Wikipedia

Winners may write history. But Elon Musk has often complained that losers author the Wikipedia entry.

Now conservatives are trying to change that, putting their focus on the unflashy website that gets more eyeballs than the largest U.S. media outlets, making it the latest institution to feel such pressure.

For those not chronically online, however, this past week’s tempest over Wikipedia can be jolting—especially given the site’s objective to remain trustworthy. For many, it is the modern-day encyclopedia—a site written and edited by volunteers that aims to offer, as Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales once said, free access to “the sum of all human knowledge.”

Hoping to avoid misinformation about President Donald Trump’s nominees and appointments on Wikipedia? Good luck. Wikipedia has designed a protocol that directly and unerringly produces the worst descriptions about conservatives and Republicans by virtually guaranteeing that right-leaning media sources cannot be cited. The once reliable online encyclopedia ran off the rails under the leadership of its previous CEO Katherine Maher, who made sure that not a single right-leaning outlet was deemed “reliable”—a stark contrast to the 84 percent of leftist media Wikipedia deems reliable.

According to a new study, the online encyclopedia disfavors right-wing public figures.

Wikipedia has long been celebrated for its stated mission of providing open, unbiased information to anyone with Internet access. Central to that purpose is the site’s neutral point of view (NPOV) policy, which requires articles to be “fairly” and “proportionately” written, without “editorial bias.” My new computational analysis of Wikipedia’s content, however, found that this worthy ideal is not always realized in practice.

Larry Sanger remembers the promise of the web. He co-founded Wikipedia in 2001, with the hope that it could sustain a “free and open” Internet—a place where information, dissent, and creativity could thrive. At Wikipedia, he proposed a system of rules that encouraged users to “avoid bias” and maintain a “neutral point of view.”

That Internet is gone.

Wikipedia’s parent company has denied claims the Saudi government infiltrated its team in the Middle East.

Two international human rights groups said Saudi officials had altered or deleted content on the website.

The claims came after Wikimedia carried out its own investigation and suspended 16 users for “conflict of interest” editing in the Middle East.

Wikipedia fails to reflect relevant viewpoints on hot-button topics and describes center-left establishment worldviews, its co-founder Larry Sanger said. This consensus reality is prone to nefarious manipulation by powers that be.

“There is a big nasty complex game being played behind the scenes to make the articles say what somebody wants them to say,” Sanger said this week, blasting the current community culture at Wikipedia. “There are all kinds of tricks that people can play to ‘win’ it.”