Sundar Pichai is now Google CEO, but Wikipedia is fighting over his school

Now according to most media reports and interviews Pichai attended Jawahar Vidyalaya for Class X and Vanavani Matriculation for Class XII.  However after Google’s CEO Larry Page made the announcement about Pichai succeeding him as CEO, several other schools started claiming Pichai as one of their own.

[related-post]

For starters, Pichai’s high-school was changed to PSBB and Vanavani, according to the Wikipedia edits. In fact, even PSBB’s Wikipedia page mentioned Sundar Pichai as its notable alumnus, which can be seen here. That notable alumni has since been dropped.

Another gleaming gem that was added during this edit change was that Picahi led his school team in the Tamil Nadu Regional Cricket Tournament. Check out the edited page below

The wikipedia Edit which showed Pichai as alumnus of PSBB school

This need to claim Sundar Pichai as their school alumni got so bad, that at one point his Wikipedia page showed three schools in the list. The page reflected Jawahar Vidyalaya, Vanavani Matriculation and a new addition on the list was GRT Mahalaksmi Vidyalaya. Check out the page below.

Based on the Wikipedia edit, it would appear that Pichai attended so many schools in Chennai

At some point, someone decided to go all out on this ‘school’ madness and added that Pichai was already in IIT by the time he was 8 and that he never went to school.  Oh and Rajinikanth and Shaktiman made an appearance in this post as well because when you’re mocking something, why stop at anything.

Hopefully they were doing this as a joke and not being serious. Check out that Wikipedia version below:

Sundar Pichai was apparently in IIT by age 8 according to one edit.

And yes the edits are continuing. So far Pichai’s wikipedia page has seen over 354 edits in the last week alone, and the number of users who have edited Pichai’s page stands at 406.

If you see the graph on the edit stats page for Pichai, you will notice how the graph spikes once August 2015 starts, the month when he was announced as Google’s new CEO.

While some of us might have a good laugh over this ‘edit-war’, the issue raises concerns over how ‘collective wisdom’ online is often guided by its inherent biases.  In this case, the desire to claim the new Google CEO as a member of one particular Chennai school has reduced the whole exercise of Wikipedia’s democratic freedoms to a farcical exercise.

Watch video: (App users click here for video)