Wikileads

A few days ago, Wikileaks accused the foundation that heads up Wikinews and Wikipedia of censorship after a controversial article was deleted from Wikinews.

Jason Safoutin, a Wikinews volunteer, wrote an article about alleged child pornography on Wikipedia. At issue: a 1976 Scorpions album cover that depicts a prepubescent girl in a provocative pose. The album cover has been on Wikipedia since 2006, but a couple of weeks ago, World Net Daily, a conservative news source, accused the user-created encyclopedia of hosting kiddie porn.

Safoutin’s article detailed the controversy surrounding the album cover. It also claimed that Erik Möller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the small non-profit that oversees Wikinews and Wikipedia, condones sex between young children.

The article was deleted from Wikinews. And according to Wikileaks, the Wikimedia Foundation was to blame.

But the Wikimedia Foundation denies direct involvement. I spoke with Jay Walsh, the Wikimedia Foundation’s communications director, to find out what happened. Click below to hear their side of the story.

Audio: The Wikimedia Foundation discusses censorship on Wikinews

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:

Wikileads.net: Can you describe why this article was deleted?

Jay Walsh: Here’s what I can tell you: The Wikinews articles that were removed were removed by volunteers. They were removed by participants in the Wikinews project. They were not removed by the foundation proper.

WL: Can you explain maybe how somebody becomes an administrator of Wikinews?

JW: I wouldn’t be able to speak authoritatively about how that happens on Wikinews. I know on the other wiki projects it is a community collaborative process where people who have particular levels of experience or have made higher quality edits or high quality revisions, they may be offered the extended responsibility of kind of having administrative authority, which is essentially a smaller set of tools to basically delete an article or move articles.

WL: And in general, do you know about what percentage of Wikinews articles are deleted like this?

JW: I don’t, but I would presume it’s not a very common practice. We’re not in a major, mainstream media organization, but in a journalistic organization there would be realistic issues about why a story may not be able to be published or why a story might go ahead and be published. And Wikinews, it’s not a mainstream media organization. It’s small, volunteer-driven, and as a foundation we’re very small. At the paid part of the organization — the staff members who work with the projects — we’re about 15 people at maximum. So that’s a very small overhead, so it’s difficult to divert a lot of energy to questions like this — to editorial questions like this.

WL: About the article. There were three main points in it. one of them was about the controversy with Wikipedia and the album cover with the naked 10-year-old girl on it. Then there was the controversy surrounding that album cover. The FBI was supposed to be looking into it. And then there was another part about Wikipedia’s stance about nudity on the site in general, and also your deputy director Erik Moller’s supposed stance on child pornography. Do you think that there was a specific part that caused this article to be deleted as it was?

JW: I can’t necessarily speculate. What I would say is that the discussions with staff members, some of that revolved around information that would have been potentially libelous or incorrect. There is lots of media coverage about somewhat controversial topics on Wikipedia, so those questions are not so much what was problematic about that story. I’d say it was more related to the issues about the named individuals and fact that the larger issue around our staff members being discussed recently in the media is based on, you know, completely ridiculous, disparate information being tied together to tell a real smear story. So, i mean, that issue is sensitive, and i think that is problem, the more sensitive of the issues.

WL: The part about Erik Moller?

JW: Correct.

WL: OK. I read your deletion policy a bit, and it seems like the common practice is usually if there is some kind of problem with an article, if there’s a claim of libel or anything that could get Wikinews into trouble, the first thing that happens is authors try to fix that part of the article. And from what I understand, that didn’t happen as much here. It was a quicker action to delete. So when libel comes up, when defamation comes up, is this normal practice — a volunteer deletes the article?

JW: You know, I don’t know that there’s a lot of precedent. I don’t know if this is something that has taken place a lot since Wikinews started. I think the answer is probably that this hasn’t happened very often. I would say that folks involved in the project are aware of those issues, and that there is sensitivity. We could be writing about real people. We could be writing about real issues. And you can probably appreciate the sensitivity and the reality of having a wiki-based news project doing the work of a media outlet. It needs to have those journalistic priorities, and occasionally that means that some stories may not be the right kinds of stories to push forward. This is a general observation, that the community tends to be more acutely aware of those issues, faster than we are. So often they’ll see something first and they will actually rectify those situations before the foundation side is even notified of those things. And that’s part of the self-correcting aspect of how the Wikimedia projects work.

WL: Well, thank you. Is there anything you think that we have missed that you want to add to this conversation?

JW: I just need to reinforce that a lot of the coverage and a lot of the stories circulating around, they neglect to mention the fact that the foundation is very, very small, that it’s a small non-profit, charitable foundation. The reality is that the volunteers have come up with these policies and they enforce these policies themselves and come to us only when it’s really necessary. It’s a testament to the volunteers doing good work really quickly and it’s a testament to their respect for a policy situation that is managed by volunteers more than anything.