By Andreas Kolbe
See also Cover-up begins in Wikipedia’s Gibraltar scandal
The English Wikipedia and Wikimedia UK came in for criticism in the media last month over the Gibraltarpedia PR scandal. Roger Bamkin, a Wikimedia UK trustee and former chairman of the British charity supporting the Wikipedia website, had taken up a paid consultancy position for the government of Gibraltar, in a project designed “to market Gibraltar as a tourist product through Wikipedia”.
As an article in Wikipedia’s internal newsletter, The Signpost, reported, controversy focused specifically on the number of Gibraltar-related articles appearing in the “Did You Know …” (“DYK”) section of Wikipedia’s main page. This section of the Wikipedia main page features new work added to Wikipedia. Roger Bamkin had taken an active role in ensuring that articles related to his project appeared there, on Wikipedia’s most visible page, in a way that “seemed to some observers to blur his roles as a Wikimedia UK trustee, a paid consultant for the projects’ government partners, and an editor of the English Wikipedia”.
As reported in The Telegraph, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales expressed the view that having 17 Gibraltar DYKs in August, more than any other topic bar the Olympics, was “absurd”, and that it would be “wildly inappropriate for a board member of a chapter, or anyone else in an official role of any kind in a charity associated with Wikipedia, to take payment from customers in exchange for securing favorable placement on the front page of Wikipedia or anywhere else.”
The reach of Wikipedia’s front page should not be underestimated: it receives around 10 million views a day. A 2010 article noted that
Over the weekend, prominent placement on Wikipedia’s main page launched a nearly twenty-year-old Time magazine article about Scientology onto the Time site’s “most-read” list. The jump
…continue reading Why there is no end to the Gibraltarpedia scandal – or Jimmy Wales’ silence.