• DOI:10.1353/jod.2020.0010
• Corpus ID: 211145754

The Cutting Edge of Sharp Power

@article{Walker2020TheCE,
  title={The Cutting Edge of Sharp Power},
  author={Christopher Walker and Shanthi Kalathil and Jessica Ludwig},
  journal={Journal of Democracy},
  year={2020},
  volume={31},
  pages={124-137}
}

• Christopher Walker, Shanthi Kalathil, Jessica Ludwig
• Published 2020
• Computer Science
• Journal of Democracy

The pages of Wikipedia, sometimes referred to as the “world’s encyclopedia,” are consulted by users roughly twenty-billion times per month.1 This popular online resource has arguably become a definitive global information gateway: Search-engine algorithms regularly place Wikipedia entries at the top of their lists of results, which also makes Wikipedia the chief source of replies to all manner of queries by Apple’s “Siri” and other voice-assistant software. Wikipedia—launched in January 2001—is a prime example of the remarkable technological innovations that emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century. As a contributor-based platform open to a global audience, it relies on trust, cooperation, and transparency in the production of its content. For all these reasons, the revelation in an October 2019 BBC report that more than a thousand “tendentious edits” had been made across nearly two-dozen sensitive articles relating to China shook the information platform. Mandarin-language entries had been rewritten to cast the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre as “‘the June 4th incident’ to ‘quell the counterrevolutionary riots.’” Taiwan—previously described as “a state in East Asia”—was redefined as “a province in the People’s Republic of China.” Other edits similarly sought to reframe matters past and present in a manner congenial to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The BBC concluded that, while the source of the edits could not be proven, “there are indications that they are not all necessarily organic, nor random.” It highlighted calls by People’s Republic of China (PRC) experts and by an official from a party-controlled publishing body for action to change the tenor of Wikipedia entries.2 Wikipedia, it bears noting, is currently blocked for ordinary users in the PRC.