Wikipedia is possible without discussion one of the most interesting projects to come out of the internet. An open and collaborative encyclopedia where anyone can collaborate by contributing their knowledge and which completely democratizes free access to information. For those of us who grew up in the days when encyclopedias still took up entire shelves in our homes, seeing all this information and more available at the click of a mouse is a sensational advance.

Wikipedia has a huge number of them over 6.458 million records in English, over 1.755 million in Spanishand equally monstrous characters in other languages. It is the largest repository of general information today, and unlike domestic encyclopedias, it is most common that information is updated quickly when changes occur. This means something that we could not have imagined a few decades ago.

However, the model is not perfect and one of its main strengths also hangs in one of its main flaws. The vast majority of articles can be edited by anyone, you don’t even need to be registered with Wikipedia to create a new entry or edit an existing one, something that suits the good intentions of most, but also a more malicious tone from others.

The most recent example of this type of attitude can be found in the information published by Vice, in which we can read about it a Chinese housewife spent years falsifying Russian history in the Chinese edition of Wikipedia. Gradually and in a very elaborate manner, this woman, who identified herself on Wikipedia with the username Zhemao, would create no less than 206 articles infested with false information that were passed off as authentic over the years.

The beginning of the end for Zhema’s misdeeds came when the Chinese novelist Yifan read one of his posts and, intrigued by the information in it, which he intended to use in one of his novels, wanted more information about him. With the Wikipedia article in hand, he went to the experts, who, surprised by the publication, They told him that this information was not true.. Then it was time to start pulling the strings.

The important point of this scam is that Zhemao would write very complete records, and he would also link them together, creating what we could define as a very well-connected information structure. So this hoax goes far beyond others we’ve seen on Wikipedia before, but which involved a single specific entry. In this case, due to the sophistication of the lie, these records would have gone unnoticed for years.

The Zhemao account, as well as other secondary accounts used by the same person, would be permanently blocked and a large team of Wikipedia editors would still review everything that person posted and edited. And it is because during all these years he was able to edit many other records, the information of which is now being questioned until it is confirmed by experts.

Zhemao’s case is somewhat extreme, but it reminds us in a very strong way that we should not simply believe what we see posted on Wikipedia. A few years ago, one of the creators of Wikipedia questioned the encyclopedia and even advised against using it, while he focused on his new project, another online encyclopedia, but in which blockchains are used to combat false and biased information. And it’s a shame, but perhaps the only solution for Wikipedia is to take similar or similar measures to protect the truth of the content. On the contrary, its reliability may end up losing many integers.