It was the third day of what would become an infamous match in Test cricket: the second in the five-match 2007-08 Border-Gavaskar Trophy between India and Australia. Brett Lee comes up to bowl his 28th, and Australia’s 116th, over of the day. Harbhajan Singh slashes out at the third ball of the over. The ball balloons over slips and runs away for four. Singh walks up to Lee, taps him on the back with his bat and apparently says “hard luck”. At the end of the over, Andrew Symonds exchanges words with the Indian off-spinner.
Those few moments would later erupt into the most talked about international cricket controversy in recent memory.
Yellow Monkey: Blnguyen, who uses this toy as his avatar, edits Wiki entries for several Indian cricketers.
But, at the time, far from the very public glare of the media, a silent battle was going on between Indian and Australian fans. Not on the pitch, on the stands or in the streets. But on the Internet. On Wikipedia.
“Till that second Test, Harbhajan’s Wikipedia page hardly had any traffic. Perhaps 200 or so views a day. But within five days of the controversy, traffic jumped almost 100 times. On 9 January, three days after the Test, Harbhajan Singh’s page on Wikipedia had 17,600 views. And then began the vandalism,” says Blnguyen, a Wikipedia user who requested us to address him only by his online user name. Coincidentally, Blnguyen is also known among Wikipedians as “yellow monkey”, because of the stuffed toy he uses everywhere as his mascot. He never posts any photos of himself.
“Most of the vandals on Bhajji’s page were from Australia, of course. But pretty soon, the Indians got into the act as well. When things got out of hand, we had to lock articles for umpires Benson and Bucknor and (cricketers) Ponting, Symonds, Harbhajan and most of the Indian cricket team,” Blnguyen explains.
Wikipedia.com is today a bona fide Internet phenomenon. The free online encyclopaedia has more than 9.25 million articles across 253 languages. Wikipedia, in its own words, is a “free, multilingual, open content encyclopaedia”. Anybody can access it anywhere and at any time, at no cost.
But what has really made Wikipedia successful is the fact that any user, even an unregistered one, can create, enhance or edit a Wikipedia entry. This means that unlike a regular encyclopaedia, Wikipedia is updated constantly. All the time, every day. Normally, this open, no-restrictions approach to content creation is a recipe for disaster. What prevents a crazed user from vandalizing a Wikipedia entry and posting content that is wrong or offensive? In Wikipedia’s case, nothing. The entire idea of “open content” is to throw the editorial doors open to anyone. No questions asked.
So, how does Wikipedia regulate itself?