By now, there really should be no doubt in your mind - global warming is real,
it’s man-made and it threatens every single aspect of our lives.
And yet, if you go on Wikipedia these days,
you’ll still find people hell-bent on denying the science of climate change,
and they’re doing their best to warp the truth by rewriting it.
There is a strong consensus that global surface temperatures have increased…
HAVE NOT INCREASED!... in recent decades. That the trend… THE POLITICAL TREND!... is
caused by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases… ALLEGED EMISSIONS!
At the grand age of 20, Wikipedia is one of the world’s most popular websites.
The online encyclopaedia gets more than 9 billion page views every month
and that’s just in the English version.
So what’s written there actually matters.
But the thing about Wikipedia is that anyone - literally anyone with
an internet connection - can edit what’s in it.
And this makes it vulnerable to manipulation.
Wikipedia has many rules to prevent
abuse. But in reality, it's actually quite easy to distort articles.
And the people denying the very existence of global warming know it.
They’ve been waging an editing war on Wikipedia to get their views across.
They'll put a sentence at the very top that says, “Everything on this page is a hoax”.
Instead of the first sentence saying so and so is a climate change denier,
they want the first sentence to say so and so is a
climate policy analyst.
I’m Marco Silva and this is BBC Trending.
In this special series,
we’re looking at how disinformation is hindering the fight against catastrophic climate change.
There’s an information war playing out on Wikipedia.
The platform has for long been plagued by climate denial, pseudoscience, bad information.
But a group of volunteers is working tirelessly to keep deniers at bay.
How good a job are they doing? And can they really
be expected to patrol Wikipedia in hundreds of different languages?
My name is David Tetta. I'm one of the volunteer editors for Wikipedia’s climate change page and
before I worked at the US Environmental Protection Agency from 1979 to the beginning of 2015.
So it's fair to say that the protection of the environment has been pretty central to your life?
Yeah, I would say so.
David lives in a small, tight-knit community in northern California. You know,
the type of community where your neighbours can just walk into your house at any time.
Hang on just one sec. Sorry. No worries, Inga. I'm in the middle of an interview…
And it was while chatting to his neighbours that David first thought of joining Wikipedia.
I was noticing in 2019 how so many of those conversations, no matter what the original topic,
seemed to evolve into people expressing their fear about the environment,
about the changing climate, about the future.
Extreme conditions leading to extreme concern,
as scientists say climate change shows no signs of slowing its deadly rampage.
I thought I'm retired, I have time on my hands. And I started thinking about
where I can contribute. And one of the things that occurred to me was Wikipedia.
David started small. He read a couple of pages involving climate change.
There were certain areas that could be improved.
So he set out to work. He started proposing some changes, speaking to other volunteer editors.
And before he knew it, David was spending hours
on end keeping on top of all the science on climate change.
My general rule of thumb for time,
you have to read through about 100 pages of scientific information to edit a sentence.
There are instances where I spent probably 100 hours expanding on entire sections.
It is incredibly meticulous work, slow, but I imagine incredibly rewarding?
Right now I'm looking at the page stats in terms of number of page views
– seven million people reading the words you're writing, that's pretty satisfying.
It gives you a certain sense of responsibility for making sure you're getting it right.
David is just one of dozens of volunteers that contribute to the main Wikipedia page on
climate change, which, by the way, has a very special status.
It is a protected page, you have to have a certain amount of editing experience,
to be able to edit the page at all.
Less than 1% of all pages on English Wikipedia get some level of protection against editing.
So, you’d think, being part of that exclusive club might actually shield these pages from trolls,
from other people with bad intentions, right?
But there are occasionally people who meet that standard,
who've done a little Wikipedia editing work, who nonetheless come in and put a sentence at
the very top of the page that says, “Everything on this page is a hoax”. And that might stay
up for a few minutes or an hour or so. But usually one of the editors will spot it.
And this is important.
Because the page on climate change has so many eyes on it, every time there’s a new edit,
the regular editors instantly know about it. And they’re able to filter out any bad information.
But the same doesn’t apply to other climate-related pages.
I can't remember how but I stumbled across this page on sustainable energy.
And it just had a lot of problems…
That’s Su Laine Brodsky. She’s based in Vancouver, Canada - and like David,
she’s one of the editors keeping close tabs on climate Wikipedia.
Misinformation about climate change is often in articles that aren't the main articles.
They're less trafficked articles about particular countries,
or they can be articles about particular institutions or particular people.
For example, when you've got an article about a climate science denier, an individual, people will
try to soften that. They want the first sentence to say, “So and so is a climate policy analyst”.
And that's a way of making the person sound more credible.
These bad edits don’t come up very often, but they can be done at any time.
So, people like David or Su Laine have to be permanently on guard.
It’s a constant battle against a faceless enemy.
Still, volunteers say they’ve got the upper hand, and that’s down to the way Wikipedia works.
Wikipedia doesn't actually have a policy saying that you cannot put climate change denial onto Wikipedia.
What we do is instead we have policies that say you have to cite quality sources.
If people explain to you that your sources aren't good, you have to engage in that conversation.
And people who don't even make an attempt to do that are identified fairly quickly.
In other words - you’ve got to show your work, people!
It’s fine to make an edit, but you’ve got to back it up with facts,
with evidence from real, quality sources.
Wikipedia is just an uncomfortable place to be if you want to promote a point of view that goes against science.
If you're somebody with a fringe point of view, whether it's a denialist point of view
or a fringe alarmist point of view, you're going to be by yourself with all of these people
saying, “Well how do you defend that position?” It's not fun. It's much easier to be on social media
where you can say whatever you want, and not really be held to task for it.
Does that mean the deniers, the very people spreading misinformation,
have just gone elsewhere? Away from Wikipedia? Well, not quite.
I'm Alex Stinson. I'm a senior programme strategist at the Wikimedia Foundation.
That’s the organisation that runs Wikipedia.
I'm also a long-time Wikipedia volunteer.
And I'm interested in the climate crisis, how we represent that on Wikipedia.
Alex is based in Uruguay.
Over the last couple of years, he’s spent hours on end editing climate change-related pages.
And in that time, he’s learnt how to spot misinformation.
He says it comes in four different flavours.
Brace yourself and cleanse your palate.
Number one.
This first is just neglect. This is information from three years ago, 10 years ago
that has been lingering on the site for whatever reason and no one's paid attention.
This could be climate change science that’s gone,
well, out of date. It’s wrong, it’s old, but it’s still online.
Number two.
The other thing we have is balance problems. And a lot of our energy topics have something
like this going on, where it’s only one field or perspective ever really found its way in.
Like writing about fossil fuels, their chemistry, their economic value,
while saying suspiciously little about how damaging they are for the environment.
Number three.
Then we have the active misinformation going on that's in the background. This is where
someone will come in and subtly erase one of those balance topics or actively fight it.
Here’s an example that Alex spotted this year.
The Trans-Amazonian Highway in Brazil is very controversial,
because by cutting through the forest, it's kind of becoming a vector for deforestation.
For a bit of context, this highway Alex is talking about
was built in the 1970s and it has never been fully paved.
It literally goes through the Amazon and according to the Brazilian space agency,
over the years it has contributed to more and more trees being cut down.
But back to Alex.
We discovered that the Trans-Amazonian Highway article on English Wikipedia, but also Spanish
and Portuguese Wikipedias, had had a small group of new editors, people who weren’t
behaving by our norms. [They] had completely pulled the environmental impact assessments
out of the article. So it looked like there was a group of people actively like, “Oh,
this is bad for communicating the economic development in Brazil”.
For how long did these changes survive?
Those changes, I think it was like a week, give or take.
Remember how I said there were four types of misinformation?
Time for number four.
This is one that happens a lot with social movements and breaking news.
Because Wikipedia is open for people to edit, when something social happens, that it has a
lot of trolls on the internet, some subset of those people will pay attention to Wikipedia.
And the example of this that happened was Disha Ravi...
Disha Ravi is an Indian climate activist.
Alex himself created a Wikipedia page about her in late 2020.
It was a fairly uncontroversial page at first, not getting a huge amount of views, or edits,
but then in February [2021], something changed.
A 22-year-old college student, a youth climate change activist, has been sent to police custody…
Disha was arrested for sharing a document that was meant to help
farmers protest against the government.
And then when it hit the news, far right extreme Hindu nationalists suddenly were all
pouncing on her biography trying to warp it
in another direction. And we couldn't just leave the page unlocked.
Meaning Alex and the other volunteers made it more difficult for anonymous,
new users to drop by and vandalise the page.
Right, because it was a target. And this tends to happen with breaking news stuff
where something really polarising might spread out into problems.
It’s fair to say misinformation comes in all shapes and sizes.
But Alex is convinced Wikipedia’s well protected against most of them.
All of the studies on vandalism and misinformation and stuff suggest that our kind of natural
immune system on the big language Wikipedias catches something like 97% of it rapidly.
But how do they do it then?
We have bots -
Computer programmes.
- that revert stuff that's very obviously problematic. And then we have several layers
more of immune system. So every edit is in front of a group of patrollers on the Wiki.
And then you have people like me who watch the kind of high visibility pages
on these topics, because we know they'll get targeted.
But is all that enough?
Wikipedia has many rules to prevent abuse. But in reality, it's actually quite easy
for skilled networks to get around these rules and distort articles. So
manipulating pages on Wikipedia is actually much easier than we think.
That’s Yumiko Sato. She’s a Japanese writer based in the US.
For her work, she has spent a fair amount of time investigating Wikipedia - not
just the English version, but versions in other languages too.
The English Wikipedia is the largest version -
With about 40,000 users actively editing it each month. But…
Wikipedia exists in more than 300 languages
and half of them only have fewer than 10 active contributors.
In other words, in more than 150 versions of Wikipedia,
you have fewer than 10 people editing pages in their language each month.
And this, Yumiko says, is a bit of a problem.
Wikipedia works only if the editing community is large
and independent enough to weed out misinformation. So even though English Wikipedia isn’t perfect,
it's still the best version of Wikipedia because of that. Other versions are much smaller,
and lack editorial diversity. So that makes them vulnerable to manipulation.
Does non-English Wikipedia have a misinformation problem?
Absolutely. Yes.
So, just how serious is it?
Well, I took a look at Wikipedia pages about climate change in some of those 300+ languages.
Obviously, I didn’t go through all of them. But still,
it didn’t take me long to find some issues.
On Croatian Wikipedia, almost half of the article on climate change
is devoted to scepticism and conspiracy theories.
On Swahili Wikipedia, right at the top of the page, you’ll find the suggestion that scientists are divided
over whether or not mankind is to blame for global warming - which they’re not.
Bosnian, Romanian, Belarusian, Mongolian Wikipedias? Same thing.
Chinese Wikipedia lists some pretty wacky, widely-disproven theories
to explain global warming, side-by-side with actual science.
It was shocking. So I put my findings to Alex from the Wikimedia Foundation.
Doesn't it worry you that people might be looking for information
on this subject in their language and come across rubbish like this?
It does. This worries me a lot. And this is why we need more people involved in this project.
If we're serious about the global crisis, we need to be communicating in these other languages.
And we need to push back on this disinformation in science, but that only works if
the science-literate show up in that language, in that Wikipedia.
One of the key principles of Wikipedia is that it’s mostly
down to the volunteers to decide what’s published on the platform.
The whole system is meant to be open to anyone and also self-governed.
And that’s part of the reason why Alex says that to solve a problem like this,
you just need more people editing.
Yumiko, the Japanese writer who studied Wikipedia, disagrees.
I think the foundation needs to monitor them to ensure the quality and accuracy of their articles.
And if they cannot do that, perhaps they should make just one Wikipedia maybe, one global
Wikipedia that users from around the world can edit and read in the language of their choice -
Using machine translation.
It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than what we have now.
Until that happens, it’s entirely down to volunteers like Su Laine to hold the fort.
Wikipedia is uneven. You have to still take it with a grain of salt. There's some articles that
explain things really well. And there's some articles that are still quite poor.
That's what the volunteers are there for – it’s because we feel that there's stuff to improve.
And that’s it for today. I’m Marco Silva. I produced and presented this episode.
The series producer is Vibeke Venema. Our editor is Mike Wendling.
If you’re enjoying the series so far, please do all those things podcasts ask you to do, whether
that’s subscribing to the show, posting a review - if you can - or sharing it on your socials.
Thanks for listening.