Iranian politics, white guy editors test Wikipedia’s high-minded mission
When you search for my husband’s last name, the only Google results are links to an opera singer with the same name. But for a brief moment in time, a few years ago, his family name was listed in Wikipedia’s category: “Royalty of Georgia (country).” His family isn’t royal, and never has been. Presumably out of boredom, my husband edited the wiki entry and inserted his last name. It stayed up for months. And when it was deleted, he changed it back. This time, it only stayed up for a couple of hours.
My husband’s edit was inconsequential. But not all edits on Wikipedia are as trivial as his.
Sina Zekavat describes in his piece for OpenDemocracy how he found major differences between pages on Iranian events, the country’s history and politics in English and in Persian. Content in English gives much more nuanced context, often with hundreds of verified sources; the Persian versions read like rote pro-government propaganda with dead links and footnotes to government-sponsored news outlets.
In 2007, Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales praised an Iranian contributor for his defiance (see his video for Amnesty International on free speech here). But the Iranian Ministry of Culture — which is responsible for the country’s “media management” — seems to work together with the non-profit Persian Wikipedia organization, and now there are talks to incorporate it into its ministry as an affiliated NGO.