The Trouble with Cryptocurrency Articles on Wikipedia
Editing cryptocurrency articles on Wikipedia is tricky. We take a look at why that's the case and identify some sources to avoid for the best chance of success.
It seems everyone is talking about cryptocurrency and the blockchain these days. Professional sports teams and video game publishers are minting non-fungible tokens and new cryptocurrencies pop up almost every day. Too many of those lose their value overnight.
Those conversations have spilled onto Wikipedia. Editors are somewhat divided on the topic, with some supporting blockchain wholeheartedly and others finding that crypto and blockchain is little more than a grift or even harmful.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales created an NFT of his first Wikipedia edit, but also said the encyclopedia would "absolutely never" get involved in a coin offering and has been critical of cryptocurrency in general. So, it's a bit muddy.
We'll take a look at some of the more prominent decisions made on blockchain topics on Wikipedia and how they made the editing landscape so much more difficult to deal with.
A brief history of cryptocurrency editing on Wikipedia
Cryptocurrency articles on Wikipedia have been around since the creation of bitcoin in 2009, but as the space grew, it became apparent to editors that stronger restrictions to editing on the topic were needed as the subject was "rife with promotionalism and POV pushing." In this same conversation, the community noted that crypto editors were often editing crypto- and blockchain-related articles without disclosing their ownership of the same coins they were editing articles about, a violation of Wikipedia's policy on conflict-of-interest editing.
In 2018, editors imposed a "general sanction" on all cryptocurrency-related content on the site. This sanction limited the number of times an article could be reverted back to a prior state. Except in the case of fixing obvious vandalism (it isn't terribly uncommon for an unscrupulous editor to go to a random Wikipedia page and write "John Smith is a butthead," for example, even if John Smith isn't the subject of the article), editors could only perform one reversion per day.
That made it harder for those who wished to advertise their coin or product on Wikipedia to add back in the type of promotional material that the platform has hard rules against and made it easier to ban or block violators. It also helped volunteers feel more comfortable editing on the topic.
What sources are acceptable on Wikipedia?
Even though the vandalism issue was at least partially addressed in 2018, editors had another problem to solve: What counts as a good source? Many in the community argued that most crypto news sites lacked journalistic integrity, reprinting press releases dressed up to look like news articles and avoiding writing anything negative about the blockchain or crypto in general.
These same writers, in many cases, failed to disclose their ownership of the coins they wrote about. Editors felt this constituted a clear conflict of interest and that nothing those writers produced could be considered for use on Wikipedia.
On the flip side, mainstream media struggled to effectively cover the esoterica of the blockchain. As Mike Albanese noted in Observer, these outlets "[focus] nearly all their attention on Bitcoin’s volatile price, ICO’s, and absurd anecdotes while ignoring the overall ecosystem and its potential. Often the coverage seems lazy and uninformed."
This led to editors generally defaulting to the green sources on the Wikipedia Reliable Sources List, but even those have their challenges, as they can often rely on non-usable sources for their information. Today, editing in the cryptocurrency space is extremely difficult to work in due to the lack of sources that can be used and a small pool of editors that are willing to engage in the topic, even after the general sanction was imposed.
One of the prime examples of this sourcing challenge is Coin Desk. While on the surface, Coin Desk appears to have the hallmarks of a reliable source – an ethics policy and a masthead, for starters – editors have repeatedly questioned the outlet's feasibility of use on Wikipedia (check out these discussions from 2015, 2016, 2018, 2018 [again], and 2019 for more details). These discussions brought forth a number of complaints, most prominently from David Gerard, a site administrator and crypto journalist himself.
Gerard and others noted that Coin Desk's penchant for republishing press releases and jumping the gun on the latest coins or cryptotech made a lot of the outlet's content of limited use. When coupled with the fact that Coin Desk is owned by Digital Currency Group, a cryptocurrency investment firm, editors questioned how independent Coin Desk truly was from its parent. The community lumped many similar publications in with Coin Desk, including Coin Telegraph and The Block. In our experience, the community has generally rejected the use of Coin Desk as a source even for basic secondary information, and thus rejected those similar publications as well.
Sources to avoid
In our experience as conflict-of-interest editing consultants, we've found we get the best results for our clients when we avoid using the following sources. This list is not exhaustive, but is a good starting point for navigating through the cryptocurrency editing space.
The Daily Hodl
Coinbase
Coin Desk
The Motley Fool
Coin Telegraph
Bitcoin News
Seeking Alpha
Forbes (contributors only)
News BTC
The Coin Republic
CryptoNewsZ
Coin Geek
Bitcoin Magazine
The Block
Decrypt
Crypto Briefing
ETF Database
Benzinga
AMB Crypto
FX Street
Coin Journal
Crypto Slate
Searching for the information in the green sources on the Reliable Sources List is always the best way to have any proposed content be considered and stick around for a while. When in doubt, head to an article's discussion page and ask others for their opinion on a particular source.
Wrapping up
This is a lot to consider before diving into editing cryptocurrency articles, but Wikipedia is generally a helpful, friendly place, and you and the volunteer editors have the same goal: to get the best information possible out there for the world to see. When in doubt, don't be afraid to ask for someone else's opinion. If it still seems like too much, well, editing Wikipedia is one of our specialties.