By Dolores Haze

Numerous Wikipedia articles about the Dark Web, and various sites and entities operating within it, contain links to forums and websites supporting activities that would generally be described as criminal — selling drugs, hacking secure networks, stealing credit card numbers, and so forth. Sometimes, links to fake websites are added by the criminals themselves as part of their efforts to ensnare people (many of whom are also criminals) into parting with personal or financial details. Many have reported being scammed this way, with Wikipedia acting as an otherwise innocent-looking gateway into the scams and frauds of the Dark Web.

There are no background checks on editors in this (or any other) topic area, so any thief, drug dealer, or pedophile could be editing articles about the Dark Web with impunity. Recently we noticed that someone tried to draw attention to the problem on Jimmy Wales’ talk page, providing numerous examples. Unfortunately, the responses from Wikipedians were not very helpful. One claimed the person was “promoting censorship,” though all he was actually doing was expressing his disapproval of Wikipedia linking to criminal websites. Another even argued that linking to websites that sell and trade child pornography would be “fine,” as long as the sites don’t host any of the child-porn images themselves! The sheer repulsiveness of this stance should be obvious; even sites that specialize in hardcore pornography don’t intentionally carry such links. Hopefully — hopefully — the person in question isn’t typical of most Wikipedians, and we can safely shift our focus to… someone else.

Meet the editors: Deku-shrub

Cute, but looks can be deceiving.

At least one convicted child-porn possessor that we know about has been editing in

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