Has Wikipedia morphed into Wikipevil?
Wikipedia is “Wokepedia,” complains Elon Musk. That’s because it’s become so left-wing.
“It’s designed to push an ideological agenda that you can’t see,” says journalist Ashley Rindsberg in my new video. He runs “Neutral Point of View,” a Substack publication that exposes Wikipedia bias.
“So what if it’s biased?” I ask. “It’s just one website.”
“Wikipedia’s information spreads into everything online,” he replies, “ChatGPT, … Siri, Alexa. Ask a question, it is all Wikipedia.”
As a result, “a few thousand powerful editors determine what gets counted as information.”
Those editors sure hate President Donald Trump. When he put undocumented immigrants in what people called “cages” at detention centers, Wikipedia editors listed the centers under “concentration camps.”
Since Wikipedia says, “anyone can edit,” I tried to put that in perspective, adding, “President Obama built these cages.”
Within a day, my edit was taken down.
“Wikipedia has definitely been taken over by woke activists,” says Rindsberg.
An editor of my page even posts pictures of Lenin and Che on his website profile!
To make sure the content stays leftist, Wikipedia labels conservative media “unreliable.” Editors should not cite Fox News, The Federalist, The Daily Wire, the New York Post …
By contrast, Wikipedia labels CNN, and even MSNBC, VOX, Slate, The Nation and Mother Jones, “reliable.”
That’s nuts. Fox sometimes gets things wrong, but MSN and Slate don’t?
Another example: After years of leftist media labeling the claim that COVID leaked from a lab a “conspiracy theory,” most eventually acknowledged on the new evidence.
“COVID-19 likely originated from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China,” summarized the “Today” show.
But Wikipedia still says there’s “no evidence supporting laboratory involvement.”
My own Wikipedia page is filled with not just mistakes but smears. They claim that when I anchored “20/20,” I complained that AIDS research gets “too much funding.”
But all I’d said was that AIDS research gets disproportionate funding compared to other diseases.
Former President Bill Clinton said the same thing: “We’re spending 10 times as much per fatality on people with AIDS!”
They don’t trash him, just me.
Wikipedia’s socialists sure hate libertarians.
It’s not fair.
“There’s no recourse, there’s no accountability,” says Rindsberg. “Nobody for you to talk to and say, ‘This is wrong.’ If this was a news organization, there would be an avenue or a channel for you to at least address it. In Wikipedia’s case, that is not true.”
“Is there any way to fix Wikipedia?” I ask Rindsberg.
“The best chance we have is for dedicated people who are really interested in these topics to get in there and become an editor that can make those kinds of changes. We only need a few dozen, maybe even fewer, to make an impact …
I hope you who read this column will!
Stossel is the author of “Government Gone Wild.”
