A War of Words Over Wikipedia’s Spanish Version

¹²³ · Aug 27, 2009

When Wikipedia held its annual Wikimania conferences in Egypt and Taiwan, the locations presented obvious political challenges to its idealistic vision of articles written with a “neutral point of view.”

China-Taiwan relations, for example, are a long-standing source of world tension, surpassed by a rare few disputes, among them the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Could a bunch of volunteer editors really expect to create articles that please both Chinese and Taiwanese, or Israelis as well as Palestinians? Talk about utopian dreams.

With more than 500 Wikipedians gathering in fun-loving Buenos Aires for this year’s Wikimania, politics was expected to return to the back burner. The annual conference would once again resemble a high-minded electronics show rather than the United Nations General Assembly.

Turns out there was never a chance of that.

In a surprisingly aggressive keynote address Wednesday, the free-software activist Richard Stallman told an audience of Wikipedians who had assembled from the four corners of the globe that he was disturbed to learn that the Spanish-language version of Wikipedia was restricting links to a prominent left-wing Web site. He said it looked a lot like political bias from where he stood — which happened to be the stage in the Alvear Theater on Corrientes Avenue.

The administrators of the site made things worse, Mr. Stallman said at the end of his address, by banning those Wikipedians who had complained about what had happened. For good measure, he read phrases from an article about the political crisis in Honduras that he said that were unfair to the deposed president, Manuel Zelaya.

“There’s a problem here, a real problem,” he said about the decision to limit links to the site rebelion.org, a political news aggregator that also runs some original content. Spanish Wikipedia looks like “a closed system that offers no way to deal with this problem,” he said.
His accusation from the stage created the odd spectacle of Spanish-speaking Wikipedians angrily challenging the man invited to open their conference.

Damian Finol, 26, an information-technology specialist from Caracas, Venezuela, told Mr. Stallman that Spanish Wikipedia had made it harder to link to rebelion.org because people were routinely substituting its links like a spam attack. “I don’t think it is fair,” he said to Mr. Stallman, who interrupted to say that rebelion.org is not only an aggregator, “You are repeating a falsehood,” Mr. Stallman said.

In trying to lower the volume, Mr. Stallman added, “My purpose is not to castigate Wikipedia, it is purely constructive.”

But the damage was done. Hours later, Wikimania organizers were shaking their heads at what had happened at the start of their event, which briefly included the mayor of Buenos Aires.
The lead organizer, Patricio Lorente, an administrator at La Plata University, said he was not exactly surprised by Mr. Stallman’s address: “I tried to talk to Richard about this. He doesn’t get the real dynamic of Spanish Wikipedia.There isn’t a leader, decisions are based on consensus. Unfortunately Richard has friends who convinced him that this was a real discrimination case. This is simply not true.”

Rebelion.org is more like an aggregation site like Digg, Mr. Lorente said. That means it generally shouldn’t have links on Wikipedia unless the link is to its own original content.
The irony, Mr. Lorente said, is that he considers himself allied with the left-wing cooperative movement, where workers control their businesses. “In our group, there is a diversity of opinion, but it is more to the left than the right,” he said.

Most visitors to the conference, for example, are staying at the Hotel Bauen, a worker-run operation a few blocks from the San Martin Community Center, Wikimania’s headquarters. Mr. Lorente stressed that Wikipedians were able to get a cheap price and that it is convenient, but he still felt it was worth mentioning the worker connection.

“A lot of the material on rebelion.org originally appeared in La Jornada, a left-wing paper in Mexico, and we have 1,500 links to La Jornada,” he said. “This is not a problem of ideology but a problem of spam.”

Mr. Stallman’s comments did help expose some of the raw issues within Spanish Wikipedia.
Mr. Finol said he had encouraged some Argentine Wikipedians he knew were displeased with the rebelion.org case to “come to Wikimania and see for themselves. They said, if I come, it will be to protest Wikimania.”

Mr. Finol also said that back in Venezuela, news outlets had said that he was working for the United States government. “I got hate mail,” he said.

He said the claim was silly, but that unlike Wikipedia in other languages, “a lot of political stuff is going on in Spanish Wikipedia. A majority of vandalism is political, I’m guessing.”

Still, all the Spanish Wikipedians interviewed said that through discussions, they were able to reach a consensus on even the most contentious issues, such as how to describe Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, or whether to restrict rebelion.org.

“The most heated discussions are about words that are spelled differently in different parts of the world,” said Pedro Sanchez, a 30-year-old mathematician from Michoacan, Mexico, 30, who also confronted Mr. Stallman.

For example, there is that device that moves a computer cursor: “Do you call it a mouse or a raton? In Latin America, we call it a mouse. In Spain they say raton.”

Looking at Spanish Wikipedia, for now, the answer is mouse.
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maxiep · Aug 27, 2009

That's the problem with democracy--it can be messy. One person's left wing site is another's Bible. Another's whackjob right wing site is another's first source for "objective" news. It's a constant struggle where the balancepoint is constantly moving.

Eventually, there will be a fracture where there's a left-wing encyclopedia and one for the right-wing. One for the Israelis and one for the Palestinians. One for China and one for Taiwan. We need to recognize the fact that some areas simply can't be negotiated to an area of common agreement.

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