42 Comments
Commenting has been turned off for this post

I once made an edit to a wiki page on the Greek hero Odysseus. I referenced the relevant book number of the Odyssey. The editors disallowed it because it wasn't a reliable source.

That told me all I needed to know.

Expand full comment

As a former Wikipedia editor I can assure you leftist pro-Palestinian editors control all the dialogue about Israel so the notion that their decision about the ADL isn’t biased is laughable.

Expand full comment

Check out Wikipedia Arabic like the article on Hitler.

Expand full comment

I've looked into this topic further, thanks to this essay. Looks like Wikipedia has a general rule that advocacy organizations are not reliable sources except when they describe themselves, but journalist sources on historical or news topics are OK. Even so, I found several mistakes in Wikipedia articles and in academic sources I regard as generally reliable during the last few years, and the mistakes are not apparently caused simply/solely by political or philosophical bias; they were preventable human error. I follow up on all encyclopedia articles nowadays, when I expect to be held accountable for what I learned.

Does anyone who writes or edits for Wikipedia read this? If so, please advise.

Expand full comment

Wikipedia editors are primarily leftist pro-Palestinian types so any article about Israel or Israel/Paleatine is typically riddled with bias.

Expand full comment

Thanks for the link to the Wikipedia article on the 7 October raids!

Expand full comment

I remember there was a post that had a growing list of news links on gun owners that have stopped violent crimes because they legally owned a gun. Some were assaults in public, but most were home invasions with the threat of rape and/or personal harm. The list existed for maybe a year and grew to several hundred local news links all around the country. It was my go-to list to show that responsible gun ownership saves lives. And then suddenly it was deleted. No message or anything. This was several years ago. That’s when I knew the editors were biased.

Expand full comment

Here's a recent list of defensive use of guns.

https://crimeresearch.org/tag/defensive-gun-use/

Expand full comment

Here's a recent list of incidents were concealed handguns were deployed to prevent or stop mass shooting.s

https://crimeresearch.org/tag/concealed-handguns-stopped-mass-public-shooting/

Expand full comment

I stopped any support a few years ago.

They have definitely taken a LEFT turn.

Who is the Left?

They are the Hamas lovers and Jew haters!

Expand full comment

Even my kids who use TikTok and Instagram as their "reliable sources" know that Wikipedia is unreliable and often biased. This is solid evidence of that assertion.

Expand full comment
founding

I was always taught by my teachers, from elementary school on , that in researching and writing a paper on any subject, that Wikipedia is not considered a reliable source for anything. Need to Dig deeper.

Expand full comment

It's a Wiki, so that means there is work for us to do. That is all there is to it.

Expand full comment
founding

Like the BBC or the New York Times, Wikipedia has been taken over by extremist "progressive" groups and redirected as propaganda outlets.

I'm waiting for their "math is racist" to catch up to Wikepedia's, so far, excellent math and science articles.

Expand full comment

It's sucks because Wikipedia is an amazing resource if you can read between the lines. Wanna know the roster of the 1980 Alabama football team? Bam. Curious about the GDP of the Faroe Islands. Pow. However, If a person or entity can in any way be associated with a political tribe, you need to read the entry as if it was written by your 20-year-old niece who is a sophomore at the Columbia school of journalism.

Expand full comment

Wikipedia cannot be trusted as an unbiased source in politics or even history. It's ok if you are seeking information in mathematics or a hard science.

Expand full comment

I tried to be a Wiki editor for a few weeks and Tamzin came after me immediately (not for anything related to the Israel/Gaza conflict). It seems like this individual does not have much of a life outside of controlling what information other people can access.

Expand full comment

If I recall correctly, I tried adding to an article with info/a citation from the Free Press -- you can imagine what happened shortly after!

Expand full comment

This is a big issue for bias in AI Agents. They have been trained by crawling and scraping the open web. Wikipedia is definitely part of that training data.

Expand full comment

But remember, Wikipedia needs your donations to operate..... Think of it, an internet authority on, well, everything, run anonymously with zero accountability. What could possibly go wrong?

Expand full comment

"But remember, Wikipedia needs your donations to operate."

In that case they're screwed.

Expand full comment