeton post modernista” since at least 2015?

Such vandalism happens every day, and to be fair, some of it is fixed reasonably quickly. For example, on June 23rd, right-wing French politician Marine Le Pen stopped existing completely on Wikidata, where you instead had to look for “Booba,” but only for about one full day. Meanwhile, Borussia Dortmund soccer player Leroy Sané became “dudu Sané,” but only for about two days. So we know it’s at least possible for the situation to improve.

The English Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation were seriously embarrassed by the Seigenthaler incident in 2005. This (among other factors) led to the creation of the Biographies of Living Persons (BLP) policy, and improved vandalism control — much of it through the use of highly efficient anti-vandalism bots. For high profile pages like Melania Trump’s, such vandalism normally remains there for a few minutes at most.

But while the English Wikipedia has taken its lessons to heart, the same cannot be said for the Wikimedia Foundation, which has left a known vulnerability in place for more than two years on a site notorious for its lack of vandal fighting — thereby exposing readers of numerous WMF sites to the results of these egregious attacks.