The world’s largest internet encyclopaedia is often the first result to pop up when users ask the internet a question – and thus represents a massively influential source of free information that also reflects humanity’s faults.

With entries that can in theory be written by anyone with an internet connection, in some 300 languages, it comes down to editing by mostly anonymous volunteers to police the site.

“I always carry my laptop along wherever I go to edit Wikipedia,” said Alaa Najjar, who is based in the Middle East, but asked that specific details about his identity be omitted for privacy.

“It is an addiction, as my friends say. I prefer to say it’s my passion.”

Alaa said he contributes to almost 500 entries a week and, as a medical doctor, has been busy fighting a flood of false information unleashed during the pandemic.

Among the strains of misinformation that surfaced on Wikipedia, he has spotted false reports of Covid-19 killing notable people, as well as inaccurate boosting of some nations’ death and case numbers.

“I reviewed hundreds of articles during the pandemic and rejected many misleading or erroneous amendments,” said Alaa, who got the platform’s top honour this year for his work.

A thankless job

The 20-year-old encyclopaedia, which even has an article devoted to its own controversies, has received positive accolades in recent years for its fact-checking capacities.

Although it’s a sprawling platform, the site does not seek to make money and so avoids the profit-over-safety criticism that has battered the likes of Facebook.

Instead, Wikipedia has volunteers who are deeply invested in the site’s stated mission of providing access to a written compendium of all branches of human knowledge.

Of course, it can be a thankless job to kick dubious reports off the platform.

“One particular editor called me a ‘vandal’ for removing unsourced information,” said Ksenia Coffman, who has battled what she termed “fan fiction” about World War II on Wikipedia, including how Nazis and German generals were depicted.

A strand of writing that ignores historical context regarding war-time atrocities such the Holocaust, and instead romanticises German forces, has influenced a subculture that has found its way to the platform.

“Why am I getting pushback when I am trying to remove unsourced globs of text that glorify these supposed Nazi war heroes?” asked Coffman, who lives in California but grew up in the Soviet Union and contributes around 200 edits per month.

She said the pushback from the subculture’s believers, as well as from editors who didn’t like to be challenged, was a “tactical mistake” by her detractors that in fact motivated her to stick around and take on the issue.

‘An uncomfortable mirror’

And other dark spots in human history have a way of popping up on Wikipedia, too.

Women have been less well-covered than men in published written works in general, which creates a barrier to women appearing in equal numbers to men in Wikipedia’s articles.

The platform requires reliable, published sources from news outlets or academia to underpin an article, noted Dublin-based volunteer editor Rebecca O’Neill.

“Wikipedia is an uncomfortable mirror to show the world because it reflects all the systemic knowledge gaps that we have,” she said, adding that she puts in about 40 minutes a day on the platform.

In 2015, it became clear that only 15% of English-language biographies on the platform were about women, sparking an effort to try to balance out the disparity. Six years later, the figure has risen to over 19%, said O’Neill.

Last year she was writing Wikipedia articles at the rate of one a day, and in the ratio of 19 biographies on women for every one she did about a man.

“I, as an individual, can offer something. I’m going to set aside the time and just do it, and not turn it over too much in my head,” she said.