The term "wikiality" was famously coined by comedian Stephen Colbert when, live on his satirical late-night show The Colbert Report, he deliberately added false claims to several Wikipedia entries, and encouraged his viewers to do the same. Colbert explained that he loved Wikipedia because "any user can change any entry, and if enough other users agree with them, it becomes true," with "wikiality" being defined, essentially, as truth by consensus, or in Colbert's words, "a reality that we can all agree on: the reality we just agreed on."
Though Wikipedia's policies state that entries should reflect the consensus of experts on a given topic, in practice articles of relatively minor importance usually reflect the consensus of a small number of editors, who maintain "watchlists" of articles they have contributed to in the past so that they can receive notifications when those articles are edited - and do what they can to ensure that these entries continue to reflect their own points of view. Editors of this breed seem to maintain an arsenal of preferred references, usually pointing to obscure print tertiary sources, non-peer reviewed articles and generally material of dubious scholarly value at best, and simply copy and paste these links as "sources" between the articles over which they have appointed themselves guardians, the result being that frequently the alleged sources for a statement in an article are only tangentially related to the particular assertion being made.
Furthermore, it should also go without saying that just because a certain book or online article that a particular editor has consulted and cited contains a certain claim, does not make the claim necessarily true - often the talk pages of articles prove highly enlightening with regards to the validity and accuracy of sources, as does taking a glance at the edit history, where one can that see that often a small handful of users have been responsible for the vast majority of changes to a given article, and act as gatekeepers preventing others from substantially changing the text.
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As also discussed a number of times by the blog Istria Fiume Dalmatia, the English-language Wikipedia is host to often truly bizarre arguments and edit wars concerning historical figures and places in and around the former Yugoslavia. As a general rule, the talk page of a given article will be the site of heated debate over whether the individual in question was Serbian or Croatian (or in the case of places, whether a given settlement or region was historically part of Serbia or Croatia), even, or perhaps especially, when the individual in question was demonstrably of neither ethnicity.
Even stranger than the edit wars and arguments over sources and authors, and what prompted the writing of this blog post, is the practise of adding completely fictionalized family background information, of such a nature that it could only have been invented on the spot by the editor, to biographies of people from regions of Italy bordering or now part of the former Yugoslavia.
As to the motives behind this aberrant behaviour, one can only speculate, and I have a difficult time understanding exactly what satisfaction is derived from tricking people into believing that a given figure was Serbian, Croatian or Slovenian when these editors really know he or she was not. Usually one comes across these claims in articles about figures who are relatively obscure within the scope of Italian sport, art, architecture, etc., or in articles that only people with a specific interest in public figures of South Slavic nationalities would ever have reason to visit.
As an example of the latter, the article "Slovene minority in Italy" for several years included world-famous former soccer player Paolo Maldini and his late father Cesare, born in Trieste, among in its list of "famous Slovenians" living in Italy, and, in fact, both father and son are still listed on the page "Italian people of Slovene descent."
However, this claim that the Maldini family is of Slovenian origin originated in a sourceless Wikipedia edit - it claimed that the family's name was "Mladenich" and was changed to "Maldini" during the fascist period. Both Cesare and Paolo Maldini have been the subject of biographies and given literally thousands of public interviews in none of which, obviously, there is any trace of a mention of any sort of Slovenian or Slavic origins; and amusingly, if I recall correctly, the source referenced by the article "Slovene minority in Italy" was a link to the section of Cesare Maldini's Wikipedia article with the fabricated claim inserted by the anonymous editor. This is, I believe, the very definition of a circular argument.
Italians with names ending in "ich" in particular are magnets for the insertion of these strange and often unintentionally amusing nationalist fantasies. For example, one reading the Wikipedia entry on former Internazionale and Italian national team defender Tarcisio Burgnich in 2017 would have "learned" that "Burgnich has Croatian roots on his father's side, since the city of Udine was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I." The problem is that the linked article provided as a "source" of course made no mention of Burgnich's alleged Croatian roots and Udine, of course, was reunited with Italy in 1870, not after the First World War, and has never been home to any significant Slavophone population - though, once again, somewhat amusingly, the usual small number of doggedly determined Slovenian editors have managed to insert into the article on Udine the same kind of self-referencing and vague insinuations present in the entries on virtually every single town and village in Friuli and Venezia Giulia, that the city is actually Slovenian.
One fairly creative fabrication could recently be found in the entry for Italian commercial artist Marcello Dudovich, a native of Trieste. The edit history reveals that an anonymous editor originally had inserted the claim that both of the artist's parents were Serbian, and left it that; however, it seems that another editor felt this version of the fantasy wasn't convincing enough, and changed it to say that his mother was an Italian from Trieste, but his father was a Serbian from Kotor (Cattaro), Montenegro.
Dudovich's father Antonio was from Dalmatia; but from Traù (Trogir in Serbo-Croatian) rather than Cattaro. "Serb" Antonio Dudovich was an ardent Italian irredentist who fought alongside Giuseppe Garibaldi, had his portrait painted wearing the red uniform of the Garibaldini and named his second daughter Itala (lit. "Italian girl").
These are only a few of the most egregious examples I've personally come across - depressingly, I wouldn't be surprised if there are dozens or even hundreds more. These editors seem to be dissatisfied with their countries' own histories, and so feel the need to pretend to themselves that their neighbours' achievements are actually theirs. Inserting something into a Wikipedia article does not, of course, make it so, but I suppose these people must find some solace in thinking that if enough people read and repeat what they've written on Wikipedia, it'll be sort of, almost like it's actually true.
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