By Prince Osuagwu

Select media stakeholders, yesterday, gathered at the Lagos state chamber of Commerce and industries, Ikeja to brainstorm on how to arrest the wave of misinformation in the country.

The event, WikiFact-Checkers pre-workshop conference was particularly organised to pick the brains of notable media professionals in Nigeria on how to prevent the weaponisation of open-source Wikipedia for misinformation and disinformation.

Digital media Archivist, O’Seun Ogunseitan who presented the keynote speech and Editor-In-Chief of Vanguard newspapers, Mr Gbenga Adefaye who was the Special Guest, among others, agreed that there is need for Open source libraries to go back to the drawing board to entrench fidelity of data and fact-checking principles into their practices

Mr Ogunseitan gave examples of Wikepedia’s account on the #EndSars protest and expressed dismay that it appeared there was a deliberate attempt to exploit Wikepedia for ulterior motives.

He said: “When I read reports of the #Endsars in Wikipedia, it became clear to me, how easily a beautiful Open Source Information medium like Wikipedia can easily be used like a weapon.

“The #Endsars article on Wikipedia was created on at 11.45am on January 2, 2018, the article occupies 18 pages and three lines on the 17th page. But a review of this less than 17-page article, has a total of 205 references.

“A further review of the revision history of the article indicates it has had a total of 1013 edits in the last five and half years. But almost eight in every 10 [74.2 percent ] of its edits were made in just the month of October 2020, when as many 752 of the 1013 references were made.

“In the whole of 2018, the year article was created, only 17 edits were made. The following year, between January and December 2019, even fewer edits, totalling 10, were made on the article. A total of 823 edits were made on the #Endsars article between January 2020 and December 2020 of which 752 were made in october 2020 alone. Only 71 edits were made in the other 11 months of that year. Between January and December 2021m, the article had 99 edits. It had 56 edits between January and December 202. From January to may 17, this year, the article has had 10 edits.

The Wikipedia article, which by December 2020 had recorded almost 752 out 850 edits which is some 90 percent content editing in just one month out of its previous 36 months ought to have attracted serious scrutiny of its content by Wikipedia administrators. But this never happened. It somehow escaped their scrutiny”.

Ogunseitan further averred that some persons seemingly exploited the Open Source nature of Wikipedia and they escaped suspicion that could have been based on the share number of editing activities on the #Endsars article in October 2020 alone.

For him, “the edit review gives hints of seeming arranged edits by groups, which may ordinarily hint at a form of paid editing, which Wikipedia is against.This becomes more plausible because the organisers of the #Endsars are believed to have raised up to $1.2 million to organise the protest around that time.

Adefaye on his part said that the age of social media where Artificial intelligence and photoshopping have become available tool for people who are not trained journalist, may have affected the quality of fact-based information in Wikipedia, and challenged the Open-source platform to discover a nexus between democracy, free speech media freedom and Open source platforms.

He advised that fact-checking should be sacred and fidelity of data should be the watch words of open source libraries like Wikipedia. He expressed belief that Open source Library can help deepen democracy by creating a platform where the fidelity of data is preserved and fact checking becomes a norm.