Wikipedia is under scrutiny this week after the site’s article “Grooming gang moral panic in the United Kingdom” made the rounds on X. Originally created by editor K00B8 with the title “Muslim grooming gang panic” in late June, the page has been embroiled in an edit war since August.

The article’s Talk page, where users discuss and request edits to Wikipedia content, shows the extent of the conflict. On August 16, for example, a user called Lp9mm8g proposed deleting the page outright. “This page is misinformation/disinformation,” Lp9mm8g said. “Only a single source refers to this as a ‘panic’ of any sort… the majority of [sources] unambiguously imply that Asian Muslims are overrepresented.”

In the weeks that followed, an internal back-and-forth struggle among different factions of editors resulted in repeated changes to the page’s title, often having the effect of completely recontextualizing the article. After a group of Wikipedia users successfully lobbied to remove “moral panic” and tweak the title to “Muslim grooming gangs in the United Kingdom,” a series of counter efforts by an opposing group of editors ultimately led the page back to where it started. By October 9th, the page had gone from “South Asian Muslim grooming gang panic,” to “Ethnicity and grooming gangs in the United Kingdom,” and finally, on October 7, to “Grooming gang moral panic in the United Kingdom.”

“‘Moral panic’ should be included in the article title to reflect how the subject is dealt with in reliable sources,” the editor Sceptre wrote, justifying her decision to rename the page to its current title, also adding that she could not “find a consensus” to support continuing to include the word “Muslim.” A non-admin with enhanced editing permissions, Sceptre identifies as a “non-binary dyke (xe/they/she)” who, according to her Wiki user page, has “become increasingly involved in progressive political activism, mostly transgender, LGB and feminist activism as a lesbian trans person.”

The grooming gangs scandal came to the national forefront in the UK when a series of newspaper investigations and governmental hearings found that 1,400 girls had been sexually abused by gangs of men, mostly of Pakistani heritage, between 1997 and 2014 in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham. The scandal in Rotherham was followed by similar cases in Rochdale, Banbury, Telford, and towns across the UK.

In 2022, British Home Office Secretary Suella Braverman said the most high-profile grooming gang abuses — including those in Rochdale, Rotherham, and Telford — were “overwhelmingly” perpetrated by British-Pakistani males. Reporting by The Independent, The Telegraph, Al Jazeera, and others have made similar claims.

As the UK government department responsible for immigration, security, and law and order — and which oversees counter-terrorism, policing, and border patrol in the country — the Home Office had commissioned a study on the available grooming gang data in 2020. Its conclusions were inscrutable, with the authors writing that, ultimately, “the academic literature highlights significant limitations to what can be said about links between ethnicity and [grooming gangs].”

Two years later, “the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse investigated abuse in six cities which had not experienced a high profile grooming case,” per the BBC. “It found evidence that gang-based abuse was happening, and of widespread failures by the police to record the ethnicity of perpetrators.”

“The safety of women and girls is paramount,” then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in 2023 when he launched the UK’s Grooming Gangs Taskforce. “For too long, political correctness has stopped us from weeding out vile criminals who prey on children and young women.” The Taskforce, working with 43 police departments across England and Wales to support investigations, has arrested over 550 suspects and identified over 4,000 victims in the past year.

“Wikipedia has become a battleground not just for ideas but for who gets to decide what constitutes reality,” writer Ashley Rindsberg, who has previously covered Wikipedia for Pirate Wires, told me over DM. “In this case, we've known for years from mainstream media reporting in the UK that the grooming gangs were real, and that they were localized to specific communities. But what we’re seeing is the ability of a tiny group of determined Wikipedia editors to delete history, as it’s been reported and corroborated, and replace it with alternative myths that, through the canny use of Wikipedia’s policies and protocols, stand in the place of truth, as an ideological substitute for reality.”

The internal conflict over the Grooming Gang article is another example of the all-out information war raging behind the scenes at the internet’s encyclopedia. In August, Pirate Wires published an investigation into the rulemaking tactics Wikipedia editors have used to “churn news articles from an overwhelmingly left-leaning list of ‘reliable sources’ into neutrality-emblazoned fact,” which those left-leaning sources then cite to support further stories that inform regime-friendly narratives.

The investigation came on the heels of our report on Wikimedia's Movement Strategy, which launched in 2017, and which has used its endowment to fund “initiatives that seek to abolish the police and create an ‘intersectional scientific method,’ among others.”

At the time of this writing, the grooming gangs article remains “Grooming gang moral panic in the United Kingdom,” but the war over the title on its “Talk” page is still ongoing.

— Kevin Chaiken