At the time of TikTok, Twitch or Instagram, it is a real institution on the internet which is controversial in the 2022 presidential campaign. The very popular Wikipedia has been exploited by Eric Zemmour’s camp, as revealed by a journalist infiltrated his campaign team. Administrators of the contributory site confirmed it to us: supporters of the candidate had even created a phantom cell baptized by its members “Wikizédia”.
These activists sought in particular to qualify the expression “ranked on the far right” to describe the political positioning of Eric Zemmour. The objective was also to highlight the candidate’s ideas and support in thematic pages. And the hardest part of this story for the reputation of the online collaborative encyclopedia is that one of the protagonists – a certain Cheep – was a highly respected contributor. This is explained to us by a Wikipedian who prefers to remain anonymous: “Everyone knew he was on the right, he himself did not hide it. But he had not said that he supported Zemmour either. It is much more difficult to imagine that this person , which has been around for years, which has created hundreds of articles, may be there, ultimately, for a purpose, a bit of nuisance.”
“The older you are, the more contributions you have, the more easily you can pass between the lines.”
A Wikipedianat franceinfo
Cheep and six other cell members were permanently banned from the encyclopedia and their edits promptly removed. Wikipedia knows how to defend itself. She has, moreover, already done so in the past, says Capucine-Marin Dubroca-Voisin, the president of Wikimedia France, the association which federates the community: “We often have attempts to modify Wikipedia. We saw it with the article on Marlène Schiappa [la ministre déléguée à la Citoyenneté], for example. We saw it with the supporters of François Asselineau, former presidential candidate, who, long before that, harassed the Wikipedia team for his article. Wikipedia gives enormous visibility and that’s why it is the target of all these influences.”
The seven members of the “WikiZédia” cell aimed at promoting Zemmour on #Wikipedia have just been banned by decision of the college of administrators.@Wikipedia_en https://t.co/3f4aOMxEf5 pic.twitter.com/wtAdnBl26y
—Jules (@JulesWP) February 23, 2022
This “Marlène Schiappa affair” of which Capucine-Marin Dubroca-Voisin was revealed by a Wikipedia administrator, as reported by the Freeze frame site. An adviser to the Minister Delegate for Citizenship wrote a large part of his biography in particularly laudatory terms.
The online encyclopedia needs constant vigilance. This is the role of the administrators but also of all the “patrollers” of Wikipedia. Valentin Guillaume, alias Apollinaire93, is one of these sentinels. This 29-year-old music teacher caught the virus seven years ago: “I have about 3,000 pages in my watchlist. Obviously I will react more strongly if I see that a page is modified by a very recent user, because these are modifications that can be problematic.”
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Eric Zemmour’s page gave him a lot of work, but also the one that lists the names of the contenders for the Elysée Palace or the one that lists the polls. More recently, it was the biography of Fabien Roussel, the candidate of the Communist Party, which posed a problem. “With the revelation by Mediapart of a potential fictitious job, says Valentin Guillaume, there is a contributor who wanted to put a huge block on this page. But with five, six contributors, we agreed that a small paragraph of four lines was more than enough.”
#Wikipedia has become a place of fan activism for some candidates, and it’s very hard for me (others are better at taking the pitch) to trust recent accounts. https://t.co/UyovrZxD76
– Valentin Guillaume (@Apollinaire93) February 24, 2022
Valentin Guillaume is not, however, a communist militant. He calls himself a centrist and backed Gaspard Koenig, a presidential candidate who failed to secure the 500 endorsements needed to qualify. But this commitment is, according to him, not a problem: “There is absolutely nothing stopping you from doing what you want in real life, as long as your contributions are neutral and correspond to the established rules.”
The encyclopedia requires well-sourced facts and refuses comments. Everything is based on a form of self-regulation, adds our anonymous Wikipedian. This history student does not hide her leftist opinions: “A page that has few contributors behind it is where there is the greatest risk of neutrality problems. But pages that are re-read a lot, that are reworked a lot, we can get more approaching neutral. It really depends on the investment behind it.”
In recent months, Wikipedia has not only interested Eric Zemmour’s camp. The team of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, very involved on Twitter or TikTok, says it is very respectful of the independence of the site. This does not prevent activists from acting, explains Antoine Léaument, who manages the digital strategy of the rebellious candidate: “Their role will be to try to make pages exist, especially for our national speakers, for people who are figures in our movement. There are always some battles for these pages to exist, to be deleted, etc. ” Lost battle for one of these figures, Clémence Guetté. The co-responsible for the LFI program has not reached the two years of media presence, one of the conditions for existing on Wikipedia.
For ecologists, it is less Yannick Jadot’s page than the thematic pages that are monitored, in particular that on nuclear energy. The objective, recognizes Bruno Walther, director of communication for the EELV candidate, is to influence the debates between contributors to prevent certain arguments from prevailing: “Our teams do not intervene, it is the environmental activists who fight.”
“When we have lobbies that go to Wikipedia to say that nuclear is a clean energy, we strongly contest that because an energy that produces nuclear waste cannot be considered clean”.
Bruno Walther, communication director of Yannick Jadotat franceinfo
According to Bruno Walther“Wikipedia is in danger of privatization”. Faced with economic and political lobbies, the encyclopedic community sees only one solution: to recruit more volunteers ready to defend its integrity.