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Wikipedia decided to make an unprecedented move to block self-serving edits. The supreme court of the online encyclopedia recently banned contributions from all IP addresses that are owned by the representatives of the Church of Scientology as well as all of its associates. It is worth mentioning that this was Wikipedia's longest-running case in its entire history. The arbitration Committee of the online encyclopedia voted 10 to 0, with one abstaining, agreeing on the ban, which took effect straight away.

To note that the website, which is listed in the top ten most popular sites on the Internet, claims to be "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit," though its administrators regularly ban some individual users for abuse of the site's terms of use. It is for the first time that Wikipedia completely blocked the IPs of such a large organization as the Church of Scientology. The reason for the move was the organization's attempts to promote its own agenda using the online encyclopedia.

According to the Wikipowersthatbe: "the use of the encyclopedia to advance personal agendas - such as advocacy or propaganda and philosophical, ideological or religious dispute - or to publish or promote original research is prohibited". The truth is that admins at Wikipedia ban those who deceive an extreme conflict of interest, but because the so-called Wikifiddlers usually hide their identity with the help of open proxies, their IPs can be banned as a move of defense. Shortly after the ruling of the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, all IPs of the Church of Scientology were "blocked as if they were open proxies". However, individual editors have the right to request a release from the ban.

The True Reasons

The administrators of Wikipedia gave evidence of their actions saying that a number of editors have been "openly editing [Scientology-related articles] from Church of Scientology equipment and apparently coordinating their activities." A lot of news stories talked about the well-known WikiScanner and the editing of articles related to the Church of Scientology from Scientology IPs. All the stories around Wikipedia's move, made some administrators think that such actions are "damaging Wikipedia's reputation for neutrality." One of the Wikipedia administrators said that monitoring edits from computers used by the Church of Scientology has been difficult due to the fact that countless editors use a few IPs and the address of each editor is continuously changing for an unknown reason. Such actions make it difficult for administrators to determine if one editor is using several accounts on the online encyclopedia in order to game the site's system. Surely these kinds of moves are prohibited in the Wikiland.

The decision of the Wikicourt was to ban only those Scientology IPs that referred to articles on Scientology. However, in order to perform the ban, the administrators will have to "checkuser" editors, meaning they will have to identify their IP each time an edit is made, but even then it would be impossible to find out who is who. One of the admins wrote in a comment that at the moment the only alternative is to block the IPs completely or checkuser every 'pro-Scientology' editor on this subject. However, the latter is less possible and could trigger a lot of debates. The majority of editors under discussion edit only those articles that are linked to Scientology. If to translate in the terms used at Wikipedia, these users are "single purpose accounts".

The Methodology

There are people who consider that users who edit the articles related to Scientology are doing so without having given any order for the Church. According to ex-member of Scientology's Office of Special Affairs, which is liable for "directing and coordinating all legal matters affecting the Church", the organization took specific steps in order to remove certain materials and criticism that are linked with the Church of Scientology. Tory Christman mentioned that the people he worked together with, used to post everyday the whole day, using five different computers, five separate anonymous identities in order to disprove any facts from the Internet regarding the Church of Scientology. He left the Church of Scientology in 2000, prior to the birth of Wikipedia.

It is worth mentioning that it is the fourth Wikicourt case that is linked with Scientology. The administrators from the online encyclopedia decided to ban not only Scientology IPs, but a host of anti-Scientology editors, who were editing certain subject related to the Church of Scientology.