Most Wikipedia articles are freely editable. At the same time, it is a very practical source of information, usually to quickly learn about some person or topic, it does not serve as a source of information for serious topics such as a newspaper article or an academic work. And it is that we do not know the authorship of the articles, which can lead to texts that are biased or erroneous.
While it is true that a good article has links to the different data that is offered, it is not easy to know who is the author of an article. This information is already available and, to know it, it is necessary to download a browser extension.
Who Wrote That? (in Spanish Who wrote it?) is an initiative promoted by WikiWho, a platform that analyzes texts to reveal “who wrote and/or deleted and/or reinserted what exact text and in what revision”
Extension browsers and languages
The extension “Who Wrote It” is supported by most browsers modern: both Mozilla Firefox and those based on Chromium, such as Microsoft’s Chrome or Edge.
It is developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, Community Tech Team. The extension requests access to the sites it supports only (ie Wikipedia in different languages), very little information compared to other extensions. It currently works on Wikipedia articles created in English, German, Turkish, Spanish and Basque.
Popular articles may have dozens or even hundreds of authors, while less popular ones may have only one or a few.
How to use it
In order to use this extension, access the previous links. In the case of Firefox, when you enter and indicate that you want to install it, it will ask you for certain permissions. Press about add and download in few seconds. Here is the capture of how the process is when you do it in the Mozilla manager:
With this, you can now enter Wikipedia to find information on something that interests you. As soon as you access Wikipedia, in the left sidebar, in the tools, you have the option to activate “Who wrote it”. You just have to click on it (if it is a page with a lot of information, you will have to wait a few seconds for it to activate) to be able to start seeing information on the authorship of the different phrases that appear in the text.
Now you just have to move the mouse over the phrases and click on the yellow color that will appear to get information. Most authors are listed with their username and the date and time of issue. They also inform you of what percentage of the article has been written by that same person and may even have indicated if there is a reason for the edit which will be shown to you there as well.
If you also click on the name of the profile, you can access additional information of the user as if he has participated in the elaboration of other articles or if he is a verifying user of Wikipedia, among others.