The ‘Guerrilla’ Wikipedia Editors Who Combat Conspiracy Theories

WIRED
6 min readAug 8, 2018
Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia was started to “improve skeptical content” on the crowdsourced encyclopedia. Photo by Federico Beccari on Unsplash

By LOUISE MATSAKIS

Susan Gerbic spent her career photographing babies at a department store in Salinas, California, just 100 miles south of San Francisco. Today, the retired 55-year-old has dedicated her life to something entirely different: Wikipedia.

As a member of the skeptical movement, Gerbic is committed to promoting critical thinking, scientific inquiry, and empirical evidence — particularly when it comes to fringe ideas. In 2010, she started a Wikipedia project to “improve skeptical content” on the crowdsourced encyclopedia, by writing new articles about topics like people who claim to have supernatural abilities and improving existing ones about groups like those who believe the Earth is flat.

Today, the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia project has more than 120 volunteer editors from around the world, each of whom Gerbic has recruited and trained herself. They’re collectively responsible for some of the site’s most heavily trafficked articles on topics like scientology, UFOs, and vaccines.

Over the past several years, companies like YouTube, Google, and Facebook have turned to Wikipedia to help fight the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories on their own platforms. While the crowdsourced encyclopedia isn’t totally immune from being manipulated, it’s proven to be a largely reliable resource for accurate information. GSoW often debunks the same harmful conspiracy theories tech platforms struggle to combat, meaning it stands to play an important role in that battle.

GSoW editors have collectively created or completely rewritten more than 630 Wikipedia pages, which together have garnered over 28 million page visits. They’ve worked in multiple languages in addition to English, including Spanish, French, and Arabic. A private group on Facebook called the Secret Cabal functions as a sort of headquarters, where members discuss edits and decide which articles to tackle next.

Their subjects provide a window into the various ways people end up on Wikipedia, and how they find information on the internet more generally. Take Stan Romanek, a UFO enthusiast who says he’s been contacted by aliens. GSoW editors wrote his page years ago and included information casting doubt on his…

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