YouTube has enjoyed many long years as one of the most popular video-streaming platforms. But also for a long time, it has been plagued with hoax videos and other misinformation that divides people.
In its move to eliminate, or at least limit those videos from spreading and affecting its users, YouTube said that it's surfacing links to Wikipedia pages.
According to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, YouTube will first supplement videos that focus on common conspiracy theories.
Acting like fact-checkers, this should, at least in its own way, debunk videos that spread misinformation.
Is this the best it can do? First of all, Wikipedia is a free-for-all online encyclopedia that can be edited by practically anyone.
While Wikipedia has a number of volunteers to remove misinformation on the encyclopedia, the contents that are contributed by the general populace, can also be manipulated to spread misinformation.
And here, YouTube still isn’t fully taking the responsibility of censoring problematic videos on its platform, which is its main problem.
YouTube's issues have affected many users and video creators around the globe, staining its brand. Here, the company needs to do more to fix things.
But this partnership, is like YouTube in offloading its responsibility to curb the distribution of dangerous content onto Wikipedia.
But still, this feature is an added extra for YouTube to help itself. After all, this tiny solution can be a step for the platform to solve its much bigger problem.
The @Wikimedia Foundation statement about the recent @YouTube announcement pic.twitter.com/PFDDNtNNjn
— Wikimedia (@Wikimedia) March 14, 2018
The partnership is informal, and this can be seen as YouTube didn't give Wikipedia the prior announcement.
"We were not given advance notice of this announcement," said the Wikimedia Foundation in a statement on Twitter. However, “We are always happy to see people, companies, and organizations recognize Wikipedia’s value as a repository of free knowledge,” the company said.
What this means, to do what it wants to do, YouTube doesn’t need to officially partner with Wikimedia to use information from Wikipedia.
After all, it’s also worth mentioning that Google already makes use of Wikipedia to supplement its search results, without having to pay Wikipedia for the privilege of doing so.