Wikipedia Is a Source of Political Propaganda
battlepenguin.com
battlepenguin.com
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-44495696
> Political analyst and former UK British ambassador Craig Murray described the scale of Cross’s activities:
> Philip Cross” has not had one single day off from editing Wikipedia in almost five years. “He” has edited every single day from 29 August 2013 to 14 May 2018. Including five Christmas Days. That’s 1,721 consecutive days of editing. 133,612 edits to Wikipedia have been made in the name of “Philip Cross” over 14 years. That’s over 30 edits per day, seven days a week. And I do not use that figuratively: Wikipedia edits are timed, and if you plot them, the timecard for “Philip Cross’s” Wikipedia activity is astonishing if it is one individual.’
https://www.mintpressnews.com/phillip-cross-the-mystery-wiki...
It doesn't seem relevant what George Galloway and Mint Press News' problem with "Philip Cross" is, just whether the evidence they present that he is an extremely prolific editor is true (seems to be the case). It seems to be up to your personal judgment whether you think this strongly implies he's not an individual or not. Certainly it's relevant information supporting the claim that he's not.
> Philip Cross has engaged in a personalized, public, off-wiki dispute with George Galloway while simultaneously making significant content edits to George Galloway’s article over an extended period of time.
> Philip Cross has demonstrated a conflict of interest with respect to George Galloway and certain other individuals in the area of post-1978 British politics.
But also:
> There is no evidence to indicate that Philip Cross has used alternate accounts or sockpuppets to edit or support his views on-wiki, nor that he has coordinated with any other editors, outside individuals, or organizations in his editing.
ArbCom took a very dim view of Galloway's, and another Wikipedian's, attempts to "out" Cross's identity.
Ultimately, ArbCom banned Cross from doing _any_ editing on "post-1978 British politics, broadly construed". That is an enormously wide topic ban.
You can also see from his user contributions and the block log that he has been banned by admins for repeatedly defying his topic ban. A 1-week ban in August 2018, a 1-month ban in November 2021, a 3-month ban in July 2022... and now he has a PERMANENT ban since last month. He can't appeal for at least a year.
It doesn't seem like a shadowy cabal to me, it sounds like one person who does nothing but edit all day. Wikipedia has quite a few such users, and that's why there's a big list of contentious topics which are more heavily patrolled and restricted than the rest of Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_sanctions#Ac...
If the overall article needs more citations then you can edit the page and apply the “more citations needed” tag, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:More_citations_need...
Here’s an overview of Wikipedia’s approach to site reliability. Lots of tools to help flag content that needs verification and there are lists of volunteer opportunities to clean up content that had been flagged. Check it out, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Reliab....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikimedia_Foundation
At least in Germany it's highly centralized for any topic that is even slightly political. I forgot the exact percentage, but it's in the realm of 95%+ is editted by a few dozen people for all topics that are even slightly political and spreads a numbers of expertises they seemingly have.
Most German Wikipedians probably know Felikz and Kopilot or the Politburo of Wikipedia in general.
edit: It's Kopilot not Copilot.
How you choose to present that information + which particular sources you choose to cite on a given topic is absolutely susceptible to bias and propaganda efforts.
The open nature of the encyclopedia means that there is at the very least a record of the controversy and in general a countervailing force against such distortions. While an open project like Wikipedia is more vulnerable to this type of attack it is also more resilient to this style of attack but the exact same reasons.
Additionally, there is a market size problem. For example, a highly literate, politically mobilised population would out-edit a less literate, politically apathetic competitor.
Is this a real problem, in the USA at least? Trump spent literal billions to have armies of paid professionals make him look good and still lost the popular vote by millions.
> For example, a highly literate, politically mobilised population would out-edit a less literate, politically apathetic competitor.
Politically mobilized populations will trounce everything, the sky is the limit. Controlling Wikipedia is one of the least interesting thing they could do.
Wikipedia did not cause culture wars.
Maybe this is true for certain modern topics, but I was able to learn most of 20th century history due to Wikipedia. Want to read about MK Ultra? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra. Want to read about Japan's human experimentation program and how the US offered them immunity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731. Obviously this stuff is never going to be taught in school (maybe in undergrad history program, but who majors in history?). But it's on Wikipedia.
In terms of non-controversial topics, there's tons of value on Wikipedia as well. There is a broad collection of informative math and physics articles, I have read many of them and would argue they're useful. And also like one for every species of butterfly and virus.
In terms of modern AND controversial topics, I agree that Wikipedia is sometimes the target of some bullshit psyops and corporate whitewashing. But if you're willing to cut through that, lots of articles have useful information, like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War. Even the title is relatively unbiased (unless you're in the west :) ). You don't go to Wikipedia for a peer reviewed article that's 100% accurate and defensible, you go to get a straight answer that's 90% correct, when every journalist and public figure is spewing a load of hot shit. And that's why, for example, when you Google "Darrell Brooks" the top suggestion is "Darrell Brooks wiki".
So yeah, I gave them 100 bucks. I don't care what they do with it. If they donate it to the Dr. Evil Foundation for Evil or somebody, fine whatever. As long as Wikipedia stays up.
I have a backup as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
That is what many if not most people mean when they state that Wikipedia is not a reliable source for any controversial topic or people.
I like the bias of not treating politics as a set of "scandals" just like the media does. It is likely that being an international effort, the English Wikipedia avoids voting in a particular partisan bias, even if it doesn't appear to be so for other languages.
> Although the free online encyclopedia is good at general information about broad topics, it’s terribly inaccurate for anything political, contentions or controversial.
No. Who would have thought ?
I can't count the number of times where I've come across some boring, mundane topic and quickly figured out (by observing reality conflicting with what I'm seeing) that the discourse is dominated by one group or another who come into it with their own assumptions.
I don't know how that sad pack of Winston Smiths they call editors rationalizes its behavior , and I don't want to know.
First one on the list, "Wikispooks". Interestingly, Wikipedia does not have an article on Wikispooks, but Wikispooks does have an article about Wikipedia!
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Wikipedia
It seems to be headlined with with subpages for their concerns about Wikipedia. Let's see:
Wikipedia/Hasbara | Systematic gatekeeping for Jewish interest on Wikipedia
There is half your problem. Tim Pool generally is not a valid journalistic source. He regularly fails to fact check, citing inflammatory rhetoric in the process for a double whammy of bad journalism.
In fact, in terms of avoiding misinformation, Pool is as inadequate for the task as citing Ben Shapiro or Alex Jones.
While I agree that Wikimedia should not be funding non-Wikipedia activities with funds raised through Wikipedia, that does not mean hit pieces like this get to start being sloppy without recourse.
Or any of the numerous corporate media (MSNBC, NY TIMES, CNN, FOX NEWS, etc.) that have clearly been spreading misinformation for donkey's years.
I said "as" inadequate. The constructed narratives and data cherrypicking of fringe entertainers like Shapiro and Jones are more frequent and more damaging than the selective reporting and factual confusions of mainstream media. The financial motivations are also slightly different as legacy media is impacted by different billionaire spending vs political infotainers.
Or more plainly: the point was not to say "aha, see, Pool and Shapiro and Jones are the ONLY sources of misinformation, and by omitting, say, the BBC, I think its fine to watch them because they are definitely trustworthy*" - I was saying the three mentioned infotainers are all on the same level. That's an important distinction.
See also, them advocating to read hidden/downvoted comments because "There is a wealth of information found in views that are not widely held or considered controversial.". https://battlepenguin.com/tech/read-from-the-bottom/ Anyone who reads hidden/downvoted comments on social media knows that the vast majority are just unhinged idiotic rants or a stream of slurs.
Like yes, it's on your left, but it's not left by any stretch of imagination.
It appears one side is arguing against what we might call "Free Speech (tm)" while others are arguing in favor of the moral/ethical principle of not restricting the free exchange of ideas. Thus the two sides end up talking past each other.
Wikipedia is supposed to be a collection of facts, not of self-expression. Eg, we see here on the front page that Fred Brooks passed away on Nov 18, 2022. That's either a fact or it isn't. If it is a fact, then that's what his article should contain.
And what would that be?
> If I had to guess, you envision people who are vocal about free speech as holding views you disagree with.
This has nothing to do with Wikipedia. My contention is that Wikipedia is not for "speech" at all, of any kind.
Eg, this is not "free speech" in any of its meanings: "New York, often called New York City (NYC),[a] is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over 300.46 square miles (778.2 km2), New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the United States."
That's a factual statement that can have been compiled by an AI. It's not an expression of the views or opinions of any single person, and one that can be extracted from maps and databases.
> Whereas as a moral/ethical principle, you cannot have a Wikipedia without the free exchange of ideas - whether it's fact or opinion.
True, but the actual contents of Wikipedia articles aren't supposed to constitute exchanges of ideas.
This is exactly my point - "speech" in this context means the exchange of ideas, not taken literally as making sounds with your mouth. So perhaps my point would make more sense if you s/speech/free exchange of ideas/
Without a free exchange of ideas, how do you form a consensus of what is or is not fact?
I could argue that your NY reference is indeed free speech in that you are making a statement of fact or opinion in a public forum.
By having free exchange of ideas allowed outside of Wikipedia, and forbidden on Wikipedia itself.
I'm saying the free exchange of ideas doesn't belong on Wikipedia pages specifically.
Social media however IS meant for specific people to spread their opinions and conservative opinions are censored there.
A confounder here is that social media inherits a lot of american political bias, and america has no mainstream left. Right leaning people interpret center and even center-right positions as "leftist" but that doesn't make it so.
This is literally that old joke that "reality has a liberal bias" right? I do agree.
There's your problem. That's not a "left wing political idea," that's a fact that right wingers just don't like.
For instance, is the Wuhan lab the source of the virus? The correct answer is we don't know, and by now may never. The investigations just weren't done and they're about as detailed and exacting as those for an air crash. Without that it's all just guesses.
The article says that "Covid came from a lab" is misinformation, but not that "Covid DIDN"T come from a lab" is also misinformation.
I spent weeks trying to explain that a source which says "there is no evidence" means no evidence either way. It kept coming back to them saying they felt this paternalistic need to prevent the dumbs from getting the wrong opinion and because Trump had said it and the repubs are dumb, that there was a higher burden to represent that view as wrong than to represent the other views as also wrong!
In the end the article just ended up sounding like CNN. So much for unbiased.
2. What right wing views are censored on social media? Superiority of capitalism over other economic systems? Less taxes leading to better prosperity? Reduced government regulation lets innovation flourish? Welfare programs are a waste of money? I see these views get debated and their pros and cons pointed out, not censored.
And medical articles are also very frequently biased/agenda driven.
Often it's a complete fantasy omitting any real world painful facts.
I'm easily entertained but a recent one from a week ago was the article on Monkeypox outbreak within the UK[0]. The current UK strategy from the likes of PHE is to vaccinate gay & bisexual men.
It's been a sore topic in the UK, but literally no mention in the article.
The NHS article mentions it [1].
So the world's most popular encyclopaedia, sanitizer its 'truth'.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_monkeypox_outbreak_in_t...
Read the "Talk" page too on those
"While anyone can get monkeypox, to date the majority of confirmed cases outside of the endemic regions in Africa occurred in young or middle-aged men who have sex with men (MSM) who had recent sexual contact with new or multiple partners."
The fact you likely aren't even aware of the incredible controversy around this topic makes clear the santization is working.
But there are edits and reverts and removed versions of the article... So what are you getting at?
Could you explain this whole controversy in the Wikipedia article? Yes, but doing that is also divisive so you just ignore it since it's not that important in the grand scheme of things.
It's not all anti-LGBT stuff although, that is perennial.
But there were doubts around the vaccine safety and effectiveness.
And the campaign was secretive (invites asked you not to disclose to others it was happening).
I've seen so many of these in the last few years who people on the talk pages are literally saying "Yes, but we can't let the Rep/Dem party benefit from this!"
An example of this that I saw was the "86-45" kerfuffle. To eighty-six something means dispose of, in some contexts to kill, and when someone was referenced saying this about trump (president 45) the fans of whoever said it went to Wiki and removed years-old references to the term meaning kill. It was obviously a reasonable statement meaning vote-out in context but they weren't happy letting people read the article and form the correct opinion - they wanted to censor all "potentially misleading" facts.
Random one I read last night
> The realization that Fitzgerald had improved as a novelist to point that Gatsby was a masterwork was immediately evident to certain members of the literary world.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald
Editors aren’t even trying to appear objective any more. It’s like the news. I think this is becoming the commonplace on Wikipedia and I hate it
So of course The Great Gatsby is going to have a terrible article. Because it's a miserable book
If you care so much about The Great Gatsby, then you should invest your time improving the article.
Constrast: https://infogalactic.com/info/Graham_Linehan with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Linehan
- I think the author may have a point. Regardless of what you think about the person in question, the former seems far more encyclopaedic and neutral (though perhaps missing a necessary paragraph on his unpopular beliefs).
Further, these ideological corrections are always biased because they're based on outrage articles and nobody writes counterpoint articles in which nothing happened and nothing is wrong. "Dog does not bite man".
Nobody is going to pen a Guardian article saying "GL can tell the difference between the type of people who give birth and those who do not" because we all can and it's just not interesting. But if a few people working for Pink News and Gawker write that GL's statements are actually dog-whistles designed to stigmatize "fake women" or something, then all of a sudden 100% of the sources agree that he's committing literal violence against trans folx.
Another article was attempting to trans an 18th century person. They said "Oh, it's okay, we'll also accept reliable sources that say they weren't a trans man" as if such a source could even exist.
The point isn't his positions but that Wikipedia is a platform for activists to pick and choose which words to amplify or to amplify pushback against, and our rules for academic sources break down entirely in a culture war where new sources can be spun up in an instant. This is giving undue weight to certain elements and ignoring others.
The material content of his positions isn't that important to me; only that Wikipedia doesn't conveniently omit those positions.
There's a no-false-balance policy which means the moon-landing-hoax theory doesn't need to get mentioned on every article related to space.
Why is your view, or anti-view, important enough that it should be mentioned, such that you'd say it was omitted if it wasn't there?
Infogalactic, not so much. Complaining that Wikipedia is a source of propaganda and then citing Infogalactic as a balance is a mistake on the order of comparing Reuters and the Babylon Bee.
I refer you to https://infogalactic.com/info/Bibhorr
I know little of IG, but IG’s is what I’d expect an encyclopaedic article on this subject to look like, with (as I said) the inclusion of a paragraph about his views on sex and gender.
WP’s puts his views (ideologically slanted as anti-trans rather than as he sees them gender critical) front and centre, and thereby characterises him as a bad person. Many people believe he is, but it’s not WPs place to authoritatively decide that, or the “Which is more real, sex or gender?” debate, or brand dissenters as immoral wrong-thinkers, or format articles to assert that stance. Ideally, WP should be far more factual and neutral.
NB: This isn’t meant to be about the Trans issue, I used that subject as an illustration of the kind of thing I personally see as ideological bias in WP.
In my experience in the UK people who describe themselves as gender critical are older left-leaning (majority lesbian) women and hold their long held (1970s onwards) beliefs in good faith and from a position of pro-female / pro same sex-attracted rights, and resistance to gender as a useful social construct.
They’re not anti-trans by primary motivation - it’s that the logical consequence of what they believe about the nature of sex and gender leads them to believe that “Trans-X aren’t X”. But from an opposing ideological viewpoint this is deemed definitionally transphobic, and the slant becomes evident when it’s asserted that this transphobic sentiment is and must be at the heart of what motivates gender critical beliefs - “They espouse their beliefs as racists espouse ‘race realism’ - as a guise to discriminate against the other”.
But in this case it’s simply not true, and denying that citing “false balance” is in itself biased and disingenuous.
This reasoning is suspect: most people don't wake up and decide to be "Anti-X" as a "primary" motivation; they're "Anti-X" because it adheres to all kinds of other positions they have, and humans are pattern-matching beings.
In other words: most people exhibit prejudice not for its own sake, but for some other sake. This doesn't meaningfully change the fact that it would be correct to label them as prejudiced.
Atheists aren’t anti-theists, for example - atheists who value empirical rationalism as a true and positive philosophy generate beliefs felt as negative (or even threatening) by devout theists. Nevertheless, it’s not fair to characterise atheists as anti-theists, or primarily motivated by prejudice against theists.
An example of this is the LGB Association in the UK. They're a homosexual rights organization and they talk about sex-based rights. They're currently undergoing a tribunal to strip their charity status depending on in their charitable goals match their actions.
Wiki editors have gamed what sources are considered reliable until they're all the ones that condemn this organization and none that support them. The article doesn't actually mention any of their words or stated goals, just what you're supposed to think about them ("anti-trans agenda, etc") and the criticism section is even worse. None of the sources explicitly used for criticism is even criticizing their actual words - just the supposedly hidden meaning.
> Wikipedia's broader policy of rejecting "softening" labels that groups use to obscure their positions
Pro-Up isn't Anti-Down. There's a big difference between pro-woman and anti-trans and trying to "unsoften" one into the other is trying to put words in people's mouths.
To draw the distinction further, not everyone with sex dysphoria (gender dysphoria) is trans. For example, some were previously, but are now detrans. Others just deal with it without making claims of being the opposite sex.
I would contend that gender critical is a subtype of anti-trans, broadly based on an ideological rejection of gendered stereotyping. The other major subtype involves convictions based on religious beliefs. Less popular subtypes include, for example, skepticism of the consumerist aspect of trans that may follow from holding an anti-capitalist worldview.
Holding anti-trans beliefs does have connotations of being a bad thing, but this is mostly because pro-trans activists have latched onto pro-LGB activism.
In the past few years, I’ve become increasingly more aware at how conservatives will simply state the facts, or praise what they appreciate, when an ideological adversary dies. In contrast, progressives and our legacy media will often write horrific hit pieces when someone on the opposite end of the spectrum passes away.
No bias there at all.
> I was living in Wellington, New Zealand when Margaret Thatcher died. Some people I knew threw a party at Hotel Bristol, a pub on Cuba Street. I knew nothing about Thatcher, but I assumed she must have been pretty bad if friends of mine were singing “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” in her wake. Today, activist still literally piss on her grave1.
> Years later in Seattle, I worked with a British woman who grew up under Thatcher. She was horrified when people celebrated the death of someone who was an inspiration to many young women all over the United Kingdom. In the past few years, I’ve become increasingly more aware at how conservatives will simply state the facts, or praise what they appreciate, when an ideological adversary dies.
If the author hung out with a bunch of people and observed this happening, and then later talked to a British woman who gave him a different perspective, can you at least see why that bias developed? I mean ... his friends threw a party when a prime minister they probably weren't even alive for died.
No ads, tracking, or megacorps. Plenty of transparency.
I wouldn't be surprised if much of this effort is done by the megacorps you claim aren't involved.