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In May, George Galloway, the ex-MP turned broadcaster, offered a £1,000 reward to identify Philip Cross – an active Wikipedia editor. Cross’s top ten most edited pages include Duke Ellington, The Sun newspaper, Jeremy Corbyn and – of course – George Galloway. “Christmas Day, Eid day, Easter Day, Cup final day, early hours of the morning, in the middle of the night – this man is on my case,” Galloway complained.

Galloway supporters fought the kind of furious Twitter war with Cross and his allies that define contemporary political debate. “The Wikipedia editing process is broken,” fumed JoshMnem on YCombinator’s Hacker News forum.


Then, at the end of July, almost everyone involved was stunned when Wikipedia banned Cross indefinitely from editing any pages on post-1978 British politics at the same time as editor KalHolmann was forbidden to speculate on Cross’s identity – both on pain of being blocked from the global encyclopaedia for up to a year. The shadowy figures behind this sudden attack of balanced approach? Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee.

The Arbitration Committee – or ArbCom – is the highest decision-making body on Wikipedia in English. It is, in effect, Wikipedia’s high court. It has 15 jurists – currently including a doctor, a copy editor, an IT specialist, a retired academic and a rocket scientist – who were elected by the site’s volunteer editors and who hear disputes after all other means of conflict resolution have failed. Their power to restrict, block or ban people is absolute and in a world of information wars, unmoderated fake news and conspiracy theories, ArbCom is rapidly becoming the first, last and only defence of politeness, respect and truth in internet debate.

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“People call us Wikipedia’s Supreme Court and I guess we play in to that using words like evidence and case,” explains Ira Brad Matetsky, a New York-based lawyer who edits under the name NewYorkBrad, was elected to ArbCom in 2007 and has served on and off ever since. “You can compare the role of judge and panel member – whether to take the case, how to take the case and deciding if it’s worth dissenting or it’s better to go along with the majority. We’re not a real court – we’re deciding disputes on a website. But they can be significant disputes and it’s a significant website.”

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales first convened ArbCom in 2003, two years after the online crowdsourced encyclopedia launched. The volunteer operated site is one of the last echoes of the utopian internet dream and operates through a complex form of community consensus democracy. Anyone can write and edit any of its roughly 48 million articles in 300 languages read 15 billion times every month and the site proudly states – in its five pillars of principle – that it has no hard and fast rules beyond neutrality, an impartial tone and “verifiable accuracy citing reliable authoritative sources.”


There’s talk boards and online forums for editors to debate content, sources and style and most issues are resolved there, through a negotiated settlement but edit wars — about everything from the US president to the size of the Death Star – have been there since the beginning. Wales initially settled the trickiest disputes himself, setting up the committee when the number he was asked to handle grew too cumbersome. In 2003, the number of editors – known as Wikipedians – was roughly 3,500 per month. Today, there are around 200,000 editors active every month.

The committee members – and the committee’s clerks – are all volunteers themselves. Paid full-timers work for the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organisation that hosts the site and boasts branches from Armenia to Venezuela with a headquarters at One Montgomery Street, San Francisco – a shining glass tower perched above an ornate Edwardian faux-Renaissance branch of Wells Fargo.

ArbCom is needed, says Jason Evans – Wikimedian in residence at the National Library of Wales - because “there’s a massive spectrum of people involved in Wikipedia from the very good willed to the highly motivated and not everyone involved has the best social skills. What they’re doing is fantastic work but when it comes to having a gentle touch with a new editor they might not understand what’s required.”

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In most cases, an editor asks the committee to hear a case, volunteer clerks handle the procedural steps and members take a vote as to whether it’s an ArbCom matter. Debates are mainly conducted in public on Wikipedia’s ArbCom disputes page – although committee members can use e-mail and even, occasionally, the phone to discuss cases.


“There are things that wouldn’t start an argument anywhere else that can still start an argument on Wikipedia,” says Matetsky. “As well as the contentious political topics, we’ve had capitalisation rules and whether individual television episodes deserve encyclopedia entries. When the committee was formed it was dealing with well over 100 cases per year. Now there’s precedents and well established ways of dealing with things we often say we don’t need a formal arbitration case. In 2010, ArbCom dealt with 30 cases. Last year we dealt with five.”

There may be fewer cases, but the arguments are increasingly heated says Fiona Apps, a Coventry based volunteer administrator – one of a few hundred editors with some powers to enforce good behaviour. “Politics in particular is more intensely argued than it used to be,” she explains. “80 per cent of the trolling is from unregistered users – lots of new Wikipedians are joining because they’re worried about fake news not to spread it – but there’s still bad behaviour even from long standing users. The way to get things done on Wikipedia is really strength in numbers and ArbCom is for the really high-level cases.”

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ArbCom’s members don’t split into right vs left or conservative vs liberal, Matetsky explains – “it’s mainly strict vs lenient. I’ve been typecast as one of the more lenient ones – I dislike excluding people unless it’s strictly necessary. Offline I have a reputation as being a litigator with a bit of a temper. My girlfriend had trouble believing this rational, kind NewYorkBrad was me.”


George Galloway’s supporters have accepted Wikipedia’s ban on Philip Cross as a good thing – albeit with reservations. “I think there was enough evidence to ban the account completely, but a British politics topic ban was still more than I expected from ArbCom so in that sense, yes, I was happy with the ruling,” says Keyvan Minoukadeh, who runs media activist site FiveFilters.org. “The system worked to some extent, but largely because there was such a huge outcry that something had to be done about it. I think arbitration should be carried about by people who are not as invested in the Wikipedia project but I think Wikipedia is better with ArbCom than without it.”

“There’s lots of idea about how you could do things differently and the system does have trouble with what is going on right now – Trump, Putin, Theresa May, politics where scholarly opinion has not decided so you get partisan controversy,” says Matetsky. “But the great thing about Wikipedia is that anyone can edit it and it’s self-regulating. It doesn’t work if you change that. It may look wrong from the outside but that’s the beautiful thing about Wikipedia – it doesn’t work in theory, it only works in practice.”

Updated August 22, 2018 09:37BST: This article has been updated to clarify Jason Evans' job title