On Wikipedia’s Left-wing bias:
You can’t cite the Daily Mail at all. You can’t cite Fox News on socio-political issues either. It’s banned. So what does that mean? It means that if a controversy does not appear in the mainstream centre-Left media, then it’s not going to appear on Wikipedia.
Exactly. Sources! That's what it's all about. Al Jazeera is used copiously throughout Wikipedia even though it is Qatari state media and a Hamas mouthpiece.
How Wikipedia entries are distorted:
There are companies like Wiki PR, where paid writers and editors will go in and change articles. Maybe there’s some way to make such a system work, but not if the players who are involved and who are being paid are not identified by name — they actually are supposed to be identified by name and say ‘we represent this firm’ if they are officially registered with some sort of Wikipedia editing firm. But they don’t have to do that.
There's a similar but worse problem with Israel. Paid anti-Israel hacks are supplemented by an army of anti-Israel volunteers and a hostile "administration." Due to anonymity, it is impossible to distinguish between dedicated amateurs and professional propagandists. All we can do is surmise.
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Remember that comments are open and can be anonymous. Tips, critiques, and suggestions are welcome, and I am receptive to guest blogs as well. They can be anonymous or otherwise. Just email me at WikipediaCritic at proton dot me
3 comments:
The Daily Mail ban in 2016 was definitely the moment Wikipedia editors collectively gave in to the powerful temptation to use their insider skills and knowledge of the rules and weaknesses of their editorial model, to distort their encyclopedia content to the way they wish the world was, rather than how it is.
The mere existence of the Daily Mail was an affront to the sensibilities of the known to skew left wing Wikipedia community. Unlike hugely discredited outlets such as National Enquirer or Russia Today, duly banned shortly after the Mail, here was a legitimate newspaper that was hugely popular and was being read it seems precisely because in the eyes of the British public, it is the most right wing mass market newspaper available to them. The British print media having a long and proud history of allowing consumer choice from a range of editorial positions, with the legally enshrined neutrality of the BBC acting as a kind of collective touchstone, accused of bias by both left and right, but carrying broad public trust.
The Mail was being read it seems precisely because the British public are a broadly right wing bunch who hold moderate but conservative views on topics such as immigration, welfare and warfare. This unsurprisingly meant that the Mail was used quite often by hundreds of Wikipedia editors who saw no reason to distrust its reports and took the quite sensible view that an editorial policy of neutrality that seeks to weigh the views of all available sources would necessarily mean the Mail's views have to be included in Wikipedia's articles. How can you write about the Iraq War, for example, if you're not allowed to include what the Mail was allegedly reflecting (or indeed pushing) as the will of the people?
The absence of the Mail is a stain on any claim of Wikipedia to be a neutral recorder of British history. It being acknowledged by sources Wikipedia still considers reliable, that the Mail's success is in large part down to not just reflecting but driving British public opinion on matters of the day, and thus being hugely influential in British political life.
And so here we are today. The Mail ban was a kind of breaching experiment, an attempt by the Wikipedia editors to see if they could skew the "neutral point of view" of their encyclopedia to the left by simply declaring that popular mainstream outlets on the right were unreliable. Unreliable sources being duly ignored.
Surprisingly, it worked. Despite the fact their methodology to prove unreliability was bunk and the debate featured a whole host of lies and was, in essence, a mere popular vote with a handful of cherry picked examples taken out of context or even ironically deliberately misrepresented to suit a narrative, it won the day.
The current system of dividing sources into reliable and unreliable based on their masthead, or latterly for one broad topic area, has its origins in this one giant lie. It overturned years of good practice, where the only thing that mattered was context. What is the claim and where are you citing it?
That eye for context is why Wikipedia already had well established rules against using celebrity gossip stories in biographies. But that didn't stop the fact the Mail has a huge presence in that market being used as a reason to ban it outright as a source on Wikipedia. Countless problematic points such as that were simply ignored by the panel of three closers of that debate. Their reasoning was deliberately kept secret, lest people realize the weakness of it once those wholly irrelevant arguments were discounted.
The Wikipedia editors often try to claim that because they have never tried to ban the so called broadsheet newspapers such as the Times and Telegraph, this means the Mail ban was about reliability not politics. There are more than a few problems with that defence. Firstly, part of the Mail's usefulness to an encyclopedia of everything, is its huge commercial success, which means it has far more journalists cranking out far more stories and opinions on a far wider range of subjects, all on a free to read platform. And of course, it wasn't too many years before the Wikipedia editors took the precedent of the Mail ban and took aim at even the Telegraph, disliking its strong editorial stance against gender ideology. Another decision that makes no real sense unless viewed as an attempt by the Wikipedia editors to stack the deck against right wing sources and thus skew their encyclopedia content to the left.
The Mail ban was a masterstroke of illogical and downright fraudulent argument winning the day. Things like that are happening more and more now, because of the capture of the Wikipedia criticism site Wikipediocracy by ardent left wingers for whom there is nothing more important in the world than the success of the American left on the political stage, now that Trunp has shown the weakness of their democracy. The irony being it was precisely because of its free press that Britain has never had its Trump moment.
Another major reason why Wikipediocracy doesn't like to talk about the Daily Mail ban, is the fact that the ban was proposed by a member of that forum, the Wikipedia user Hillbillyholiday. They had miscalculated and believed that proposing this as a piece of dramatic but likely unsuccessful change to Wikipedia policy would embarass Jimmy Wales and improve Wikipedia's use of sources by eliminating so called tabloids from not just biographies but everything. To their very great surprise, Jimmy wholeheartedly endorsed the idea, and the Wikipedia community ran with the ban not as a measure against tabloids, but against bigotry in the encyclopedia.
The fact Hillbillyholiday was later exposed by the Mail as a deeply deviant individual who was a very odd choice as a moral campaigner against tabloid journalism, and the fact he was eventually banned by Wikipedia for repeated and mulitple beaches of community trust, doesn't seem to concern Wikipedia one bit.
It of course was not an accident that one of the very first lies told in the Mail ban debate came out of Hillbillyholiday's mouth. He tried to use the fact The Guardian had zero IPSO rulings against it as evidence of its reliability compared to the Mail. In reality, The Guardian is not regulated by IPSO. Much like Wikipedia, it takes the view that the only people who can be trusted to regulate The Guardian on matters outside of actual illegality, is the Guardian.
The fact this blatant and deliberate lie stood for almost a day without challenge, during which time several people added their vote to ban the Mail, is one of the many reasons you cannot really take the view that this debate was fair and impartial. The closers didn't acknowledge this or any other lie told, such that we might know whether they discounted any votes that were possibly influenced by it. That being standard practice elsewhere on Wikipedia.
The warped logic of the ban has of course led to all sorts of truly sick paradoxes that torpedo Wikipedia's claims to care about what can be verified as the truth. Currently Wikipedia describes Marek Kukula as a respected astronomer. In reality, according to the Mail, he is a convicted producer of child pornography. There isn't a single logical reason to believe the Mail has made a deliberate or even accidental error in that report. In their ban debate, Wikipedia editors certainly didn't produce a single example of the Mail being unreliable in that specific context. There has not and likely never will be any reason to doubt that specific report. But due to this ban, none of that context matters, and so the story must be considered potentially unreliable.
Wikipedia cannot acknowledge that it isn't, without calling into question the entire logic of the ban. What it is for, who pushed for it and why. So they do not. And somehow, they get away with it.
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