User:OnBeyondZebrax/sandbox/List of Wikipedia controversies

In late February 2002, the Spanish Wikipedia community decided to break away ("fork") from Wikipedia to protest against plans by co-founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger to sell advertising on Wikipedia sites.

The Seigenthaler incident was a series of events that began in May 2005 with the anonymous posting of a hoax article in Wikipedia about John Seigenthaler, a well-known American journalist.

December 2005 Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales was caught editing his own Wikipedia entry.

Early to mid-2006 – A series of U.S. Congressional staff edits to Wikipedia were revealed in the press.

July 2006 – MyWikiBiz was founded by Gregory Kohs and his sister to provide paid editing services on Wikipedia. His Wikipedia account was blocked shortly after the August publication of a press release announcing the establishment of the business.

March 2007 The Essjay controversy a prominent English Wikipedia editor and administrator known as "Essjay", w a "tenured professor of religion at a private university" who held a "Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law", was in fact a 24-year-old who held no advanced degrees.

August 2007 Virgil Griffith, a Caltech computation and neural-systems graduate student, created a searchable database that linked changes made by anonymous Wikipedia editors to companies and organizations from which the changes were made. Th

February 2008 A group of Muslims started an online petition demanding that Wikipedia remove images of the prophet Muhammed from Wikipedia articles about him since some followers of Islam believe that such images violate the precepts of the religion. Protesters also organized an email campaign to pressure the English Wikipedia into removing the offending images. By February 7, approximately 100,000 people had signed the petition and the article had been protected from editing by non-registered users. Jay Walsh, Wikimedia Foundation spokesman, told Information Week that "Noncensorship is an important tenet of the user community and the edit community" and Mathias Schindler, of Wikimedia Deutschland, said in response to efforts to have the images removed from the German language Wikipedia that "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a venue for an inter-Muslim debate."

• March 2008
  • Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales used Wikipedia to end a relationship he was having with conservative political columnist, television commentator and university lecturer Rachel Marsden, by adding a single sentence to his own Wikipedia user page stating "I am no longer involved with Rachel Marsden." This was interpreted as a wider Wikipedia controversy because of the suggestion (from released private chat logs purportedly between Marsden and Wales) that Wales had previously edited Marsden's biographical article on Wikipedia, at the request of Marsden (before they were romantically involved).
  • Jimmy Wales was accused by former Wikimedia Foundation employee Danny Wool of misusing the foundation's funds for recreational purposes. Wool also stated that Wales had his Wikimedia credit card taken away in part because of his spending habits, a claim Wales denied. Then-chairperson of the foundation Florence Devouard and former foundation interim Executive Director Brad Patrick denied any wrongdoing by Wales or the foundation, saying that Wales accounted for every expense and that, for items for which he lacked receipts, he paid out of his own pocket; in private, Devouard upbraided Wales for "constantly trying to rewrite the past".
  • It was claimed by Jeffrey Vernon Merkey that Wales had edited Merkey's Wikipedia entry to make it more favorable in return for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation, an allegation Wales dismissed as "nonsense".
• April 2008 – Phorm deleted material related to a controversy over its advertising deals.
• May 2008 – A long-running dispute between members of the Church of Scientology and Wikipedia editors reached Wikipedia's arbitration committee. The church members were accused of attempting to sway articles in the church's interests, while other editors were accused of the opposite. The arbitration committee unanimously voted to block all edits from the IP addresses associated with the church; several Scientology critics were banned too.
• June 2008
  • In 2007, Jim Prentice, then member of the Parliament of Canada for Calgary and Minister of Industry, introduced copyright protection legislation, which was compared by many to the DMCA. The legislation was controversial and Prentice withdrew it in December 2007. By June 2008 there was a great deal of speculation in the Canadian press that Prentice would eventually succeed Stephen Harper as Prime Minister of Canada. Michael Geist, professor of internet law at the University of Ottawa, discovered that a series of anonymous edits to Prentice's Wikipedia article had been made in late May and early June from an IP address owned by Industry Canada, Prentice's ministry. The modifications removed critical mentions of Prentice's involvement with the copyright legislation and added generic positive claims about the minister. Geist announced on his blog his findings about the modifications, which one Canadian commentator called "hagiographic palaver extolling Prentice".
  • Australian press stated that American law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft had threatened the Wikimedia Foundation on behalf of then-Telstra-CEO Solomon Trujillo. The letter allegedly contained: "If Wikipedia and Wikimedia do not remove the improper language by that time (7pm on March 7), and take the steps necessary to block its being reinserted, Mr (Trujillo) intends to commence litigation ..." and reportedly demanded that the editor responsible for the defamatory material be blocked. Jimmy Wales denied that any such threat had been received, stating that "It is sad to see a media so irresponsible as to make it seem that Wikipedia would cave to a few lawyers letters objecting to legitimate criticism. It is even sadder to see Mr Trujillo attacked by that same irresponsible media for something he did not do."
• August 2008 – Republican senator and then presidential candidate John McCain was accused of plagiarizing elements of a speech he gave on the Republic of Georgia from Wikipedia. The Congressional Quarterly found that McCain's speech contained two passages which were substantially identical to passages in the Wikipedia article on the country and that a third passage "bore striking resemblances." McCain's speech was written by speechwriters rather than by the candidate himself. After the Congressional Quarterly's report was released, McCain's aides released a statement that contained: "there are only so many ways to state basic historical facts and dates and that any similarities to Wikipedia were only coincidental".
• September 2008 - There were suspicious updates to Sarah Palin's biography after the announcement that she would run for the vice-presidency.

David Rohde

• November 2008 – New York Times reporter David Rohde was kidnapped by the Taliban while reporting in Afghanistan. The Times feared that reporting of the matter would endanger Rohde's life, so they did not mention it in their pages. Statements about Rohde's kidnapping were edited into Wikipedia during the voluntary news blackout, however. Representatives of the Times called Jimmy Wales and asked him to suppress the information. He agreed to take care of it, but in order to avoid the scrutiny which attends his edits to Wikipedia, Wales asked an unnamed administrator on the site to delete the information instead. Wales told Times media reporter Richard Pérez-Peña that "We were really helped by the fact that it hadn't appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source. I would have had a really hard time with it if it had." The Christian Science Monitor reported that Wales's actions were the subject of much criticism from bloggers and journalists, who argued that information suppression undermined the credibility of Wikipedia.
• December 2008
  • In early December, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) added the Wikipedia page about the album Virgin Killer to its blacklist of online material potentially illegal in the United Kingdom because it contains an image of a naked prepubescent girl. The IWF's blacklist is voluntarily enforced by 95% of British Internet Service Providers. The issue eventually left most British residents unable to edit any page on Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) protested the blacklisting of the page even though, as the IWF stated at the time, "the image in question is potentially in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978," and, in an "unprecedented" move, the IWF agreed to remove the page from its blacklist.
    Further information: Internet Watch Foundation and Wikipedia
  • Professor T. Mills Kelly conducts a class project on "Lying About the Past", which results in the Edward Owens hoax. A biography was created about "Edward Owens" who was claimed to be an oyster fisherman that became a pirate during the period of the Long Depression, targeting ships in the Chesapeake Bay. It was revealed when media outlets began reporting the story as fact.
    Further information: George Mason University's historical hoaxes

2009

• January 20, 2009 – The Wikipedia article for West Virginia senator Robert Byrd was briefly edited to state, incorrectly, that he had died. Senator Edward Kennedy's article was also changed at this time to reflect his notional death. Shortly thereafter Jimmy Wales was quoted by Fox News as saying "This nonsense would have been 100% prevented by Flagged Revisions".
• February 2009 – Scott Kildall and collaborator Nathaniel Stern created Wikipedia Art, a performance art piece as a live article on Wikipedia. Site editors quickly concluded that the project violated Wikipedia's rules and opted to delete it 15 hours after it was initially posted. A month later, Kildall and Stern received a letter from a law firm representing the Wikimedia Foundation, claiming the domain name, wikipediaart.org, infringed on their trademark. The ensuing controversy was reported in the national press. Wikipedia Art has since been included in the Internet Pavilion of the Venice Biennale for 2009. It also appeared in a revised form at the Transmediale festival in Berlin in 2011.
• March 2009
  • Mere hours after the death of French composer Maurice Jarre, Irish student Shane Fitzgerald added a phony quote to Jarre's Wikipedia article. The quote said "One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear." The quote was quickly copy/pasted by journalists and incorporated into numerous obituaries of Jarre published in newspapers around the world, including The Guardian and The Independent.
  • In early March 2009, conservative website WorldNetDaily published a report by staffer Aaron Klein which claimed that liberal editors routinely whitewashed US President Barack Obama's Wikipedia article. Klein's report claimed, e.g., that "[m]ultiple times, Wikipedia users who wrote about the eligibility issues had their entries deleted almost immediately and were banned from posting any material on the website for three days." It was revealed within days that there was only one such editor, called "Jerusalem21," and that that editor's only other edits were to Aaron Klein's Wikipedia article. Under questioning from journalists, Klein stated that "I am not 'Jerusalem21', but I do know the Wikipedia user (he works with me and does research for me), and I worked with him on this story," thus undermining the credibility of his report.
• May 2009 – Wikipedian David Boothroyd, a Labour Party member, created controversy in 2009, when Wikipedia Review contributor "Tarantino" discovered that he committed sockpuppeting, editing under the accounts "Dbiv", "Fys" and "Sam Blacketer", none of which acknowledged his real identity. After earning Administrator status with one account, then losing it for inappropriate use of the administrative tools, Boothroyd regained Administrator status with the "Sam Blacketer" sockpuppet account in April 2007. Later in 2007, Boothroyd's Sam Blacketer account became part of the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee. Under the Sam Blacketer account, Boothroyd edited many articles related to United Kingdom politics, including that of rival Conservative Party leader David Cameron. Boothroyd then resigned as an administrator and as an arbitrator.
• June 2009
  • Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, was accused by the Virginia Quarterly Review of plagiarizing material for his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price from Wikipedia. Anderson claimed that he had originally attributed the material properly but that due to disagreements with his publisher over formatting it had ended up in the published work without quotation marks. He took responsibility for the error, saying “That’s my screw-up.” Anderson announced that the attribution errors would be corrected in the online version of the book and in future publications. Anderson's book is a defense of the notion of free content exemplified by Wikipedia, so the fact that he plagiarized material for it was seen by at least one commentator as "riddled with savage irony."
  • James Heilman, a Canadian doctor, uploaded to Wikipedia copies of all 10 inkblot images used in the Rorschach test, on the grounds that copyright to the images had expired. Heilman was widely criticized by psychologists who used the test as a diagnostic tool, because they were worried that patients with prior knowledge of the inkblots would be able to influence their diagnoses. In response to Heilman's posting of the images, a number of psychologists registered Wikipedia accounts to argue against their retention. Later that year two psychologists filed a complaint against Heilman with the Saskatchewan medical licensing board, arguing that his uploading of the images constituted unprofessional behavior.
• July 2009 – The National Portrait Gallery in London issued a cease and desist letter for alleged breach of copyright against a Wikipedia editor who downloaded more than 3,000 high-resolution images from the gallery's website to upload them on Wikimedia Commons.
  Main article: National Portrait Gallery and Wikimedia Foundation copyright dispute
• November 2009 – Convicted German murderers Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber sued the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) in German courts, demanding that their names be removed from the English Wikipedia's article on their victim, Walter Sedlmayr. German laws force compliance with such requests for suppression. Alexander H. Stopp, the two men's lawyer, succeeded in forcing the German Wikipedia to remove their names. Mike Godwin responded on behalf of the WMF, stating that the organization "doesn't edit content at all, unless we get a court order from a court of competent jurisdiction. [I]f our German editors have chosen to remove the names of the murderers from their article on Walter Sedlmayr, we support them in that choice. The English-language editors have chosen to include the names of the killers, and we support them in that choice."
• December 2009 – Actor Ron Livingston, star of the 1999 film Office Space, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court against a John Doe who had repeatedly edited Livingston's Wikipedia article to include statements that Livingston was gay and in a relationship with a (possibly notional) man named Lee Dennison. The lawsuit also claimed that the John Doe defendant had set up phony Facebook profiles for Livingston and his putative partner. The suit named neither Wikipedia nor Facebook, but was evidently intended to give Livingston the power to subpoena identifying information from the two organizations about the anonymous defendant. The lawsuit was followed by a manifestation of the Streisand effect as Livingston was targeted with accusations of homophobia. Jay Walsh, then head of communication for the Wikimedia Foundation, said that "This is a serious issue. We take it quite seriously. We understand real people are reflected in these articles. ... Articles about living people are tough articles to manage. Someone who is a fan or an enemy might try to attack or vandalize those articles. This isn't a new scenario for us to witness."

2010

The observation decks and spire of the Donauturm

• April 2010 and before – One of the largest disputes in the German Wikipedia about a simple sentence was about the Donauturm in Vienna. While the observation tower shares some architectural aspects with the Fernsehturm Stuttgart, it was never planned for TV broadcasting purposes. The German Wikipedia went through a rather lengthy (about 600,000 characters) discussion about the suitable title and category. Some (often Austrian) authors denied the description of Donauturm as a "TV tower", which was stubbornly defended by others. The Spiegel coverage of the issue cited a participant with "On good days, Wikipedia is better than any TV soap".
• April 2010 – Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger informed the FBI that a large amount of child pornography was available on Wikimedia Commons. Sanger told Fox News: “I wasn't shocked that it was online, but I was shocked that it was on a Wikimedia Foundation site that purports to be a reference site." Co-founder Jimmy Wales responded by claiming that a strong statement from the Wikimedia Foundation would be forthcoming. In the weeks following Sanger's letter, Wales responded by unilaterally deleting a number of images which he personally deemed to be pornographic. Wales's unilateral actions led to an outcry from the Wikipedian community, which in turn prompted Wales to voluntarily relinquish some of his user privileges.
• July 2010 – Following the football World Cup the FIFA president Sepp Blatter was awarded the Order of The Companions of O R Tambo for his contribution over the World Cup. The South African Government's webpage announcing the award referred to him as Joseph Sepp Bellend Blatter, the nickname having been taken from his vandalized Wikipedia article.
• August 2010 - After the Federal Bureau of Investigation requested that Wikipedia remove its seal from Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation lawyer Mike Godwin sent a snarky letter to the Bureau, denying their request and contending that the FBI had misinterpreted the law.
• September 2010 – Right-wing radio presenter Rush Limbaugh broadcast a discussion of an upcoming hearing in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida courtroom of judge Roger Vinson of the case Florida et al v. United States Department of Health and Human Services, one of the cases brought by US states challenging the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Limbaugh told his audience that Vinson had previously killed three brown bears and mounted their heads over the door of his courtroom in order, according to Limbaugh, to "instill the fear of God into the accused." This, stated Limbaugh, "would not be good news" for supporters of Obamacare. However, the story was not only false, but had been edited into Vinson's Wikipedia article a scant few days before the broadcast. The bear-hunting information inserted into the Wikipedia article was sourced to a nonexistent story in the Pensacola News Journal. A spokesman for Limbaugh told the New York Times that a researcher for Limbaugh's show had found the information on the News Journal website, but that newspaper's managing editor told the Times that no such information had ever been published there.

2011

Johann Hari

• June 2011
  • Potential candidate for US President Sarah Palin described American Revolutionary War hero Paul Revere as "he who warned the British that they weren't going to be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells." This description, characterized by US News and World Report (USN&WR) as "flummoxed ramblings," kicked off a battle over the contents of the English Wikipedia's article about Revere. Palin's remarks and various interpretations were added by supporters to the Wikipedia page and just as quickly removed by detractors, although at least one commentator opined that "in some cases people appeared to be attributing the claims to Ms. Palin in order to mock her." In the 10 days following Palin's remark, Revere's Wikipedia page received over a half million page views and led to extensive and inconclusive discussion on the article's talk page and in the national media about whether the episode had improved or harmed the article. Robert Schlesinger, writing in USN&WR, summarized the episode by saying that "[i]t used to be said of conservatism that it stood athwart history and yelled 'stop.' Increasingly it seems to stand beside reality while hitting the 'edit' button."
  • PR Week reported on a 'fixer', a known but unnamed London-based figure in the PR industry who offered services to 'cleanse' articles. Wikipedia entries this person was accused of changing included Carphone Warehouse co-founder David Ross, Von Essen Group chairman Andrew Davis, British property developer David Rowland, billionaire Saudi tycoon Maan Al-Sanea, and Edward Stanley, 19th Earl of Derby. According to PR Week, 42 edits were made from the same IP address, most of them removing negative or controversial information, or adding positive information.
• September 2011 – British writer and journalist Johann Hari admitted using Wikipedia to attack his opponents by editing the online encyclopedia's articles about them under a pseudonym. Using a sockpuppet, Hari engaged in a six-year trolling spree where he would repeatedly paint himself in a flattering light while also inserting fabrications in the entries for people he considered enemies, such as Francis Wheen, Nick Cohen, Niall Ferguson, and Christina Odone, who he falsely said had been fired from her job at the Catholic Herald. Odone also suspects Hari of having made anonymous edits calling her an antisemite.
• November 2011 – After the South African government passed the Protection of State Information Bill, a law which criminalized certain forms of speech in that country, the Wikipedia article about the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party was altered in protest. The protesters deleted phrases on the page which were critical of the ANC, presumably suggesting that they would be illegal under the new law. This was denied by ANC spokesman Keith Khoza, who stated that the edits were "conduct ... not consistent with a civilised society."

2012

• January 2012
  • British MP Tom Watson discovered that Portland Communications had been removing the nickname of one of its clients' products ("Wife Beater", referring to Anheuser-Busch InBev's Stella Artois beer) from Wikipedia. Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) CEO Jane Wilson noted, "Stella Artois is on the 'wife-beater' page because it is a nick-name in common currency for that brand of strong continental lager. The brand managers who want to change this have a wider reputational issue to address, editing the term from a Wikipedia page will not get rid of this association." Other edits from Portland's offices included changes to articles about another Portland client, the Kazakhstan's BTA Bank, and its former head Mukhtar Ablyazov. Portland did not deny making the changes, arguing they had been done transparently and in accordance with Wikipedia's policies. Portland Communications welcomed CIPR's subsequent announcement of a collaboration with Wikipedia and invited Jimmy Wales to speak to their company, as he did at Bell Pottinger. Tom Watson was optimistic about the collaboration: "PR professionals need clear guidelines in this new world of online-information-sharing. That's why I am delighted that interested parties are coming together to establish a clear code of conduct."
  • It became known that during the 2008 US presidential race, changes made by both Barack Obama and John McCain's campaigns made the news.
• February 2012 – American labor historian Timothy Messer-Kruse, an expert on the Haymarket affair, published an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education describing his three-year struggle to edit the Wikipedia article on the subject. Messer-Kruse had discovered new primary sources which, in his professional opinion, cast doubt on the conventional view of the incident. In 2009, when he first tried to edit the article to include the new information, he was told by other editors that primary sources were not acceptable and that he would have to find published secondary sources. As he later said on NPR, "So I actually bided my time. I knew that my own published book would be coming out in 2011." When his book was published and he returned to insert his newly discovered material into the article, he was told that it was a minority view and could not be given "undue weight," even though he had proved in his book that the majority view was incorrect regarding major details of the case. Steven Walling of the Wikimedia Foundation told a NPR reporter that all of Wikipedia's rules had been followed, stating that "We do not rely on what exact, individual people say, just based on their own credibility." National security scholars Benjamin Wittes and Stephanie Leutert have used Messer-Kruse's experiences to illuminate the "broad question" of "whether Wikipedia's policies are encouraging an undue conservatism about sourcing."
• March 2012 – The Bureau of Investigative Journalism uncovered that UK MPs or their staff had made almost 10,000 edits to the encyclopedia, and that almost one in six MPs had had their Wikipedia article edited from within Parliament. Many of the changes dealt with removing unflattering details from Wikipedia during the 2009 expenses scandal, as well as other controversial issues. Former MP Joan Ryan admitted to changing her entry "whenever there’s misleading or untruthful information [that has] been placed on it." Clare Short said her staff were "angry and protective" over mistakes and criticisms in her Wikipedia article and acknowledged they might have made changes to it. Labour MP Fabian Hamilton also reported having one of his assistants edit a page to make it more accurate in his view. MP Philip Davies denied making changes about removing controversial comments related to Muslims from 2006 and 2007.

Wedding dress of Kate Middleton

• July 2012
  • Attempts to delete an entry about the wedding dress of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge led to a controversy on the English Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales used the example to illustrate his notion about a 'gender gap' in Wikipedia on the Wikimania 2012. The issue received some press coverage.
  • Wikimedia UK chairperson and administrator of the English Wikipedia Ashley van Haeften was banned from the English Wikipedia for 6 months for sockpuppeting and other violations of Wikipedia's norms and policies. He was only the ninth Wikipedia sysop to be banned. Wikimedia UK's board fully supported van Haeften following the case, until van Haeften resigned as chair in August.
• September 2012
  • Author Philip Roth published an open letter to Wikipedia, describing conflicts he experienced with the Wikipedia community while attempting to modify the Wikipedia article about his novel The Human Stain: although the character Coleman Silk had been inspired by the case of Melvin Tumin, many literary critics had drawn parallels between Silk and the life of Anatole Broyard, and Roth sought to remove statements that Broyard had been suggested as an inspiration; however, Roth's edits had been reverted on the grounds that direct statements from the author were a primary source, not a secondary. Wikipedia administrator and community liaison Oliver Keyes subsequently wrote a blog post criticizing both Roth and his approach, and pointed out that even prior to Roth's attempts to modify the article, it had already cited a published interview in which Roth stated that the inspiration for Coleman Silk had been Tumin rather than Broyard. Keyes also pointed out that the edits had been made via an anonymous IP address, with no evidence provided to support the claim that Roth was actually involved.
  • The Gibraltarpedia project, where editors created articles about Gibraltar, came under scrutiny due to concerns about Roger Bamkin, a Wikimedia UK board member who was head of the project, having a professional relationship with the government of Gibraltar in connection with Gibraltarpedia. Of primary concern was that the site's main page "Did You Know" section was allegedly being used for the promotional purposes of Bamkin's clients. Bamkin, under pressure, resigned from the board.
• October 2012 – Asian soccer's governing body was forced to apologize to the United Arab Emirates soccer team for referring to them as the "Sand Monkeys"; the spurious nickname had been taken from a vandalized Wikipedia article.
• November 2012 – Lord Justice Leveson wrote in his report on British press standards, “The Independent was founded in 1986 by the journalists Andreas Whittam Smith, Stephen Glover and Brett Straub...” He had used the Wikipedia article for The Independent newspaper as his source, but an act of vandalism had replaced Matthew Symonds (a genuine co-founder) with Brett Straub (an unknown character). The Economist said of the Leveson report, "Parts of it are a scissors-and-paste job culled from Wikipedia."

Tony Blair's wife, Cherie Blair, and Jimmy Wales cutting Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary cake in 2011

• December 2012 – A discussion took place on the Wikipedia user talk page of Jimmy Wales about his connection with WikiBilim and the repressive government of the Republic of Kazakhstan. Wales unilaterally shut down the conversation when other Wikipedia editors questioned him about his friendship with Tony Blair, whose company provides paid consultancy services to the Kazakh government. Wales stated that the line of questioning was "just totally weird and irrelevant" and told Andreas Kolbe, a moderator at Wikipediocracy who edits Wikipedia under the username "Jayen466": "please stay off my talk page."

2013

• January 2013 – The discovery of a hoax article on the "Bicholim conflict" caused widespread press coverage. The article, a meticulously crafted but completely made-up description of a fictitious war in Indian Goa, had been listed as a "good article" – a quality award given to fewer than 1 percent of all articles on the English Wikipedia – for more than five years.
• February 2013 – Prison company GEO Group received media coverage when a Wikipedia editor using the name "Abraham Cohen" (who was, at the time, also GEO Group's Manager of Corporate Relations) edited the company's entry to remove information on its past controversies, following the announcement that it had obtained naming rights to Florida Atlantic University's new stadium.
• March 2013 – Controversy arose in March 2013 after it emerged that large segments of the BP article had originated from a corporate employee who was a Wikipedia editor.
• April 2013
  • A Wikipedian threatened with arrest by the French secret service used his administrative privileges over the French Wikipedia to delete the article about the Pierre-sur-Haute military radio station. The French government was accused of attempting to censor Wikipedia, even though much of the information considered as confidential by France was sourced from a documentary that had aired on a local TV station.
  • It was confirmed by a spokesperson for the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media that Wikipedia had been blacklisted over the Russian Wikipedia's article about cannabis smoking. Being placed on the blacklist gives the operator 24 hours to remove the offending material. If the website owner refuses to remove the material then either the website host or the network operator will be required to block access to the site in Russia. The New York Times had reported in March that Russia had begun to "selectively" block internet content that the government considered either illegal under Russian law or otherwise harmful to children.
  • The Sun alleged that Labour Party MP Chuka Umunna, in 2007 before his election, used the Wikipedia username "Socialdemocrat", to create and repeatedly edit his own Wikipedia page. Umunna told The Daily Telegraph that he did not alter his own Wikipedia page, but the paper quoted what they called "sources close to Umunna" as having told the newspaper that "it was possible that one of his campaign team in 2007, when he was trying to be selected to be Labour's candidate for Streatham in the 2010 general election, set up the page." On April 11, 2013, the Evening Standard alleged that an edit in January 2008 was made on a computer at the law firm at which he then worked. Umunna said that he had "no recollection" of doing so.
  • An edit war on the Wikipedia article of Canadian politician and leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP) in British Columbia, Adrian Dix, was widely reported in the Canadian press. Dix, while employed by Glen Clark, then premier of British Columbia, had falsified a memo related to a scandal involving casinos in which Clark was implicated, leading to Dix being fired from his post. The Wikipedia editor who led the effort to keep mention of the incident out of Dix's article was identified by Global News and the Vancouver Sun as Mike Cleven, who edits Wikipedia under the username Skookum1. Cleven denied that he was associated with the NDP, stating that "I am the editor who’s spent the most energy on keeping the people pushing an inflammatory and undue-weight account of this. Whitewashing the article to prevent mention of this is not the aim here, it is to prevent articles being used for defamatory purposes … the BC Liberals have pulled this kind of crap on Wikipedia before; they can say it’s not them, sure uh-huh, but the agenda of those claiming NOT to be them is too much like theirs to be worth explaining further."
  • Amanda Filipacchi wrote an op-ed for the New York Times on April 24, 2013, titled "Wikipedia's Sexism Toward Female Novelists", in which she noted that "editors have begun the process of moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the 'American Novelists' category to the 'American Women Novelists' subcategory." She suggested the reason for the move might be to create a male-only list of 'American Novelists' on Wikipedia. The story was picked up by many other newspapers and websites and feminists said in response that they were disappointed and shocked by the action. Wikipedia editors initiated various responses soon after Filipacchi's article appeared, including the creation of a category for 'American men novelists' along with an immediate proposal to merge both categories back into the original 'American novelists' category. The 'American men novelists' category was criticized because the two categories together would have the effect of emptying the 'American novelists' category. When the 'American men novelists' category was first created, its only entries were Orson Scott Card and P. D. Cacek (who is female). A few days after the op-ed, Filipacchi wrote in the New York Times Sunday Review about the reaction to it, which included edits to the Wikipedia article about her that she suggested were retaliatory. In an article in The Atlantic responding to accounts that the edits she had initially complained of were the work of one rogue editor, Filipacchi detailed edit histories identifying seven other editors who had individually or collectively performed the same actions. Andrew Leonard, reporting for salon.com, found that Filipacchi's articles were followed by what he called "revenge editing" on her article and articles related to her, including that of her father, Daniel Filipacchi. Leonard quoted extensively from talk page comments of Wikipedia editor Qworty, who, e.g., wrote on the talk page of Filipacchi's article: "Oh, by all means, let’s be intimidated by the Holy New York Times. Because when the New York Times tells you to shut up, you have to shut up. Because that’s the way 'freedom' works, and the NYT is all about promoting freedom all over the world, which is why they employed Judith Miller."

Andrew Leonard poses in front of his own Wikipedia page, the creation of which was inspired by his reporting on "revenge editor" Robert Clark Young.

• May 2013
  • Andrew Leonard, writing in salon.com, revealed Wikipedia editor Qworty's real life identity to be Robert Clark Young, a novelist and writer. Qworty first drew attention to himself through his "revenge editing" on the Wikipedia article of novelist and Wikipedia critic Amanda Filipacchi. Young routinely made negative revisions to the pages of authors with whom he disagreed. Leonard was aided in his investigation by members of Wikipedia criticism site Wikipediocracy. According to Washington Monthly columnist Kathleen Geier, "The Qworty case reveals the Achilles’ heel of the Wikipedia project. Anyone possessing enough time and resources, and who is obsessed enough, can post information on the site that is false, misleading, or extremely biased." Shortly after the publication of Leonard's article Qworty/Young was indefinitely blocked from editing Wikipedia and a sockpuppet investigation was opened in order to determine the extent of Young's editing with multiple accounts. Writing about the episode on his talk page, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales quoted Leonard's original article: "For those of us who love Wikipedia, the ramifications of the Qworty saga are not comforting." and went on to write that "That sums it up for me. More thoughts soon. I would have banned him outright years ago. So would many others. That we did not, points to serious deficiencies in our systems." Leonard's continued investigations into Young's editing revealed a years-long crusade against articles about topics and people related to modern paganism. Leonard reported that one of the pagans whose article Young had nominated for deletion in 2012 nominated Young's article, in an act of revenge, for deletion after Young's revenge editing came to light. However, the pagan editor told Leonard "that he was unlikely to be successful in getting Young’s page deleted, because Salon’s series of articles on the Qworty affair had enshrined the entire saga as a notable moment in Wikipedia history."
• June 2013 – Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, asked other editors to post their suspicions about Edward Snowden's activities on Wikipedia to Wales' talk page, arguably violating Wikipedia's strict "outing" policy. No evidence of Snowden's editing was uncovered.
• August 2013 — On August 22, 2013, Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning announced her intention to transition. Shortly thereafter, Manning's Wikipedia page was moved from "Bradley Manning" to "Chelsea Manning", and the page was rewritten to reflect Manning's female name and gender "with remarkably little controversy" at first. Within a day, however, a long move request had begun which found no consensus for the move, resulting in the page being returned to "Bradley Manning" until a second long move request in October found consensus that it should indeed be "Chelsea Manning". The same month (October), Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee heard a case about the disputes about the article, which resulted in several editors being topic-banned from editing transgender-related pages for either making transphobic remarks or accusing others of making such remarks. This led Trans Media Watch to criticize the Committee for implying that accusations of transphobia were as bad as actual transphobia. “We feel that Wikipedia's banning of certain editors for calling people transphobic reflects a wider cultural problem whereby identifying someone is prejudiced is seen as worse than being prejudiced,” they said in response to the bans.
• September 2013
  • Lawyer Susan L. Burke who had represented Iraqi civilians against the private military company Blackwater Inc (now known as Academi) sued to discover the identity of two Wikipedia editors who allegedly inserted misleading information into the Wikipedia article about her and whom she alleged were associates of Blackwater Inc.
  • Croatian newspapers reported that the Croatian Wikipedia had been taken over by a clique of fascists who were rewriting Croatian history and promoting anti-gay sentiment. The Croatian Minister of Education, Science, and Sport, Željko Jovanović, made a public statement saying that the country's students should not rely on the Croatian Wikipedia: "[W]e have to point out that much of the content in the Croatian version of Wikipedia is not only misleading but also clearly falsified." In an interview with Croatian news agency HINA, Snježana Koren, a historian at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, judged the disputed articles "biased and malicious, partly even illiterate", adding that "These are the types of articles you can find on the pages of fringe organizations and movements" and expressing doubts on the ability of its authors to distinguish good from evil.
• October 2013
  • Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner expressed concerns that too much money from Wikipedia donations was flowing to the various Wikimedia chapters around the world, funding bureaucracy rather than benefiting the encyclopedia. She also expressed concerns that Wikimedia's Funds Dissemination Committee process, being "dominated by fund-seekers, does not as currently constructed offer sufficient protection against log-rolling, self-dealing, and other corrupt practices."
  • Rand Paul was accused of quoting Wikipedia in some of his speeches. Specifically, Jeremy Peters of The New York Times accused Paul of plagiarizing the Wikipedia article on Gattaca when Paul was giving a speech about eugenics. The Gattaca article was semi-protected soon after for a period of a week.
  • An investigation by Wikipedians found that the Wiki-PR company had operated "an army" of sockpuppet accounts to edit Wikipedia on behalf of paying clients. The company's website claimed that its "staff of 45 Wikipedia editors and admins helps you build a page that stands up to the scrutiny of Wikipedia’s community rules and guidelines." The company's Twitter profile stated: "We write it. We manage it. You never worry about Wikipedia again." The Wikimedia Foundation subsequently sent Wiki-PR a cease-and-desist letter.
  • Australian Environment Minister Greg Hunt made headlines in Australian media in an interview with the BBC World Service stating that he had "looked up what Wikipedia says about bushfires" and read there that bushfires were frequent events that had occurred in hotter months prior to European settlement at the same time as meteorologists funded by the federal government, other scientists and politicians expressed concerns that increasing extreme fire and flood events are linked to scientifically accepted climate change. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Wikipedia's article about Hunt was edited to state that he uses Wikipedia for important policy research, and editing of the article was then disabled for new or unregistered users due to vandalism.

2014

The controversial monkey selfie

• January 2014 – The Wikimedia Foundation announced that Program Evaluation Coordinator Sarah Stierch was "no longer an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation", after evidence was presented on a Wikimedia mailing list that she had been editing Wikipedia on behalf of paying clients, a practice the Wikimedia Foundation said was "frowned upon by many in the editing community and by the Wikimedia Foundation".
• March 2014 – Wikimedia Foundation employee and former English Wikipedia administrator Ryan Kaldari admitted to using a sockpuppet to attack a fellow Wikipedian, simultaneously relinquishing his administrative rights.
• April 2014
  • The Wikipedia page about North Carolina Senator Jim Davis was edited to state, incorrectly, that he had died of a heart attack. Davis, who was on vacation with his family in Virginia at the time, received a phone call soon afterward (on April 18) from the Macon County Commissioner, who told Davis he had heard three times that Davis had died of a heart attack.
  • There was concern that the Wikipedia article on the Hillsborough disaster had been vandalized with offensive comments from computers within various UK government departments.
• July 2014
  • The Daily Telegraph reported that IP addresses belonging to the Russian government had edited articles relating to Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 to remove claims that it helped provide the missile system used to shoot down the aircraft. Among the pages edited was the Russian Wikipedia's article listing of civil aviation incidents, to claim that "the plane [Flight MH17] was shot down by Ukrainian soldiers".
  • The Wall Street Journal reported on a controversial article-writing program called Lsjbot that has created millions of articles on Swedish Wikipedia and several other language editions.
  • The 5-year-old Amelia Bedelia Cameroon "accidental hoax" about Amelia Bedelia, main character of its eponymous popular children's book series, was revealed by journalist EJ Dickson. Dickson, who authored the fabricated statements with a friend when they were "stoned", only rediscovered the hoax after it had been propagated tens of times by blogs, journalists, academics, as well as Amelia Bedelia's current author, causing debate about Wikipedia, the usage made of it, as well as responsibility regarding online sources in general. After the hoax was identified, the IP address which had been used to insert it was banned from Wikipedia.
• August 2014 – Photographer David Slater sent a copyright takedown notice to the Wikimedia Commons over a photograph of a Celebes crested macaque taken on one of his cameras, which at the time was being operated by the macaque, resulting in a "monkey selfie". The Wikimedia Foundation dismissed the claims, asserting that the photograph, having been taken by a non-human animal, is in the public domain rather than copyrighted by Slater, per United States law.

2015

• January 2015 - The Guardian reported that the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee had banned five editors deemed to be breaking the site's rules from gender-related articles amid the Gamergate controversy. This gathered a response from outlets such as Gawker, Inquisitr, Think Progress, The Mary Sue, de Volkskrant, and Wired Germany. The accuracy of these reactions was promptly addressed by the Committee, which had not yet released its final decision. The Wikimedia Foundation also released a statement on its blog. On January 28, the Arbitration Committee issued a final ruling in the GamerGate case, in which one longtime editor was banned from the site and other editors were prohibited from editing articles related to Gamergate or gender.
• June 2015 - Wikimedia UK employee Richard Symonds, a Liberal Democrat, was stripped of his advanced permissions on the English Wikipedia after the site's Arbitration Committee found that he had abused his position in order to "exert political or social control", and improperly blocked an account and attributed its edits to Grant Shapps.