Can Wikipedia ever really be a “neutral” source? Wikipedia’s avowed principles of expression and neutrality are once again coming under fire, amid the latest escalation of a high-profile “war of words” between self-appointed Wikipedia editors — this time with a focus on China and Hong Kong.

Kick-starting it all? Recent verbal clashes between pro-democracy and pro-Beijing editors, centering around tensions between Hong Kong and mainland China — and the quashed protests of 2019 and 2020 in particular, the BBC reports. In September, Wikipedia’s governing body banned seven pro-Beijing editors from making changes on the platform, after they were accused of intimidating pro-democracy editors. But pro-Beijing voices surveyed by the BBC say such steps risk skewing the narrative around China and Hong Kong in favor of western viewpoints, and promoting online bias.

The platform’s defenders maintain it strives to offer balance: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales emphasized that the platform could be a source of quality information on China — provided the government allows access, the BBC notes. The role of the online encyclopaedia is to present multiple viewpoints, along with “an explanation of these viewpoints in a fair way,” he added.

This isn’t the first time Wikipedia has been a battleground for competing perspectives, including on Nazi history: Soviet-born Ksenia Coffman — who has been an active Wikipedia editor since 2015 — was compelled to revise articles she saw as glorifying the military exploits of Nazi officers in the Second World War, a recent Wired article reports. Coffman has amassed an impressive 97k edits, created 3.2k pages, and ranks number 734 out of 121,000 “elite” Wikipedia editors. And while Coffman believes she’s performing an essential service, fellow editors with differing views on how to characterize military prowess have accused her of vandalizing the articles she edits. Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 birthed a Wikipedia struggle for narrative control, with the revision history for “Crimea” being edited over 500 times in March 2014 alone, before finally being locked, ABC News reported at the time.

… And erm, (The) Eagles: An ongoing conflict pits purists — who insist that the ‘70s rock group “Eagles” (yes, they of Hotel California fame) should never be referred to colloquially as “The Eagles” — against others who, you know, care about grammar and stuff. This squabble makes it onto a 2011 list of Wikipedia’s most ridiculous edit battles, along with how to spell the “Caesar” in Caesar salad, and whether we can say polar bear cubs are cute.

The issue is, anyone can edit a Wikipedia article: Wikipedia’s basic model — based on a method of crowdsourcing knowledge — hasn’t really changed in the 20 years it’s been around. Early criticism of the platform accused it of “diminishing the importance of expertise and ceding truth itself to popular opinion,” a recent Slate article notes.

But Wikipedia also has measures in place to try to avoid bias: Some Wikipedia pages about historical events deemed particularly emotive or controversial (at least, to English speakers), like entries for 9/11 or the war in Afghanistan, have been semi-protected. This means they can only be edited by users with a registered account, which is at least four days old and has made at least ten Wikipedia edits.

A large, dedicated editorial community is one of them: The global team of volunteers reviewing Wikipedia posts and edits stood at around 80k in 2014, according to ABC. Anyone attempting to add false information to the Wikipedia page for the covid-19 vaccine would likely see it quickly removed by one of 400 dedicated page watchers, who have volunteered to monitor changes.

Along with verifiable sources: One of Wikipedia’s biggest strengths — which its community of editors helps to reinforce — is that it focuses on verifiability, rather than striving for so-called truth, which is likely to vary depending on perspective.

But the question of access to information is also deeply linked to language: On Wikipedia alone, there are huge disparities in the volume of online content available in different language editions, according to the Guardian. Out of 288 official language editions, English is by far the largest in terms of users — followed by German, then French, it adds. Some 74% of the concepts written about on Wikipedia had articles in only one language, while 95% of concepts were written about in fewer than six languages. At the time, English contained only 51% of the articles written in German, the Guardian reported.

And there’s a striking difference between how widely used certain languages are, compared to the percentage of the population that speaks them, as we can see in this nifty infographic from Visual Capitalist. 60.4% of the world’s top 10 mn websites are in English, while only 16.2% of the world population speaks the language. Chinese is used on only 1.4% of the top 10 mn websites, though 14.3% of the world population speaks it, and though China has the highest number of internet users. Only 1.1% of the top 10 mn websites use Arabic, though it’s the sixth-most spoken language in the world, with 3.5% of the global population speaking it.