One of the most popular pages on the internet isn’t a social media platform, it’s Donald Trump’s Wikipedia landing site; a page where editors are constantly battling one another over who can be more petty.
Since 2004, Trump’s page has been through more than 28,000 revisions, according to Slate‘s Aaron Mak, which may be attributed to the fact that users can update Wikipedia pages in real time. Some pages have stronger editing powers than others, the site argues, and it believes that its self-policed goal of accurately conveying reliable information in a neutral tone, remains; despite the constant updates.
One event that sparked a flurry of activity on Trump’s page was the July 2018 U.S.-Russia summit in Helsinki where Trump announced that he didn’t “see any reason why” Russia would have interfered in the 2016 election despite U.S. intelligence reports.
“The article needs to be updated with Trump’s shocking performance, which sources are describing as treasonous, disgraceful, and ‘played like a fiddle,’” one ofWikipedia’s most active users MrX wrote on the Trump page’s Talk page — an editorial forum for discussion about entries.
“Let’s not play the ‘promote the most ridiculous comments’ game that the media appears to be playing,” replied a user called power~enwiki. “Approximately nothing new happened, but there are plenty of ‘former government officials’ willing to give hyperbolic quotes on Twitter.”
And with those two comments a debate among Wikipedia editors began with the more spiteful members of either way of thinking resorting to malicious updates that targets both the President and his adversaries.
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