Wikipedia as a source of propaganda? Just read the Wikipedia article titled “COVID-19 Lab Leak Theory.” From the Wikipedia article, would think that there is no legitimate clashing version of this story.
Glenn Greenwald describes what has happened to Wikipedia in recent years, demonstrating by looking at various Wikipedia pages that demonstrate almost comedic bias. What kind of information is reliable according to Wikipedia? It is weighed heavily in favor of established corporate media sources. See Wikipedia: Reliable Sources. Consider further, this article: “Wikipedia: The Corrupt Encyclopedia: Wikipedia formally censors The Grayzone as regime-change advocates monopolize editing.”
Larry Sangar, co-founder of Wikipedia, appeared on System Update to discuss his own concerns. According to Sangar, during the period of 2006-2012, Wikipedia became a biased pro-establishment website. He gave examples that he noticed from 2010-2015. Wikipedia became severely biased against Eastern/holoistic medical traditions. He sensed that it “got over the top” around 2013-2018, when Wikipedia increasingly moved onto the radar of the political establishment. Google began investing many millions of dollars in to Wikipedia. According to Sanger, “No encyclopedia has ever been as biased as Wikipedia is now.”
Sanger mentioned that there are alternative encyclopedias, such as Ballotpedia, which he describes as “fairly neutral” and Conservapedia (on the conservative side). To read 35 encyclopedias at once, Sanger recommended using encyclosearch.org or encycloreader.org These sites us open source software, with digitally signed results. These are two attempts to try to strike a blow against censorship and control. Sanger also mentioned that there will soon be a WordPress plugin that will allow people to aggregate their own website articles in a mega collection.
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[Added Oct 6, 2023]
This battle of ideas on Wikipedia’s platform formed a crucial part of the encyclopaedia’s commitment to neutrality, which according to Sanger, was abandoned after 2009. In the years since, on issues ranging from Covid to Joe Biden, it has become increasingly partisan, primarily espousing an establishment viewpoint that increasingly represents “propaganda”. This, says Sanger, is why he left the site in 2007, describing it as “broken beyond repair”.
[Supp Dec 14, 2024]
