For background on the Brazilian aardvark and the citogenesis phenomenon see the original New Yorker story and How pranks, hoaxes and manipulation undermine the reliability of Wikipedia

Well said. Here is another example of Wikipedia re-writing history with the new, Wikipedia-based version, being regurgitated by Associated Press, among many others. Never mind that an innocent basketball player was defamed.

The Bhutanese Passport hoaxer, by the way, also worked on other "projects" that promptly infected Google's "Knowledge Vault", like all these Wikipedia hoaxes do.

Some of these hoaxes have entered academic literature. In such cases, Wikipedia actually destroys knowledge.

Wikipedians do seem to operate on the assumption that existing content, even if completely made up, is somehow superior to any recent change, as though content gained legitimate merit and factuality simply by being in Wikipedia. There was a concrete example of this in the edit history of the Thoreau case mentioned in the Washington Post article. The hoaxer had made up a reference to make their nonsense stick. When the hoaxer later himself tried to delete the hoax again, another Wikipedian REVERTED them, saying, "Rv; the information is referenced; if you say it's wrong, prove it." Just because the content had been on Wikipedia for a few months, it was assumed it must be correct. Discussed in more detail here.

How could it be? It uses the same news media as its sources.

I believe quite a bit of development work has gone into Wikipedia Zero (and into mobile generally, which is the Wikimedia Foundation's major growth sector, as desktop pageviews are going down). At present, the WMF staff and contractors page shows one Director of Mobile Partnerships, and four mobile partner managers. I don't know how much developer time Wikipedia Zero currently claims. There is also a project to get Wikipedia articles to subscribers via SMS. ("The Wikimedia Foundation added that it partnered with the Praekelt Foundation, a South African nonprofit with expertise in text messaging, to develop the necessary technology for the project.") Of course, SMS delivery seems like the worst possible format for article delivery, in terms of enabling a reader to assess a Wikipedia article's sourcing.

It's debatable. I appreciate there are two ways you can see this, but I believe band-aids like this are self-serving and ultimately slow progress towards that "eventual" point down. I'd rather see the Wikimedia Foundation putting their weight (and millions) behind AccessNow and EFF on this.

I'm told IIPM showed the manicured Wikipedia article to prospective students.

The school had a multi-million-dollar advertising and legal budget, and created a chilling effect. At one point, they even got government websites warning about the school censored.

Maheshwar Peri and other journalists who went up against them took a tremendous personal financial risk. As the Newsweek article makes clear, they were sued repeatedly, and had to defend each case. See also Siddhartha Deb's story: Siddhartha Deb’s Publishing Odyssey, ‘Why I Took On Arindam Chaudhuri’.

The stark truth is that Wikipedia was part of the problem here, not the solution. This is in part due to Wikipedia's own chilling atmosphere towards critics, a topic discussed right now on Jimmy Wales' talk page.

Whistle-blowers taking on an admin run a significant risk of being sanctioned themselves under some pretext like "battlefield conduct" or "incivility".

It's a band aid that ultimately benefits Wikimedia more than users, just like the equivalent Facebook Zero programme. A source that is as error-prone and vulnerable to manipulation as Wikipedia shouldn't be the only source people in these countries have access to.

They should at least have access to a broad range of news outlets, Google Scholar and Google Books. Zero-rated programmes diminish rather than increase the chances of that happening, perpetuating rather than ending the digital divide and treating people in the developing world as second-class citizens that are fed crumbs from the first world's table.

can be found in this article by Mridula Chari on scroll.in: Wikipedia bans editor for consistent bias in favour of Arindam Chaudhuri's IIPM. Includes some more details on goings-on in the Indian-language Wikipedias (Marathi etc.)

No. See Wikipedia Zero. "For many readers in the Global South, the primary (and often only) access to the internet is via mobile. However, mobile data costs are a significant barrier to internet usage. We created Wikipedia Zero so that everyone can access all the free knowledge on Wikipedia, even if they can't afford the mobile data charges."

There are lots of Wikipedia admins who are social entrepreneurs of one form or another. This should be clear if you think about the fact that they are not getting paid for this. Sure there are idealists; but there are also lots of admins who get their reward out of the fact that they can use Wikipedia to influence public opinion – via the top Google search result – in line with their social, commercial or political agenda, and do so anonymously. No one should be surprised by this. You get what you pay for.

It's not so easy. With Wikipedia Zero and Facebook Zero, tens of millions of Indians in rural areas do not have access to anything else. They get Wikipedia and Facebook free as part of their mobile phone deal, but would need an expensive data plan to access anything else on the Internet. The situation is the same in many other third-world countries. What you have then a is a large captive audience who can only consume Wikipedia, but cannot check its sources or access alternative sources. Hence the concerns voiced by AccessNow and the Electronic Frontier Foundation about Facebook and Wikipedia becoming gatekeepers: keeping information out as much as bringing information in. The potential for manipulation is stupendous, because only political and business elites will have read-write access to Wikipedia. This case illustrates why people in developing countries need affordable access to the entire internet, not a Wikipedia and Facebook band aid.

It's a verbatim quote from the Newsweek article, and marked as such. It's the considered opinion of the Careers360 journalist who played a key role in exposing the school for what it was, at great personal risk. He says prospective students were specifically directed to the WP article to quell any doubts they might have had about the school.