We’re Overdue in Demanding Accountability From Wikipedia

A mobile device shows Wikipedia's front page displaying a darkened logo in London on Jan. 18, 2012. (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

Commentary

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 But most of what they referenced was vastly outdated and limited in scope.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.

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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 COVID-19. 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.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.