Marco Silva
Climate change misinformation specialist.
Several foreign-language Wikipedia pages are promoting conspiracy theories and making false claims about climate change.
Some of the numbers suggest scientists are divided over the causes.
Humans are to blame for global warming, according to the overwhelming scientific consensus.
A representative of the Wikimedia Foundation said they were worried about the findings and needed more volunteers.
There are a number of disproven theories, including the emergence of a totalitarian world government and calls for climate action to secretive financial interests.
More than a third of the page on global warming is devoted to questioning the science of climate change, while also pushing conspiratorial views.
Alex Stinson is a senior programme strategist for the Wikimedia Foundation. We need more people involved in this project.
Each of the more than 300 different languages has its own version of the encyclopedia.
The quality of its content is dependent on the volunteers who are open for edits.
The chances of conspiracy theories and bad information on the site would decrease if more volunteers were in different languages.
The image source is on the internet.
The image caption is.
The English-language article on climate change has been viewed eight million times.
"Wikipedia only works if the editing community is large and diverse," said a Japanese writer based in the US.
One of the world's most visited websites is the online encyclopaedia.
The English-language version has more than 40,000 users actively editing it each month.
The climate- change pages have a group of editors who patrol for bad information.
Many of the pages in languages other than English are not the same.
In more than 150 languages, less than 10 people a month regularly edit any pages.
The smaller versions are vulnerable to manipulation because they lack editorial diversity.
Self-governance is one of the core principles of Wikipedia.
Unless the community of editors steps in, the Wikimedia Foundation can do little.
The foundation has never directly interfered with editorial policies.
If the science-literate show up in that language, in that context, and that Wikipedia, then we can push back on this misinformation in science.
Information that is not useful.
There is fake news.
Climate change.
