Wikipedia was founded by two internet entrepreneurs Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales back in 2001. It was intended as a free open access encyclopaedia, written, edited and maintained by volunteer contributors. The founders hoped this method would continually improve the quality, relevance, and accuracy of Wikipedia’s contents. Sanger and Wales wrongly believed that under such circumstances no central organization or group could control its content. Wikipedia once aimed to avoid bias and maintain a neutral point of view.
Over the last two decades, Wikipedia challenged Microsoft’s Encarta and Encyclopaedia Britannica. Although Wikipedia was resisted by academics as a legitimate source of information in education, it is now the ‘go to’ resource for students around the world. Wikipedia has over 1.5 billion unique visitors per month.
The recent revelations of past “tweets’ by Kathrine Maher during her tenure as Wikipedia Foundation CEO (now NPR CEO), has caused some alarm over the integrity of Wikipedia. Maher’s achieve on X (Twitter) of over 24,000 posts reveals her left leaning political biases using buzzwords and phrases like “structural privilege’, ‘epistemic emergency’, ‘non-binary people’, cis white mobility privilege’ and ‘toxic masculinity’. As a supporter of Black Lives Matter, she subscribes to ‘critical theories’ and considers the US First Amendment an impediment to her campaign to rid the world of wrong opinions.
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These biases first became consciously apparent in Wikipedia’s pages during the Covid-19 pandemic. This is clearly evident in the pages on ‘Ivermectin’, ‘Pfizer vaccine’, ‘Covid pandemic in Sweden’, and public commentators like Dr Robert Malone, accused of promoting misinformation.
These biases are common across the whole spectrum of Wikipedia pages.
Whistleblowers within the US publicly funded National Radio Network (NPR) have also complained the network has swung towards a liberal bias, since Maher’s recent appointment as CEO.
This has prompted Wikipedia’s co-founder Larry Sanger to talk about the interference in the integrity of Wikipedia in an interview with Christopher F. Rufo in the City Journal recently.
Sanger was shocked but not surprised over the manipulation of Wikipedia pages. Sanger said “The bias of Wikipedia, the fact that certain points of view have been systematically silenced is nothing new. …But I did not know just how radical-sounding Katherine Maher is.”
Sanger confirmed he knew of back-channel communication with US intelligence agencies, most probably the CIA, where they influenced Wikipedia through accounts they control.
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Maher has been open she has worked with government to shut down what they consider ‘misinformation’, which means Wikipedia is no longer free and open. This was conformed by investigative journalist Virgil Griffith’s research on how different agencies and corporations use Wikipedia to manage their reputation . Griffith found that the CIA have Wikipedia edits going back to 2007.
Intelligence agency interference in social media was conformed by the ‘Twitter Files’, which explained the relationship between Twitter (now X) and security agencies, before Elon Musk took over. Mark Zuckerberg confirmed in 2022 how Meta (Facebook and Instagram) cooperated with the FBI on ‘misinformation’ warnings. Wikipedia is just one more case of the intelligence community’s influence over social media for the purposes of influencing public opinion.
The case of intelligence community and leftist leadership giving Wikipedia a bias is serious. Wikipedia is where the young are getting their information. Wikipedia is now an integral resource for their education. If Wikipedia says something in climate change, gender, political issues, and public health and medicine, it must be true.
Wikipedia has been playing a major role in ‘dumbing down’ the current and next generation of our youth. Its potentially playing a major role in destroying diversity of opinion. This goes someway to explaining community attitudes on issues like climate change today.
The damage is been done now.
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