In the days after the terrible Parkland school shootings, Wikipedia searches for AR-15 firearms began routing people to a page for the “Colt AR-15,” according to the Verge. The Colt AR-15 page doesn’t mention any of the school shootings or subsequent calls for banishment of AR-15 type weapons. Peculiar. The reason this began to happen was because in the wake of the Parkland, Florida mass shooting deaths, a group of “gun enthusiasts” have been busy bees, making sure these gun pages are as technically fetishistic as the NRA likes them to be.
That focus on hardware was by design. For months, the “Colt AR-15” page has been largely edited by a group of gun enthusiast editors. They joined together under the name “Wikipedia Project: Firearms,” or “WP:Firearms” for short. Expertise groups are common on Wikipedia, and in some ways, WP:Firearms fits the mold perfectly: a collection of users with detailed knowledge of a specific topic, keeping a close eye on all the pages where that knowledge might be relevant. But on Wikipedia, as in the real world, the users with the deepest technical knowledge of firearms are also the most fervent gun owners and the most hostile to gun control. For critics, that’s led to a persistent pro-gun bias on the web’s leading source of neutral information at a time when the gun control debate is more heated than ever.
However, according to the Verge, these gun pages have been becoming very “technical” lately, disappearing any and all reference to gun safety or gun control debates connected with any and all firearms. This allows the groups spending most of the time editing these pages to sanitize their maze of firearm pages to their liking.
Fighting a similarly proposed edit on the Smith & Wesson page, user Trekphiler went further. “There are millions of weapons in civilian hands, including thousands of AR-15s,” he wrote, “and none of them have harmed anyone. This is the usual gun confiscator garbage.”
When users tried to detail the gun control concerns in the Colt AR-15 page, where most “AR-15” searches were still being directed, they ran into another technicality. “Sorry, this is an article about Colt’s AR-15 (tm) rifle,” one WP:Firearms editor responded. “This is not the correct article for information that is about AR-15’s in general. That section of the article should be edited to remove the references to crimes that were not committed with Colt AR-15 rifles.”
As many of us have seen for many years now, a big part of the gun lobby’s tact has been to begin a semantic technical argument about guns that makes for legislation that can never be granular enough not to be easily attacked.
According to Wikimedia, WikiProject groups like WP:Firearms do not have more influence over these pages, but it is starting to seem like that’s not true. If you Google “ar 15 wikipedia” you will get the AR-15 style rifle page with its small blurb about mass shootings at the bottom, but it’ll be nestled into all the variants of the AR-15—brand names—and their “a-political” wiki pages.