Demanding accountability from Wikipedia is just the first step toward exposing internet propaganda that has so far been given free rein to control the narrative
The first thing one needs to understand about Wikipedia is not just its
size, but how all-encompassing, culturally unprecedented, and
surreptitiously influential it is.
On any given day, you and your family may have turned to Wikipedia
to better understand news coverage and current events such as the
Jan. 6 protest (otherwise known as the “January 6 United States
Capitol Attack”), or the Black Lives Matter riots (otherwise known as
“Violence and controversies during the George Floyd protests”). You
might even have looked up gender transition, abortion, the COVID-19
jab, or illegal immigration. And when you were done, you closed the
tab without following a citation link or checking a different source.
And no one even realized that the most influential voice in your home
wasn’t even human.
Even if one doesn’t specifically seek out Wikipedia, a Google search
will immediately display an information box filled with Wikipedia
information, a Google Nest Hub, Alexa, or Siri will parrot Wikipedia
blurbs to satisfy you, and a Safari search will automatically return—
you guessed it—a Wikipedia answer. (And you will basically get the
same regurgitated results on any search engine, although the order
may differ.)
Wikipedia is frequently used as a source across the internet and, as
such, is the 13th most popular website in the world. It’s been
characterized as the “largest human knowledge repository” in
existence; nothing else even comes close.
According to journalist J.J. McCullough, “Britannica.com is pretty
much the only other site on the net that even approximates
Wikipedia’s ambition, and it’s not even in the world’s top 1,000 sites.”
How Accurate Is It?
Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald compiled a short list of “studies”
as the basis for claiming that Wikipedia was “accurate and reliable.”
Their 2022 article declared that “Scientists have actually done a lot of
work looking at how accurate Wikipedia is across all sorts of topics.”
But most of what they referenced was vastly outdated and limited in
scope. Most readers probably didn’t follow the reference links and left
impressed that Wikipedia was the pinnacle of accuracy.
I don’t doubt that Wikipedia can generally be trusted for its various
entries that aren’t related to the religious or political, “generally” being
the keyword here. It may even be the fact that cloaking itself in many
apparently accurate articles is what makes it so dangerous: They lend
it an air of gravitas that makes it easier to believe the lies and rubbish
published elsewhere.
And they’re open about the rubbish. In a section that almost no one
reads titled, “Ten things you may not know about Wikipedia,” they’ve
covered themselves by publicly disclaiming:
“We do not expect you to trust us … some articles are of the highest
quality of scholarship, others are admittedly complete rubbish. Also,
since Wikipedia can be edited by anyone at any time, articles may be
prone to errors, including vandalism, so Wikipedia is not a reliable
source. So, please do not use Wikipedia to make critical decisions.”
If truth be told, no one can prove that Wikipedia is accurate and
reliable, largely because it has become an immeasurable internet
leviathan. And we need to closely examine the people telling us to
trust Wikipedia because they likely have nefarious motives.
Wikipedia Joined Forces With WHO
In 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit based in San
Francisco that operates Wikipedia, joined forces with the World
Health Organization (WHO) to control information related to COVID19. This meant that Wikipedia entries were modified to combat what
the WHO categorized as dis- or misinformation. Now, the online
encyclopedia is replete with entries such as “COVID-19 vaccine
misinformation and hesitancy,” “COVID-19 misinformation,” and
“Great Reset.” Other articles such as “vaccine hesitancy“ leave no door
open for people of good conscience who have serious medical
concerns about other vaccines.
It’s likely that this unprecedented alliance with the WHO not only
influenced hundreds of Wikipedia articles but also spread to Facebook
(Meta) and YouTube. Consider that The Economist noted in January
2021 that “conspiracy-theory videos on YouTube often come tagged
with warning information from Wikipedia” and that “since 2018
Facebook has used Wikipedia to provide information buttons with the
sources of news articles.”
Who’s Editing It?
Probably the best summary of who’s editing Wikipedia comes from
Mr. McCullough. Although his background as a Washington Post
columnist suggests he’d be an unlikely critic of Wikipedia, his video
“Why I hate Wikipedia (and you should too!)” is a must-watch for
everyone.
He begins by reminding us that anyone can edit a Wikipedia entry
without providing a real name, email, or registering for an account.
“This is worrying unto itself,” he says, adding that “in practice, the
writing and editing of Wikipedia articles is done by an extremely tiny
subculture of largely anonymous hardcore Wikipedia nerds.”
He adds that best estimates put the number of writers/editors at 1
percent of all registered users, then he quotes a Vice story from 2017
that calculated that only about 1,300 people were creating most of the
new content, and that number was trending downward.
He also points out what many of us have found out the hard way: If
you try editing a Wikipedia article yourself, the changes usually
disappear as soon as you leave the page—there’s no “crowd” in
crowdsourcing.
And many high-profile articles are “locked” or “semi-protected,”
supposedly to “stop spam or vandalism”—or can that be used as an
excuse to silence opposing views?
So who’s really creating and editing Wikipedia, the largest repository
of information on earth? Shadowy, unidentifiable figures, who, by
controlling the narrative, control the people.
Is It Biased?
Many Wikipedia articles with accurate facts still obviously frame a
subject in a biased manner. Any articles about former President
Donald Trump (and anyone even remotely associated with him) are
good starting points to explore this claim. Articles about conservatives
or conservative causes seem to contain everything scandalous and
negative ever reported about the subject, and others commit the sin of
omission by purposely not reporting facts that would otherwise
portray the subject in a positive light.
I myself have seen attacks against Christianity in various articles,
which Wikipedia might tell me was vandalism flagged to be cleaned
up by its army of bots—AI programs that identify and clean up
vandalism as soon as it occurs.
Wikipedia’s bias also is well known on the geopolitical stage.
Earlier this year, renowned Israeli journalist Caroline Glick
interviewed Naomi Kahn, head of the international division of
Regavim, a “public movement dedicated to the protection of Israel’s
national lands and resources.” Ms. Glick said that she knew that
Palestinians had set out to systematically destroy archaeological sites
in Judea and Samaria but asked Ms. Kahn to comment on Palestinian
efforts to invent “thousands of years of non-existing history.”
Ms. Kahn responded: “If you look on Wikipedia … [Palestinians] have
a very, very large presence of all these historical and ethnic and
cultural entries. The New Israel Fund has an army of people who sit
and create all this. So look up, for example, traditional Palestinian
weaving or embroidery … and they create this narrative, meaning
they’ll take bits of … some sort of traditional handicraft from across
the entire Middle East, rebrand it as Palestinian, and hey, presto. …
[They say] this village was a center of the weaving industry … in
ancient Palestine. … It’s really very, very simple to do.”
She continues to explain that Wikipedia’s guidelines don’t allow
organizations to create or edit articles. However, she suggests that
organizations pay individuals to do the editing and that it’s all done
quietly and “behind the scenes.” And since you can’t edit your own
entry, she notes the article for Regavim was taken over by so-called
Palestinian experts, saying “Our Wikipedia page is a diatribe against
what we do, all full of slurs, slanders, and outright lies.”
The View From All Sides
Allsides.com describes its website as one that “display[s] the day’s top
news stories from the Left, Center and Right of the political spectrum—
side-by-side so you can see the full picture.” It rated Wikipedia as
“Center”—meaning it either didn’t show much political bias or
displayed a balance of articles with left and right perspectives. But
that all changed in 2021 when it removed the rating altogether.
Julie Mastrine, director of marketing and media bias ratings at
AllSides, told me that internal conversations about the Wikipedia
rating were triggered by reader feedback.
When they realized that Wikipedia technically didn’t fit into the
methodologies they’d developed for news websites, it was decided to
label it “Not Rated.” However, Ms. Mastrine decided to write “Is
Wikipedia Biased?” as a resource for readers to learn about all the
bias claims against Wikipedia, including from its co-founder, Larry
Sanger.
In a 2021 interview, Mr. Sanger told UnHerd.com that he no longer
trusted the website he created.
“If only one version of the facts is allowed,” he said, “then that gives a
huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of
things like Wikipedia in order to shore up their power.”
To many folks, it looks like the wealthy and powerful have already
seized control of Wikipedia.
What’s the Fix?
The first step is admitting there’s a problem. Wikipedia is hiding
behind a false transparency, pointing to its public list of Wikimedia
Foundation donors and begging for money as it continues to grow into
a monstrous data blob consuming everything around it.
As one of the greatest influencers in history, Wikipedia needs to adopt
and implement something such as AllSides Media Bias Ratings™.
Taking its most controversial entries from politics, religion, and
current events, it could assign small panels of named reviewers from
the left, center, and right to edit and rate these articles. It should also
begin requiring this process or something similar on every new article
going forward.
We have let Wikipedia and Big Tech influence a generation of
Americans. If you want to see how that’s turned out, just take a look
around. Demanding accountability from Wikipedia is just the first step
toward exposing internet propaganda that has so far been given free
rein to control the narrative of a nation and influence millions.
We’re Overdue in Demanding Accountability From Wikipedia | The Epoch Times
