The most challenging job of the 2016 race: Editing the candidates’ Wikipedia pages

Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website in the world, and in a presidential race in which millions of people use the site to research Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, some of the most influential figures in the race are almost completely unknown.

Wikipedia editors, many of whom are unpaid and live across the globe, take it upon themselves to manage every word, link and image published to Trump’s and Clinton’s biographical and campaign pages.

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Because of Wikipedia’s high profile – more than 4.1 billion page views for its English sites so far in October – editors effectively write an election guide with convenient summaries on candidates’ pages that often sit at the top of search results.

Since Clinton and Trump announced their candidacies in 2015, their biographical pages have been edited nearly 12,000 times by more than 2,000 unique users, according to Wikipedia revision history statistics, which publicly logs every edit.

Trump’s page has more than triple the number of edits than Clinton’s since January 2015. In fact, he’s been edited more times in an election cycle than other Republican nominees since 2004.

Updating and managing content as well as fact checking and sourcing can be rewarding for editors who want to collaborate on a global project.

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“There is a sense of shared responsibility to maintain this vast resource,” said Samantha Lien, a spokeswoman with the Wikimedia Foundation. “Wikipedia might mean something a little different to everyone.”

It can also be a time-draining hobby.

Ryan Ng, a 17-year-old high school student from New York City who goes by Epicgenius on Wikipedia, has contributed thousands of edits since 2012, including more than 100 recently to Clinton’s and Trump’s pages. The work has been so consuming, he said, he was almost expelled from high school two years ago.

His friends often ask him why he does it.

“I give them all the same answer,” he said. “It’s exciting to contribute your knowledge to the wiki, no matter where you come from.”

Tackling vandalism

Anyone with Internet access can add, delete or modify anything on Wikipedia.

Some pages require users to create an account. Others don’t.

Occasionally, a mischievous user will delete Trump’s entire page or rewrite Clinton’s name.

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But most edits are constructive, and vandalism occurs in only 7 percent of them, according to a group of researchers from the University of California at Santa Cruz, Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of Pennsylvania.

Among their findings: Most vandalism happens during school and office hours.

The group also created STiki, a tool to help Wikipedia editors catch changes on a page that might be vandalism.

Using STiki data, here’s how the tool scored more than 10,000 edits made to Clinton’s and Trump’s pages from January 2015 to Oct. 26 of this year:

Another defense against vandals is a page’s protection status. Clinton and Trump’s currently allow only registered users to make an edit.

One Trump editor, who goes by Buster7 and has contributed more than 250 edits to Trump’s personal and presidential campaign pages, said vandalism isn’t that problematic.

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In one case, he said, someone changed all mentions of Trump’s surname to “Drumpf” as a homage to an episode of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.”

“Sometimes a drive-by vandal will ‘splash’ his graffiti on the article,” said the 69-year-old Illinois resident, who agreed to speak with The Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of backlash online. “But there are so many editors paying attention that it gets removed almost right away.”

Let’s talk it out

When any new information about Clinton or Trump is made public, editors discuss – sometimes for days – before publishing facts to a page.

Earlier this month, they debated adding revelations of Trump’s lewd comments about women in a 2005 “Access Hollywood” video to the introductory paragraph.

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“A no-brainer,” one editor wrote. “This is the most covered issue in the campaign.”

Another editor suggested excluding the story for now, proposing that they reconsider “when this can be put into perspective.”

In the Clinton editing camp, editors discussed including information about campaign-related emails leaked from WikiLeaks.

One editor said the group couldn’t assume the emails were authentic, saying their other sources claimed Russia might have manipulated the emails for “political gains.”

These kinds of discussions are mandatory, said Frank Margheriti, a 20-year-old editor who goes by the name MelbourneStar and has contributed to several Clinton-related pages.

“The world is using Wikipedia to read up about Clinton and Trump, so we owe it to everyone to present information that is factually accurate, verifiable and neutral as possible,” he said.

Other discussions are less controversial but can still be a source of contention for veteran editors.

One example? Picking the right lead image.

Here are some pictures editors discussed using for Trump and Clinton in threads earlier this year:

Fighting bias in the homestretch

As Clinton and Trump travel the country and rally for additional support, Wikipedia editors are staying busy as more traffic goes to the candidates’ pages.

Most of the editors try to keep their edits balanced.

Wikipedia as a whole has become less biased since its founding in 2001, according to a Harvard Business School study.

Margheriti, who lives in Australia, said it’s easy to stay out of squabbles between Democrats and Republicans in the page’s forums because he “doesn’t have a horse in this race.”

“We ought to be independent from our own views,” he added.

Anythingyouwant, a 54-year-old editor from eastern Massachusetts who has contributed more than 1,000 edits to Trump’s biographical page and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that while partisanship is part of human nature, keeping a balance between opposing views is key to editing.

“I do feel some level of satisfaction from preventing Wikipedia from being a commercial for candidates,” he said.