by Jar’edo Wens, Special Correspondent on Wikipedia hoaxes

The most viewed article on Wikipedia for the week ending 28 March was a short article about the passports of the tiny country of Bhutan. 1,771,673 page loads. The link to the article was widely shared on social media sites. Did the world develop a sudden interest in Bhutanese passports? No, the reason people were looking at that particular Wikipedia article was because the page included an audio file with what sounded like an auto-tuned racist caricature of an Asian accent reading the article text.

No Wikipedia admin had the sense to delete the audio file as the tasteless joke that it so clearly was. It was easy for people flooding in from Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and elsewhere to overwhelm the “consensus” and have the file remain on the page. Several people argued that because the uploader of the file, KuchenZimjah, claimed to be from Bhutan, it could not be considered racist. It stayed until someone finally made a replacement and the original was deleted as unused.

As is typical in these cases, no one followed up or tried to learn anything from what had happened. KuchenZimjah was not blocked or even warned for uploading the file (in fact, several people thanked him for the joke). No one bothered to look at the other articles KuchenZimjah had created or the files he uploaded. Here’s what someone doing due diligence would have found without a great deal of effort.

…continue reading Bhutanese Passport – what does the hoax say?