Very recently an article at The Times of India stated as the (2014 General) election season hots up, the online war has entered another zone - the Wikipedia.
They told some biased and/or paid editors were adding promotional content on Wikipedia.
We knew it for a long a time. There are few more spheres in Wikipedia, where we have been facing similar or worse problem, such as— a) Bengali commercial cinema b) Indian Hindi television serials. In this essay, I'll discuss the problems we are facing in the Bengali cinema related articles.
Affected articles edit
Affected articles are all recently released Bengali commercial films articles. Here "commercial films" need some explanation. I mean, all films of Dev (actor), some films of Jeet (actor), Soham Chakraborty, Koel Mallick, Subhasree Ganguly.
The worst affected articles have been—
- Dev (actor) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
- Challenge (2009 film) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
- Paglu (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
- Paglu 2 (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
- Prem Aamar (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
- Chander Pahar (film) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
List incomplete
Problematic edit pattern edit
In these articles editors just keep on adding unbelievable, unexceptional claims with no or bogus citation(s). Their first target is generally the box office section of film articles where they claim each and every of their popular actor's films earn more than ₹100 crore (US$13 million).
- Examples
- See this edit, claiming Paglu earned ₹100 crore (US$13 million) in first few weeks. Clear hoax.
- Very recently I cleaned up Dev (actor) once again, after getting a report. Look this before the cleanup.
- In this version of Chander Pahar (film) article it was claimed the film earned 2.5 billion INR — hoax.
- In this version it is claimed that Bojhena Shey Bojhena film earned ₹95 crore (US$12 million).
Another deliberate hoax. We face similar problem more or less in every Bengali commercial film article.
Problematic editors edit
There are many editors — the worst part of the issues. There were dozens of IPs, when we semi-protected some articles, we started getting registered users. All of them make similar edits. You warn a user 2-3 times, he retires the account, and a new account appears. There is an endless queue of this appearing-disappearing.
Reports, actions edit
Since mid-2012 we have been fighting against these vandalism. You may see a compact report posted at the Admin's noticeboard here. After/before that we have posted it in every possible noticeboard.
We have taken or we have been taking the following steps to protect articles—
- Semi-protect all affected articles.
- Warn users.
- Block editors.
- Using Editnotice.
Solution edit
An admin (who is also a Wikimedia employee) told These kinds of situations can be difficult to deal with. :/
. But she later offered some help. The exact solution of this problem has not been found and may not be found anytime. We repair affected article everytime we find.