Marco Silva
Climate change misinformation specialist.
David Tetta is the image source.
The image caption is.
David Tetta is a volunteer on the website.
Climate change denial has been a problem for the encyclopedia. A group of dedicated volunteers around the world are working to keep the deniers at bay.
David Tetta lives in a close-knit community where neighbours just wander into each other's homes, and during our interview, he broke off for a second to shoo one of them out of his house.
David first thought of volunteering to edit Wikipedia when he talked to his neighbours. Climate change was a topic that was being discussed more and more in the year 2019.
He says that many conversations evolved into people expressing their feelings of angst and fear about the environment.
I was wondering what kind of information people are getting.
David had worked for the US Environmental Protection Agency for more than 30 years.
He looked at the most obvious starting point for climate change information and found certain areas that could be improved.
He proposed edits and discussed them with other volunteers. He was pouring hundreds of hours into the encyclopedia.
He says it takes about 100 pages of scientific information to edit a sentence.
English Wikipedia gets more than nine billion page views a month, and that's not lost on David.
It gives you a responsibility to make sure you're getting it right.
Anyone with an internet connection can make changes to the encyclopedia. Those who deny the climate crisis know that it is vulnerable to manipulation.
They've been working on an editing war to get their views across, and it's not always their forte.
Someone added a sentence that wrongly said climate scientists are in the pocket of a secretive Communist organisation.
A user wrongly suggests that basic climate science is not as settled as you might think.
One time the entire text of an article on climate change was turned into a hyperlink. Clicking on any of it would lead to an article about hoaxes.
Those stunts don't last very long.
David says that it might stay up for a few minutes or an hour. One of the editors will spot it.
David is part of a small group of volunteers who have made it their mission to protect the articles about climate change on English Wikipedia. They're not afraid to fight.
David will send a note to the deniers on their personal page on the internet saying that this could have consequences. Sometimes these people are kicked off the internet.
One of the world's most popular websites, and one that is published in more than 300 different languages, is the encyclopedia.
According to the editors interviewed for the piece, English Wikipedia is the most reliable source of climate change coverage.
Femke Nijsse is the image source.
The image caption is.
Femke Nijsse is an influential editor in the climate change community.
Dutch volunteer Femke Nijsse says they are lucky with a large editor base.
She is one of the most influential voices within the small community of climate change editors on the internet.
If you've ever visited the main article on climate change on the internet, you'll know that Femke is the user who contributed the most.
She says she is proud of her work on the website.
Femke is studying the transition to green energy and has been thinking about global warming for a while.
She's been editing articles for seven years and she needs to know what junk science is.
She says that editors have a good feeling for misinformation red flags, including use of unreliable sources.
The removal of misinformation is the most satisfying editing for me.
Femke is a stickler for the rules of the internet.
In October, a user tried to add a sentence to an article that said stopping the world from using fossil fuels wouldn't make a difference to global warming. Femke explained that the statement would have to be backed by reliable sources.
There are policies that insist you have to cite quality sources, which can weed out unscientific content.
Su-Laine Brodsky, a tech writer by profession, says that org is an "uncomfortable place to be if you want to promote a point of view that goes against science." It's easier to be on social media, where you can say whatever you want, and not be held to task for it.
For the past 15 years, Su-Laine has been editing the encyclopedia.
The image is from Su-Laine Brodsky.
The image caption is.
Climate misinformation can make people angry, says Su-Laine Brodsky.
She began by sharing medical information and moved on to writing about animals. She decided to focus on climate pages recently.
She says she was intimidated by the idea of working on climate change because she was interested in the environment and wildlife. Climate change was a very controversial topic.
One day she stumbled across an article that was full of problems. There was a lot of self-promotion - companies promoting themselves, people who are doing some kind of research promoting their pet project.
Su-Laine got stuck in and began to get rid of it.
She says that encyclopedias are people who fix things. You need to have enough confidence to say, "I can make this suck a bit less."
Sometimes the errors are obvious. It didn't take long for Su-Laine to realize that some users were twisting the facts in subtler ways.
People will try to make it seem like so-and-so is a 'climate policy analyst' when there is an article about a climate science denier. She says that is a way of making the person sound credible.
Climate misinformation can range from neglect to a lack of balance, according to Alex Stinson from the Wikimedia Foundation.
He's confident that the organisation can deal with the problem.
"All of the studies suggest that our natural immune system on the big language encyclopedias catches a lot of misinformation quickly," he says.
The organisation uses computer bots to fight vandals. Some of the high-profile articles can only be edited by users with a certain amount of editing experience.
There are areas of the website that are harder to patrol.
Alex says there are over six million articles on English Wikipedia. Not all of those are under the same scrutiny.
According to a recent investigation, bad information is more common on climate pages in languages other than English.
It is up to volunteers to hold the fort.
Su-Laine says that the website is not evenly distributed. You have to take it with a grain of salt.
Information that is not useful.
Climate change.
