According to the report, a crowdsourced digital encyclopedia could be asked to explain why the Indian government made these changes.
Indian cricketer Arshdeep Singh has been the target of malicious online trolling after his team lost to Pakistan in an Asia Gup match on Sunday night, and some have defaced his Wikipedia page, claiming that he has links to the Khalistan separatist movement.
According to the report, the crowdsourced digital encyclopedia was asked to explain why the Indian government made these changes, but HT was not immediately confirmed.
The changes Of Khalistan
According to Singh's history of editing his Wikipedia page, the word "India" was replaced by "Khalistan" by an unregistered user in several places in his 00:28 Indian Standard Time (IST) profile.
This user also edited his name, first reading it as "Major Arshdeep Singh Langra" and after a while as "Major Arshdeep Singh Bajwa". This guy also randomly altered Singh's in-game stats.
Users also replaced the word "India" with "Khalistan" in the links cited to support the page's claim, leading to an estimated time of non-existent Khalistan.
All these changes were reversed by an anonymous Wikipedia editor about 15 minutes later.
The editor of Khalistan
Wikipedia is a Wiki, a collaborative database or service where anyone can add or edit content. Anyone can make changes or suggestions, but the service follows a strict logging mechanism. According to the version history on the
Singh page, the user who made this change was not logged in and was using the Internet Protocol (IP) address 39.41.171.125.
An Internet Whois search shows that the IP address is located in Pakistan. According to IP address allocation records, this particular address was assigned to Pakistan Telecommunications Company Limited (PTCL), Pakistan's state-owned telecommunications operator (equivalent to BSNL in India).
Of course, you can use a VPN service to spoof your IP address, and if your VPN service uses a PTCL server, someone outside of Pakistan could spoof the above address as your own. However, it is unlikely that this will happen, and it is likely that the user who modified Singh's Wikipedia page is in Pakistan.
How do edits work of Khalistan ?
Anyone can add or edit articles on Wikipedia, which has more than 6.45 million articles as of Monday. However, for a handful of articles related to popular topics, people or places in general, there is an additional protection that is triggered when the page is locked (the lock is displayed in the upper-right corner for unauthorized users).
According to Wikipedia, “in some circumstances, pages may need to be protected from modification by certain groups of editors. Pages are protected when a specific damaging event has been identified that cannot be prevented through other means such as a block”.
In this case, these changes went live because the page was not protected and the edits were minor (major edits are likely to draw more attention). But in keeping with its protected pages policy, a Wikipedia administrator locked Singh’s profile till September 21 once the vandalism was fixed.
Like Singh’s case demonstrated, there is usually a very close eye of Wikipedia’s large community of volunteers on the changes happening and usually, malicious changes are detected and fixed within minutes, if not by the hour.
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