While Westminster remains mired in endless Brexit deadlock, over on the Brexit Wikipedia page things are even less amicable. Editors are parrying death threats, doxxing attempts and accusations of bias, as the crowdsourced epic has become the centre of a relentless tug-of-war over who gets to write the history of the UK as it happens.

Originally posted in January 2014, what began life as “Proposed referendum on United Kingdom membership of the European Union” has bloated into a 11,757-word behemoth.


But the article’s vast size is the least of its problems. In private, and on discussion pages, editors tell tales of turf wars, sock puppet accounts, and anonymous figures hellbent on stuffing the article with information that supports their point of view.

“I was heavily involved with the Brexit page, but gave up more than a year ago because the level of bias on it proved impossible to address and the aggravation of trying to deal with that was not worthwhile,” says EddieHugh, a Wikipedia editor who has made 186 edits on the Brexit page – making them one of its most prolific contributors. Since leaving the page behind, EddieHugh now specialises in editing entries about obscure mid-century jazz musicians.

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For the dedicated cabal of Wikipedians who are still editing the page, the battle against bias is never-ending. “Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view,” reads the second of the Wikipedia “five pillars”, the fundamental principles that guide editing on the website. But who gets to decide what counts as neutrality?

“Brexiteer-types frequently complain that the page has an anti-Brexit bias because the page simply covers what credible economic research indicates about the likely impact of Brexit,” says Snoogans Snoogans, who has made 12 per cent of all the edits on the page. As with all of the editors I spoke to for this piece, Snoogans asked to be referred to by their Wikipedia moniker.


“I edit a lot of controversial politics pages and have experienced death threats and attempts to doxx me as a result,” they say. On the Brexit page, Snoogans mainly adds information to the section that details the potential impact of Brexit on the UK and Europe, one of the most controversial aspects of the page.

“The big problem with the page is that vandals and good-faith editors with strong points of view regularly seek to remove the content sourced to peer-reviewed studies and expert assessments, in particular from the [opening paragraphs],” they say. “They do so either because they personally reject the findings of those studies or due to a sense of ‘false balance’.”

One sentence Snoogans added to the page’s opening paragraphs is particularly divisive. Early on the article refers to a “broad consensus” among economists that Brexit will damage the UK economy. Soon after he added the sentence, other editors tried to remove the edit, arguing that economists aren’t reliable enough to be included in Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia’s rules don’t contain specific guidelines about economists, but recommend that “academic and peer-reviewed publications, scholarly monographs and textbooks” should be used as sources where possible.

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Others asked for the entire section detailing the impact of Brexit to be moved to a separate article altogether, arguing that the article had become too long and unwieldy. At 72,900 characters, the article falls firmly within Wikipedia’s “probably should be divided” category according to its guidelines on article size.


Other debates revolve around the Brexit jargon and the page’s 19-word-strong glossary. Is Leaver the best way to refer to Brexit supporters, or is Brexiteer more common? And is “Remoaner” the remain-supporting version of “Brextremist” or is the latter somehow nastier? A recent question on the Brexit talk page, where editors discuss changes to the article, raises another question about the term Quitlings. Is it something to do with quislings, and if so, shouldn't the glossary mention that? For now, the consensus is that yes, it is a reference to the Norwegian Nazi sympathiser Vidkun Quisling – whose name has evolved into a synonym for traitor – but that the term isn’t widely used enough to justify including it in the article.

Of course, the Brexit article itself is just the black hole at the centre of the galaxy of Brexit content on Wikipedia. In all, there are at least 79 Wikipedia pages that relate to Brexit in some way. There are pages on Brexitovka – a vodka brand created to commemorate (or commiserate) the Brexit vote – and one on the Breunion Boys, a Dutch band that released a song called “Britain Come Back” imploring the people of the UK to try and stop Brexit.

Other editors are more interested in correcting mistakes than they are in contributing to the ever-increasing pile of Brexit-related Wikipedia content. Tlhslobus, a former retired software developer from Dublin, says he steps in when he sees something that needs fixing, but tries to steer clear of big edits on the Brexit page.

When he noticed that the page had some details wrong about the European Court Of Justice’s ruling that the UK could unilaterally revoke Article 50, Tlhslobus quietly stepped to make a few corrections. But mostly he’s interested in pruning the article, and leaving the heavy-lifting to editors that have the energy to deal with the stress that tends to result from any significant edits.

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“As someone who edits a lot of controversial politics pages, a lot of editing and time goes into “patrolling” the page,” says Snoogans. “This means that I check all new changes, and if they’re bad, I revert them.”

But what may appear like diligence to some editors, can look like bloody-mindedness to others. On discussion forums and subreddits, groups of Wikipedia critics – some angry ex-editors and others who are sceptical of Wikipedia’s whole mission – gather to critique the website.

One longtime Wikipedia watcher who asked not to be named warned me that some editors set up multiple accounts to try and strongarm their point of view onto the page. One of the accounts editing the Brexit page, he warned, might actually be a sock-puppet account for Tarc, a now-banned account that was infamous for getting into scrapes with other editors on and off of the website.

Proving such an accusation, however, is tricky. Wikipedia editors are anonymous, and the community is almost entirely self-regulated. Although the english Wikipedia has almost six million articles, 77 per cent of them were written by just one per cent of editors. One editor, Emass100 says that the rules around editing are arcane and difficult for newcomers to penetrate, a fact that puts off new people from contributing to articles that are already dominated by big-name editors.

“There is an innate hostility to any new content,” says Emass100, a Canadian student who started editing Wikipedia when he was doing a university project on Chinese politicians and realised that many of them didn’t have their own English Wikipedia pages.

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On the Brexit page, there are no such wide open spaces. Every edit is fought over, and then defended viciously. On a page where motives are constantly questioned and no one is quite sure who is behind which account, suspicions run rife. “The main challenge is the conduct of other editors,” says one editor who didn’t want to be interviewed for this article. “You might be one of the editors,” he told me.

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