The #EndSARS article on Wikipedia was created at 11: 45 am on January 2, 2018. The article occupies 16 pages plus 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%) of its edits were made in just the month of October 2020, when as many as 752 of the 1013 references were made. In the whole of 2018, the year the article was created, only 17 edits were made.
The following year, between January and December 2019, even fewer edits, totalling 10, were made to 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 2021, the article had 99 edits. It had 56 edits between January and December 2022. 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% of its 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. Some persons seemingly exploited the Open Source nature of Wikipedia and they escaped suspicion that could have been based on the sheer number of editing activities on the #EndSARS article in October 2020 alone. The edit history review gives hints of seemingly arranged edits or 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 some $1.2 million to organise the protest around that time, even though they only confirmed raising more than half a million US dollars. Incidentally, the period of the highest editing on Wikipedia, was when the organisers of the protests owned up to receiving funds as donations from all over the world (refs 160, 191). My review of the edit history of the #EndSARS article edit history in Wikipedia revealed that six source attributions were directly from Twitter which is totally against the rules guiding the acceptability of sources on Wikipedia. Yet, references 64, 117, 118, 119, 163, and 185 are direct quotes from Twitter.
The #EndSARS article in Wikipedia not just quoted the uncorroborated Tweets of individuals reporting as eyewitnesses of a live situation, but it used one of the tweets within a week of it being made. Two more tweets were used in the article, two months after they were made and all without any published corroboration. About a year after the October 2020 peak of the article edit, yet another three old tweets of individuals, were used as sources in the article, again without any published corroboration.
What is worse is the contents of the tweets suggest they were clearly from persons who were seemingly promoters of the #EndSARS in what stinks as individuals using Wikipedia to fight personal wars .
It is instructive that on November 9, 2020, a Wikimedian asked on the Article’s Talk page whether Tweets were “now acceptable” as references. Unfortunately, the question was not replied to then and has remained unanswered to date. Hence three Tweets were again used as references in 2021. A detailed review of the version history of the #EndSARS article showed that attempts to vandalise the article were reversed, just as unacceptably biased edits were removed from the article on some occasions. But it would seem such attempts at fidelity were too limited in scope to substantially remove the seeming one-sidedness in the article.
My deeper Fact-Checking of the source references, for instance, revealed that the organisers of the #EndSARS Protest registered a domain name www.endsars.com. It was registered in Iceland or bought from a registrar based in Reykjavik, Iceland, on October 4, 2020, the same month that organisers of the #EndSARS protests raised so much money and organised their bloodiest protest in the five years of the organisation.
The endsars.com website seemingly documents random experiences from supposed or assumed victims of Police brutality. The victims it documented were mostly anonymous. The posters on the website are not IP-Checked to confirm authenticity or eliminate multiple posts from the same persons claiming to be supposed victims.
But the #EndSARS article in Wikipedia still used www.endsars.com as a source reference. This patently unreliable website and at best a primary source too, was used in the #EndSARS article as if it is a reliable secondary source (ref.15) By Wikipedia editing rules, the endsars.com website as a source, is essentially a circular source, if not outrightly incestuous as a media reference for the #EndSARS article in Wikipedia.
Ogunseitan is an investigative journalist and specialist writer. He is also a software programmer and digital media archivist. He delivered this (excerpts) as Keynote Address to WikiFact-Checkers, Lagos, on “Preventing the Weaponisation of Open Source Media Libraries for misinformation and disinformation”; a review of the #EndSARS article in Wikipedia.
Domain names of at least five websites used as references have timed out. Two of them have now been registered afresh, possibly by different entities, but now definitely for other purposes. One of the five websites, www.774ngr.com (ref 95 and 101) is now a pornographic
website. A second domain name www.Ab-Tc.com (ref 107) has now been redirected to www.ab- tc.ng which is a newer domain name of a website that is now an entertainment blog. It was registered by a registrant in Ghana on June 14, 2020. Two websites used as sources no
longer exist on the domain names on which they were. The domain names are now available to be registered by new owners.
The same reference (107), hints that the particular page containing what was referenced for the #EndSARS article from the now defunct website as a source is archived on Wayback Machine of www.web-archive.org. But the global internet archival website says the supposedly archived page is not available anywhere on its server or anywhere on the internet. Yet, the missing webpage or pages are supposedly the source of an outright lie which reads “Lekki Massacre: Lifeless bodies scattered on the streets of Lagos”.
A particular source reference (Ref 18) in the #EndSARS article reviewed, is a school project that even documented the October 2020 Protests. It was used as a reference three days after it was released even without ever being published in any journal where it could have been peer-reviewed.
This presentation has tried to show some seeming loopholes in the current operations guidelines of Wikipedia as an Open Source medium which may have been exploited for misinformation or to outrightly dis-inform, at least in this part of the world. It is however pertinent here, to immediately too, recognise and applaud the robust reliability of the openness of Wikipedia whose very strong and effective user logging documentation, made it possible for me to dig out some of what I have been able to in this review.
