Online encyclopedia-turned information giant Wikipedia has completely banned seven of its editors over their sympathy for French presidential hopeful Eric Zemmour.
Seven Wikipedia editors, including one of the site’s biggest French-language contributors, have been completely banned from the online encyclopedia over their pro-Zemmour stance.
The seven editors were “banished” by the site on Wednesday after it emerged that they tried to edit the page of the firebrand presidential candidate.
According to a report by Le Parisien, the editors were “banished” after they tried to change move a reference to Eric Zemmour’s classification as “far-right” further down the candidate’s online page, along with a host of other changes.
Banishment is a particularly rare and harsh penalty used by the site, being different from a regular ban in that it cannot be circumvented by a user opening up a new account.
Among those banned was an editor operating under the online handle “Cheep”, who was at the time reportedly the 64th largest contributor to French Wikipedia.
Within the report, the publication notes the fact that political activists frequently try and change Wikipedia pages in relation to their preferred candidates.
“People don’t understand how Wikipedia works, which is a participatory encyclopedia,” said Samuel Lafont, who serves as Eric Zemmour’s digital strategy manager, noting that the campaign is active everywhere on the internet.
How radical and out of touch is Wikipedia?
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— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) July 16, 2021
Wikipedia’s banning of pro-Zemmour activists is possible the latest example of the online encyclopedia’s political bias, which has come under ever-increasing scrutiny in recent years.
Multiple studies into the online platform have found significant left-leaning bias, with right-leaning editors being six times more likely to face sanctions from the site.
One particularly notable example of bias on the site came in the form of the scheduled deletion of the entry for “mass killings under Communist regimes” over its “anti-Communist” bias.
While as of writing the page remain active, it is now noted to be undergoing “expansion” and/or a “major restructuring”, and that the neutrality of the article is “disputed”.
The site also falsely described allegations of Hunter Biden having corrupt political dealings as “debunked conspiracy theories”, heavily censoring the page of the now-first family member in the run-up to the 2020 US Presidential Election.
At the time, no reference to the bombshell reporting by the New York Post, which appeared to support such claims of corruption, could be found on Hunter Biden’s wiki page.
Site co-founder Larry Sanger has said that he is now embarrassed by the platform, saying that its previous commitment to political neutrality is now “long gone”.
“Wikipedia’s ideological and religious bias is real and troubling, particularly in a resource that continues to be treated by many as an unbiased reference work,” Sanger is reported as having said, also claiming that “the deck is too stacked on Wikipedia for it to ever be salvaged”.
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