Just check the ‘Talk’ section of the page, it explains everything. Short version, there is nothing Orwellian going on at this Wikipedia page.

ATTENTION NEW VISITORS TO THIS PAGE

Hi, people from online. I’m JPxG. I agree that censorship is bullshit et cetera. Allow me to address a few things:

I read online that Wikipedia changed the definition of a recession.

The thing that is getting shared around everywhere is no longer the case. The sentence “Though there is no global consensus on the definition of a recession, two consecutive quarters of decline in a country’s real gross domestic product is commonly used as a practical definition of a recession” is currently right there in the lead section. Additionally, it wasn’t there for very long to begin with (it was added for the first time a few days ago). The screenshots of the stuff getting removed are out of date.

Okay, so what, someone tried to remove it?

The article always said something about “two down GDP quarters”. The first section of the article, titled “Definition”, has mentioned it since 2011. As far as I can tell, nobody ever messed with this. The entire current dispute is over whether it should say this in the lead paragraph and the definition section, or just in the definition section. Right now, the article gives both that definition and the NBER definition, and takes no position on which is “correct”. The NBER definition is “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales”.