Wikipedia

Handle with care: particularly the bios.

Encyclopaedias have been around for thousands of years, latterly made of mounds of paper, now electronic and assembled by learned scholars on various topics. Perhaps the most bottom-up, democratic approach has been that of Wikipedia, launched in 2001.  Type anything into a search engine - one of the top retrieved sources will likely be a Wikipedia entry.  

However, as always with human endeavours, there is a less salubrious side to the entries, especially those on hotly debated and polarised subjects like feminism, transgender issues and science. 

Anyone can go online and write, edit, change, add, or remove an entry to a particular topic. With 6.5 million articles and more than two edits every second, the potential for misinformation is substantial. 

We are concerned by the possible distortions on specific topics, but we would like to focus on the use of biographies to carry out surgical character assassination, as we pointed out in our taxonomy of censorship.

Wikipedia has a long list of