Wikipedia editors rushing to edit the page of newly-selected Pope Leo XIV, Robert Francis Prevost, made repeated bungles with typos of his name in the title, duplicate banners, and frequently undoing each other’s changes by accident. At one point this led to a duplicate article titled “Pope Leon XIIV” being created in the confusion. Editors also repeatedly fought over how to describe his nationality given his dual American-Peruvian citizenship.
Shortly after Prevost was speculated to be a candidate, the first edit about his background focused on claims of insufficient action on sexual abuse allegations. Clumsy editing was also seen in the rush to edit the Wikipedia article on Pope Francis after his death in April.
Prevost was announced as the new Pope on May 8, taking the name Leo XIV. The news caused a massive spike in traffic to his article, leading to over 7.5 million views the day of the announcement. Based off a Wikipedia list of traffic spikes, this would mean it saw the most single-day views of any article on a living person with other spikes being at articles for famous individuals on the day of their deaths. A blog post on criticism site Wikipediocracy assessed the new Pope’s page saw over a thousand edits before midnight with ten edits made a minute at the peak of activity with chaotic results.
Among the first edits to Prevost’s existing Wikipedia page was to rename it to his papal title, except the user actually renamed the page “Pope Leo XIIV” with an invalid additional numeral. The inaccurate title page saw over a quarter million views during this time. Another editor subsequently added the incorrect title to the infobox at the top of the page. Both mistakes were quickly addressed, but moving the page to the correct title resulted in further errors.
One issue was a page already existed on Pope Leo XIV, due to a false Pope having the title. An admin thus executed a “round-robin swap” to move the article to the correct title. However, another editor coming to the page with the false title created an additional article about Pope Leo XIV at the title. What ensued were various editors making changes as if it were the article on the new Pope, with one editor further renaming the page “Pope Leon XIIV” stating the name “Leo” was incorrect. This version saw about 10,000 views.
Discussing deletion of the erroneous title pages that now redirected to the correct title, editors insisted these were “implausible” typos. Some acknowledged that it was possible for people to make errors such as adding a duplicate numeral with others noting that “Leon” was simply the Spanish name for Pope Leo XIV without the accent. None seemed to acknowledge the fact that the discussion was only occurring precisely because other established editors had made these “implausible” errors already.
Mistakes were further made with the top image as one editor inserted the image of Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the leader of the Papal Conclave who was also considered a candidate for the papacy. After this was undone, various attempts were then made to insert an actual image of the Pope, though later deleted as a copyright violation along with another image editors attempted to add to the page. Many copyrighted images were suggested or added and discussion often saw editors reprimanding others that they cannot use copyrighted images or telling them to provide a usable photo. Days later discussion agreed to use an image of him as a cardinal at the top of the page, until an image of him as Pope became available.
Other mistakes related to the “current event” banner at the top of the page, which is added when articles receive significant editing due to major news events. In the first minutes after the announcement, two editors each added a banner, resulting in duplicate banners. Attempted fixes ran into issues due to various editors acting simultaneously and removing both or making other edits amid these efforts that accidentally restored it only for it to be removed again. One attempt actually restored one banner after both had been removed, but inadvertently deleted what was then the only sourced mention of Prevost being named Pope. An edit about his ethnicity even resulted in the page having three banners.
Due to repeated conflicting edits, it was nearly 20 minutes after the announcement that a sourced mention of Prevost becoming Pope finally managed to stay in the article, though only at the bottom. Other goofs occurring because of edit conflicts included the typo “United Statws” being repeatedly restored to the intro and entire duplicated sections being added. Even after an administrator increased the lock on the page to limit editing to accounts at least 30 days old with 500 or more edits, conflicts continued to result in odd errors like duplication of sections with the “fix” removing all mention of the death of Pope Francis for nearly an hour.
In what is common on Wikipedia, a dispute also arose over how to describe Pope Leo XIV’s nationality. A dual-citizen of the United States and Peru, editors fought over exactly how to describe his nationality with a sentence in the intro describing it changing frequently. The discussion page for the Pope currently has a section on nationality and ancestry that contains nearly 30 sub-sections. Particularly, numerous arguments arose over describing him as the “first American Pope” as many objected to treating “American” as a term for a United States citizen and argued for describing him as the first from North America.
Criticism of Prevost’s selection was also a subject of dispute, mainly focusing on his handling of sexual abuse allegations against church leaders. Even when Prevost was first mentioned in the article as a candidate for Pope, content was immediately added alleging he failed to act against someone accused of abuse. Though the content was removed due to poor sourcing once Prevost was announced as Pope, other information related to claims of sexual abuse allegations being mishandled during his tenure was also added. More than half of the material in the section about his tenure as Bishop of Chiclayo concerns his handling of abuse, though also providing statements defending him.
Such messy responses to news developments are not uncommon and occurred also with Pope Francis shortly after his death was reported. As noted in a Wikipediocracy blog post, editors made nearly four hundred edits in a 15-hour period. The very first edit was to simply change the present tense “is” to past tense “was” in the first sentence followed by several edits referencing his death. Just as there were stumbling errors at Prevost’s page after he was named Pope, duplicate banners noting the page for Francis concerned a recent death were added more than once. Nearly ten minutes passed before an actual sourced mention of his death was added.
Wikipedia’s open-editing model often means news-related content gets written about in real time, despite site policy stating the online encyclopedia is not a news source. Often this results in an obsessive rush to be the first to note the event, becoming particularly macabre when responding to recent deaths. After former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger died, the editor who first changed “is” to “was” received praise from editors, including rejoicing in Kissinger’s death itself, even as the editor failed to cite a source as Wikipedia policy requires. An editor who made a similar change to the article on Queen Elizabeth mentioned never being able to “forget that high.”
Use of Wikipedia as a source of news is in line with a campaign by the Wikimedia Foundation that owns the site to promote Wikipedia as the solution to “fake news” online, in keeping with a Clinton-linked PR firm’s suggested marketing strategy. Corporate media has praised the site on addressing misinformation for years and Big Tech has relied on it increasingly with support from the Foundation, even though Wikipedia has often spread false information through their services and devices. Many hoaxes have also been spread by Wikipedia, some persisting elsewhere even long after being corrected on the site itself.
T. D. Adler edited Wikipedia as The Devil’s Advocate. He was banned after privately reporting conflict of interest editing by one of the site’s administrators. Due to previous witch-hunts led by mainstream Wikipedians against their critics, Adler writes under an alias.
