10 times Wikipedia got it very wrong

As the online encyclopedia celebrates its 20th anniversary, we look back at some of its most controversial moments

The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 by co-founder Jimmy Wales and is now one of the most visited website on the Internet. EPA

Exactly two decades ago, on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia was born.

The collaborative, volunteer-produced internet encyclopedia was founded by British-American entrepreneur Jimmy Wales. Today, it is the seventh most popular website in the world, with more than 55 million articles being consulted 15 billion times every month.

The site is currently available in 309 languages, and Wales is intent on expanding this to include the languages of the developing world. “That's really important that the next billion people, two billion people who come online are going to want to participate in Wikipedia, to grow their own storehouse of knowledge, and they're going to rely on us to support that work, and that's a big part of how I think about the future," he says.

Wikipedia's non-profit nature makes it an outlier among other internet giants, and harks back to the idealistic early days of the open-source movement. But that’s not to say it hasn’t attracted its fair share of controversy. Unlike traditional encyclopedias, contributions by non-experts are welcome, which has been the source of much debate.

The website has also been criticised for the fact that its contributors are overwhelmingly white males from Western countries, with limited input from women and people in developing nations.

It has also been known to get things very wrong. From a fictitious war to the great "monkey selfie" debate, here are some of the site’s more controversial moments.

An eery coincidence

In June 2007, a statement about Nancy Benoit's death was added to wrestler Chris Benoit’s English Wikipedia page and picked up by Fox News. "Chris Benoit was replaced by Johnny Nitro for the ECW Championship at Vengeance, as Benoit was not there due to personal issues, stemming from the death of his wife Nancy,” read the addition – which was published a whole 14 hours before police discovered Nancy’s dead body. She and her seven-year old son had both been killed by Benoit, who then took his own life. The anonymous poster went on to Wikinews to assure everybody that his edit was a "huge coincidence and nothing more”.

A bit of a reach

When TV theme composer Ronnie Hazlehurst died in October 2007, a number of British media organisations reported in their obituaries that he had co-written the S Club 7 song Reach. He had not, but the information had been sourced from a hoax edit to Hazlehurst's Wikipedia article.

The break up

In March 2008, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales used the site to end a personal relationship with conservative political columnist, television commentator and university lecturer Rachel Marsden. He added a single sentence to his Wikipedia user page: "I am no longer involved with Rachel Marsden.” This was news to her.

Musical misquote

In March 2009, hours after the death of French composer Maurice Jarre, Irish student Shane Fitzgerald added a phony quote to Jarre's Wikipedia article, which read: "One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear." This was promptly incorporated into numerous obituaries in newspapers around the world, including The Guardian and The Independent.

Psychological issues

In June of the same year, Canadian doctor James Weilman uploaded copies of all tent inkblot images used in the Rorschach test to Wikipedia, on the grounds that their hcopyright had expired. Heilman was widely criticised by psychologists who used the test as a diagnostic tool, because they were worried that patients with prior knowledge of the inkblots would be able to influence their results.

FBI fakes it

In August 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation requested that Wikipedia remove the FBI seal from the site, due to concerns that people could use the high-resolution graphic to create fake FBI badges. Wikimedia Foundation's lawyer Mike Godwin sent a curt letter to the bureau – denying their request and suggesting that they may have misinterpreted the law.

An international incident

In October 2012, the governing body of Asian soccer was forced to apologise to the UAE’s football team, after referring to them as the "Sand Monkeys”. The derogatory term had been taken from a vandalised Wikipedia aprticle.

Imaginary war

In January 2013, a hoax article on the "Bicholim conflict" was brought to the attention of the world’s media. The piece was a meticulously crafted but entirely fabricated account of a fictitious war in Goa, India. It had been listed as a "good article”, a quality award given to less than one per cent of all content on English Wikipedia – for more than five years.

Monkey selfie

In August 2014, Wikimedia received a takedown notice from photographer David Slater, regarding a photograph of a Celebes crested macaque. The image, widely dubbed the “monkey selfie”, had been taken on Slater’s camera, which was, at the time, being operated by the macaque. The Wikimedia Foundation dismissed the claims, asserting that the photograph, having been taken by a non-human animal, rather than Slater, was in the public domain, as per United States law. A court in San Francisco agreed.

Wiki-product placement

In May 2019, a marketing agency for The North Face Brazil admitted that it had surreptitiously replaced photos of popular outdoor destinations with photos featuring North Face products, which would get them to feature more prominently in search engine results. Following extensive media coverage and criticism, The North Face apologized and the images were removed.