The original spoken version of the Wikipedia article for the Bhutanese passport went viral. In January 2015, a recording of the article generated controversy on Wikipedia after it began circulating online, with a number of people interpreting the recording to be a racist joke on the article talk page, while others were amused by it.
Contents
The audio file has since been deleted on Wikimedia Commons after being replaced by another recording.
Origin
On 31 May 2013, Wikipedia user KuchenZimjah created an article titled Bhutanese passport on Wikipedia. On 10 June 2013, KuchenZimjah uploaded a recording of the article to Wikimedia Commons. On KuchenZimjah's Wikipedia user page, he says that he is a native Dzongkha speaker from Thimphu who learned English while studying in New Zealand.
The audio recording has been suspected to be processed with Auto-Tune and lengthening of vowels.
Spread
On 24 September 2013, the recording was uploaded to YouTube as a video, and it has received more than 640,000 views and over 1,100 comments since its upload.
The Bhutanese passport article has been viewed 1,389,890 times in 1 March 2015. It was also the most viewed article of the week from 22 March 2015 to 28 March 2015, with 1,771,673 views. However, the popularity has been short-lived, because the original recording was deleted soon after it went viral.
The recording has been mentioned by a few websites and media organizations and was remixed in multiple songs on the Internet.
Controversy on Wikipedia
The audio file has generated a lot of controversy on the Wikipedia talk page of the article, with many discussions on whether to delete the recording or to replace it. The page itself was once nominated to be deleted, although the discussion result was to keep the article.
Although consensus has been reached after the discussions, a few users defended KuchenZimjah's audio recording, with some arguing that the recording cannot be considered racism because KuchenZimjah said he was a native of Bhutan. The recording was ultimately replaced by a new recording with British accent uploaded by Wikimedia Commons user Macusercom.
KuchenZimjah has also created other hoaxes on Wikipedia and was ultimately blocked indefinitely, with his hoax articles deleted.