Wikipedia Review

» see wikipediareview.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Wikipedia Review started in November 2005 on a free ProBoards forum and moved to its own domain on 19 February 2006, running Invision Power Board like every other message board of the period. It existed to scrutinize Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation from outside, which at the time was a genuinely novel idea, because the encyclopedia had spent its first five years being written about either as a curiosity or as a threat to Britannica rather than as an institution with internal politics.

Posting required a working email address, and the site blacklisted the anonymous mail providers on purpose so that one person could not run a crowd of accounts. That is a funny rule for a forum full of people banned from Wikipedia for sockpuppetry, and it says something about who was actually there. The membership ran from sitting editors to people Wikipedia had permanently blocked. A fair number of the regulars had never edited an article in their lives.

It had a German-language section as well as an English one. Most of the traffic was English, and most of the subject matter was the small number of administrators who decided how the largest reference work in the world would read.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually caught ~

Seth Finkelstein wrote in The Guardian in December 2007 that Wikipedia Review had been the focal point for investigating the Essjay affair, in which a prominent editor turned out to have invented a set of academic credentials and had been cited in The New Yorker on the strength of them. In the same week Cade Metz in The Register credited the forum with surfacing a private mailing list used by a group of administrators, a discovery that ended with one of them resigning.

Wikipedia's response included a proposal called BADSITES, which would have forbidden editors from linking to Wikipedia Review or sites like it anywhere on the encyclopedia. It was not a moderation rule, it was an attempt to make a whole website unmentionable inside the project it criticized. The proposal failed, which is the more interesting outcome, since a reference work that survives by being editable cannot easily declare a category of URL unspeakable without admitting what the URL contains.

~ the reader's side of wikipedia ~

I have read Wikipedia nearly every working day since the mid-2000s and have never once edited it. That is the normal relationship and it means the entire layer this forum covered was invisible to me: the arbitration cases, the long argument over who gets to revert whom. You see an article. You do not see the eleven people who spent a month on its second paragraph.

The distance is larger from Turkey than from an English-speaking country, and not because of language. Turkish Wikipedia was a much smaller project with a completely different set of problems, and the one that mattered here was external: the whole site was blocked in Turkey from April 2017 until the start of 2020, so for nearly three years the governance question was not who runs Wikipedia but whether you could reach it at all. By then this forum had been dead for five years.

So the honest position is that Wikipedia Review documented a fight I benefited from without watching, in a venue I only found out about later, largely through the Wikipedia article that its own subject wrote about it.

~ the silence after 2012 ~

The last post is dated 31 May 2012. There was no announcement and no closing statement, which fits a forum that had already had at least one outage years earlier and had come back from it with a defiant manifesto about not being a conspiracy. Criticism of Wikipedia carried on after 2012 from other addresses, partly on Wikipedia's own noticeboards and partly on sites with a harsher purpose. The domain now answers with a 406 and nothing behind it.

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