The war over Chinese Wikipedia is a warning for the open internet

This past July, before he was banned from Wikipedia, Techyan was one of dozens of volunteers preparing to speak at the free-knowledge movement’s annual conference, Wikimania. Born in China’s northeast, Techyan, as he’s known in the Wikipedia community, had been editing Chinese Wikipedia since his early teens. As one of its three dozen elected administrators, he hoped his presentation would put a more positive spin on what, lately, had become Wikipedia’s ugliest battlefield. Rather than the edit wars and personal threats that had come to define some of its hot-button political topics like Hong Kong and Taiwan, Techyan planned to talk about how his three-year-old user group, the Wikipedians of Mainland China, or WMC, had thrived. It had done so in spite of government restrictions, and without official acknowledgment from the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts the site in over 300 languages and hands out millions in grants. Then in July, weeks before Wikimania, an email from the Foundation landed in his inbox: His presentation had been canceled. “Weeks later, I was banned,” he says. According to a September statement by Maggie Dennis, the Foundation’s VP of trust and safety, Techyan and six other veteran users were actually involved in “an infiltration” of the Chinese Wikipedia. In an interview, Dennis said a monthlong investigation found that the editors were “coordinating to bias the encyclopedia and bias positions of authority” around a pro-Beijing viewpoint, in part by meddling in administrator elections and threatening, and even physically assaulting, other volunteers. In all, the Foundation banned seven editors and temporarily demoted a dozen others over the abuses, which Dennis called “unprecedented in scope and nature.” Seasoned Wikipedia volunteers are familiar with harassment and vandalism, but Wikipedians in China have it especially hard, because the government blocks the site and makes accessing it a crime. Since the Chinese edition was blocked in 2015, millions of mainland Chinese have turned to Baidu Baike, a homegrown, for-profit, Party-sanctioned alternative. But as with the dedicated mainland users of blocked apps like Instagram, Telegram, and Twitter, the prohibition hasn’t deterred hundreds of volunteers, who tunnel through the Great Firewall with VPNs, and now make up a small but die-hard part of the Chinese Wikipedia community. Despite China’s blockade, the site remains one of the ten most active language versions of Wikipedia, thanks largely to growing numbers of editors based in Taiwan and Hong Kong. And amid acute worries over China’s influence in both places, the community’s mix of users and viewpoints has grown increasingly combustible. In 2014, when mainland editors were in the majority, there were few references to the Hong Kong protests; more recently, swarms of “pro Beijing” editors and “pro democracy” editors have battled over how exactly to depict those and simliar events. Were the students at a particular rally in Hong Kong protesters or were they rioters? Is a state-backed news outlet a reliable source? In some cases, the Foundation found, the fights had spread beyond online harassment into real-life threats, and worse. But because it released few details about the editors’ abuses, citing privacy concerns, Wikimedia left many editors to wildly speculate. On talk pages, in community chat rooms, and in media coverage, “pro-China infiltration” suggested an organized propaganda campaign, part of Beijing’s ongoing efforts to shape its image online. But such attributions are notoriously hard to make, and Dennis says there is no evidence the banned editors were backed by the government. Exclusive exchanges with Techyan, interviews with editors, and a review of records of the last 4 years suggest more personal motives. Techyan and his WMC colleagues liked to defend Beijing’s point of view, but they also liked their influence over the Wiki community; and a pro-China stance allowed them to more easily fly under the government’s radar. To protect their fiefdom, they sometimes resorted to personal threats, harassment, and assault. Volunteers at a Wikipedians of Mainland China meetup in Beijing in 2018.  [Photo: Wikicommons]In one previously unreported incident in 2018, three WMC members beat up a colleague to deter him and others from breaking the group’s de facto rules. Among other things, the victim had publicly disclosed that police officers had questioned two other WMC members about their Wikipedia work. “So,” Techyan told his colleagues about the beaten editor, “he stopped [editing] for a while.” In blog posts and emails to Fast Company, Techyan rejected claims of “physical harm” and said the Foundation’s bans amounted to censorship and “discrimination,” and were based on politically motivated complaints from adversaries in Hong Kong and Taiwan. He said he could “barely” remember the 2018 meeting or the assault. (Fast Company is only identifying volunteers by their usernames.) According to Techyan, he and other banned mainland editors are now building their own encyclopedia, starting with a “hard fork” of Chinese Wikipedia—a copy of the encyclopedia as it stands, which they will then edit and expand independently. The site, which he says already has 400,000 articles, is designed to be accessible within China, even though that will mean obeying government censors. “The Foundation’s Office Action directly affected 20, but it pissed off many more—among them, software developers, server maintainers, professional encyclopedia writers, local history enthusiasts,” says Techyan. By neglecting the mainland Chinese community, he says, the Foundation had failed its knowledge-preserving mission. “If the WMF isn’t going to do this for us,” he says, “we have to take things into our own hands.” The controversy even spilled into strident op-eds in Chinese state-backed media, where Wikipedia is rarely discussed. Citizens on the mainland were crossing the Great Firewall to access Wikipedia, one commentator acknowledged, but this was patriotic work that “has aroused the resentment of some Wikipedia users and foundations in Taiwan [who] . . . only hope that the China introduced by Wikipedia is the ‘chaotic, backward, and authoritarian’ country rendered by foreign media.'” Another article, published on the WeChat account of the Beijing-based Global Times, blamed the bans on one overseas Chinese pro-democracy editor in particular, sharing his name and personal photos and labeling him a “traitor.” Last month, Techyan said, he and another pro-Beijing editor were also doxxed on Wikipedia’s discussion pages. Editors at a WMC meetup in 2018. The Wikimedia Foundation banned several of them over abuses, including assaulting another editor after this meeting. [Photo: Wikicommons]The rhetoric and threats obscured a more sobering warning. At 20 years old, the encyclopedia that anyone can edit is now the improbable backbone of our information ecosystem, a place to rely on and get lost in, built on top of a similarly impressive volunteer-run infrastructure. Bottom-up and consensus-based, Wikipedia’s framework has proved remarkably resilient to vandalism and disinformation. But it can also be surprisingly brittle, weakened by a litany of problems from within, including harassment and bias. (Much of this stems from the stubborn fact that most Wikipedia editors are English-speaking men in Western countries.) The site’s weaknesses, meanwhile, leave it more vulnerable to manipulation by governments and non-state adversaries, who threaten not only its vision but also the safety of its volunteers. “Sharing information is not always seen as a neutral act, depending on where you might live,” says Maryana Iskander, Wikimedia’s incoming CEO, who will take the reins at the San Francisco-based organization next month. Suddenly, the Foundation’s bans and penalties had knocked out a third of the Chinese edition’s administrators.The Chinese episode represents new, treacherous territory for the Foundation as it tries to grow and defend Wikipedia around the world. Armed with a $100 million endowment and a staff of 500 globally, Wikimedia this year hired its first experts in disinformation and human rights and expanded its trust-and-safety unit to 20 people. In April, the 9-member board of trustees helped introduce a universal code of conduct, meant to standardize expectations for civility across all of its editions. This month, it also approved its first policy for human rights, meant to “inform how we respond to and protect members of our movement against demands and threats from non-state actors as well as governments that threaten to violate their human rights.” In her September letter to Chinese volunteers, Dennis acknowledged the Foundation had fallen short in its ability to address its human rights impacts and to communicate with Chinese users. At the time of its investigation and the bans, for instance, Wikimedia didn’t have a fluent Chinese speaker on its trust-and-safety staff. (Elise Flick, a Foundation spokesperson, said in an email that the Foundation “has added in-house Chinese language engagement support as of mid-October.”) “You have not had the service you’ve deserved,” Dennis told the community. One challenge for Iskander will involve deciding how hands-on the Foundation should be as it protects a project that’s long been defined by grassroots self-governance. It’s because of that structure that the Foundation typically leaves much policy-making and policing up to each community. While Wikipedia has hundreds of thousands of users, until September, the Foundation had only issued 86 bans since 2012, and typically only one at a time. Suddenly, the Foundation’s bans and penalties had knocked out a third of the Chinese edition’s administrators. “Given how much pride Wikipedia takes in being a global, open, and inclusive community, this decision [to ban editors] must have been really difficult for them, and shows how serious the challenge is that Beijing is posing to open societies,” says Lokman Tsui, a Hong Kong-based fellow at cybersecurity watchdog group Citizen Lab. “Wikipedia is the latest organization that has to struggle with this question, but it won’t be the last.” “Just Report the Hong Kong editors” China is home to the world’s largest population of internet users and to the world’s most sophisticated apparatus for policing them. But amid mounting efforts to shape the country’s image, Xi Jinping’s government has ramped up digital regulations with increasingly punitive zeal. Following a 2017 law that codified digital crimes, authorities now regularly solicit tips from the public about misbehavior online, and in some cases arrest those who access blocked websites, or use social media to, among other things, “slander” government officials or “malign” national heroes. China’s Wikipedia users are also under increased scrutiny. There are no reliable data about internet-related arrests, but reports of detentions have circulated in encrypted chatrooms and discussion pages for years. One rare public acknowledgment came in October 2020, when police in Zhejiang said a man had been arrested because, for months, he had used a VPN to gain “illegal access to Wikipedia to obtain information.” It wasn’t always so hard to be a Chinese Wikipedian. The Mandarin Chinese version of Wikipedia was born in 2001, just a few months after the English version, and got its first article the following year, on mathematics. By 2004, it had bloomed into a bustling community and was even receiving praise in state-run media. In Hong Kong, where the Beijing-backed government has suppressed civil society, Wikipedia is still accessible and legal.But that June, on the eve of the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen riots and massacre, attempts to reach Wikipedia ended at an error page. The site came back, but from then on, Beijing would keep it on a tight leash, hiding parts of it behind the Great Firewall for good. In 2015, the Foundation decided to switch to secure HTTP, which uses encryption to hide all connections to its servers, including from government hackers and censors. By that June, Beijing blocked access to the entire Chinese edition; four years later, it blocked every version of Wikipedia. Iran, Russia, Turkey, Thailand, Kazakhstan, and other countries have also blocked Wikipedia at times, but China’s blockade is thought to be the most comprehensive. Beijing’s efforts to influence Wikipedia even extend to the United Nations. In October, for the second year in a row, Chinese officials blocked the Foundation’s application for observer status at the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization, keeping Wikipedia out of global discussions around the sharing of information. The lone dissenting vote, a Chinese official explained, was because Wikipedia contained “a large amount of content and disinformation in violation of [the] ‘One China’ principle.” What’s more, he added, the Taiwan Wikipedia group had been “carrying out political activities . . . which could undermine the state’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” China’s digital suppression has been part of a global trend. In its latest report, published in September, the nonprofit Freedom House noted, alongside global efforts to regulate big tech platforms, “a record-breaking crackdown” on freedom of expression online: In at least 20 countries, governments suspended internet access, and 21 states blocked access to social media platforms, most often during times of political turmoil, such as elections and protests. In 56 countries, officials arrested or convicted people for their online speech. In a recent study on internet blockades, Google’s Jigsaw unit noted that what “was once a seemingly isolated problem has exploded” as a way for governments around the world to silence dissent and stifle democratic participation. In Hong Kong, Wikipedia, like most other foreign websites, is still accessible and legal. But a new Beijing-backed national security law, instituted last year after months of massive protests, has given police new powers to smash civic groups, shut down independent media, and compel activists to erase their online presence. The law has also led to new internet blocks, including of certain websites related to Hong Kong’s independence movement or hosted by the Taiwanese government. Wikipedians in Hong Kong have been on alert. In July, some China-based editors were seen discussing contacting the Hong Kong police. “Just report the Hong Kong editors,” one mainland administrator, nicknamed Walter Grassroot, wrote in a chat room, after someone shared the details of the Hong Kong public security bureau. “Nice idea,” said another, according to screenshots of the incident. “And their ID cards would be great too.” People in a Wikimedians in Mainland China chat room on the Chinese messaging app QQ, discussed reporting their Hong Kong colleagues to the city’s police. [Screenshot: via Telegram]It’s not clear how the threat impacted volunteers in Hong Kong. In a private message, a leader of the volunteer user group in Hong Kong said he wasn’t aware of any resulting police actions following the episode, which was first reported by the Hong Kong Free Press. The Hong Kong Public Security Bureau did not respond to a request for more information. Dennis also declined to comment on specific harms to volunteers, but she said the Foundation’s trust-and-safety team had been helping people who may have faced threats “to increase their security.” Bad apples The problems in the Chinese Wikipedia community date back to 2017, the year the Wikipedians of Mainland China was founded, according to one longtime former editor. That summer, a number of pro-Beijing editors won election to administrative positions. “The [WMC editors] elected more of their users to become admins, bureaucrats, and even oversighters [with higher data-access privileges],” says the former editor, a Chinese citizen who now lives overseas and is not being identified for safety reasons. During administrative elections, there were unusual spikes in votes for “pro China” users from sock puppet accounts. Harassment by certain editors went unpunished. “The atmosphere for discussion grew worse,” the editor says. “Personal attacks from their group were not stopped but encouraged. People who dared to point out their issues were retaliated against.” In January 2018, three members of the WMC physically assaulted a fourth after a meetup in Beijing. The victim had angered WMC leadership for telling the Taiwan user group that Techyan planned to meet Wikimedia Foundation officials in San Francisco. The Foundation later canceled the meeting. The former editor said the victim had also publicly disclosed that two WMC members “had been forced to ‘drink tea’ by the government because of a planned meetup,” using a euphemism for being questioned by the police. Two Wikipedia user meetings were canceled as a result of the police incident, and WMC administrators later sought to censor any discussion of it. (One deleted discussion has been archived on the Wayback Machine.) Though Techyan did not respond to specific questions about the assault, he says the WMC had already expelled some members for misbehavior. With hundreds of members attending meetups across China, “it is reasonable that there are a few bad apples,” he says. Last year, as an editorial war raged over articles related to Hong Kong’s political crises, the authorities helped tip the scales even more. That April, Hong Kong police raided the newsroom of the local newspaper Apple Daily, arresting its publisher and editors, ordering its accounts frozen and its archives scrubbed. In an instant, the government had not only snapped away a legendary source of independent journalism, but also suddenly deprived Wikipedia editors of a key editorial building block. (While its opinion coverage is not allowed in Wikipedia, the paper’s news stories are considered reliable sources.) In disputes over Hong Kong-related articles, the WMC and other pro-Beijing Wikipedia editors now had new ammunition to question the paper’s reporting. Administrator “Walter Grassroot” temporarily deleted every Apple Daily citation. (Administrators later blamed it on a bot.) Others pushed for the inclusion of more state-backed news sources for articles about events such as the 2019 attack on protesters at the Yuen Long MTR station. Still from a video capturing gangs of men attacking protesters at the Yuen Long MTR Station on July 21, 2019. [Photo: 立場新聞/Wikimedia Commons]“If governments and corporates are sufficiently powerful that they can dictate what goes into mainstream reliable sources, then they indirectly dictate tertiary sources like Wikipedia in terms of what they can and cannot say,” one senior Hong Kong-based editor told the Hong Kong Free Press i