Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, expressed his shock at recent statements made by the former CEO of its parent organization Wikimedia, Katherine Maher, who now serves as CEO of NPR.
The Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, likened to a “Supreme Court” for the site, suspended the privileges of member “Beeblebrox” for six months over claimed misconduct in the first such suspension in Wikipedia’s history. Among the alleged incidents, some concerned a now-former administrator with whom Beeblebrox had feuded. The same former administrator last month confessed to impersonating a Spanish indie singer and previously editing Wikipedia with an account banned for undisclosed paid editing, a common practice on the online encyclopedia.
A long-time Wikipedia editor for over a decade, Guy Macon, retired from the site late June after he was briefly banned for not using “preferred pronouns” when discussing a ban appeal by former site administrator Ashley Van Haeften. Macon used Van Haeften’s username “Fæ” instead of singular “they” due to grammatical objections. Van Haeften and Macon previously fought over the former’s agenda-driven editing. Though the ban was lifted on grounds Macon was sincerely trying to respect Van Haeften’s wishes, some administrators still argued it was valid, citing the “code of conduct” recently imposed by Wikipedia’s owners.
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger published a blog post last week analyzing the site’s left-wing bias. Examining articles about Donald Trump’s impeachments, the Black Lives Matter protests and riots, Joe Biden’s scandals, and the 2020 election, Sanger argued Wikipedia’s coverage is so extremely left-wing that it constitutes propaganda. He partly blamed an ongoing purge of conservative news sources on Wikipedia which includes Breitbart News. Sanger warned these developments made Wikipedia “a kind of thought police” and “an opponent of vigorous democracy.”
Recent allegations by former staff at the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, accusing management of bullying and other offenses including anti-union retaliation, have prompted other former staff to come forward. Aside from echoing claims about mistreatment of staff, one former staffer alleged departing employees often are pushed to sign non-disclosure agreements and questioned the practice in light of the allegations. She further alleged employees would sometimes be overworked and fired for then failing to perform.
A former staffer at the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, recently published a statement accusing high-level Foundation managers of workplace bullying based on his autism. Earlier this month, other former staff came forward with similar allegations of mistreatment by Foundation management. Some alleged they were subject to retaliation after complaining of the treatment with one suggesting it was tied to his union organizing activities.
Twitter launched its Birdwatch feature earlier this year with media noting the similarities between the crowd-sourced fact-checking process and the open editing model of Wikipedia, a comparison Twitter touted in early demos. However, much like Wikipedia, the Birdwatch platform often serves as a way for users to push their political agenda. Both right and left have taken advantage, though Twitter promises tighter restrictions, which the platform’s history of bias suggests will tilt it towards the left.
Wikipedia celebrated its 20th anniversary on January 15, following a year of considerable controversy for the online encyclopedia. The site’s increasing leftward bias became more apparent in the preceding year with Wikipedia’s owners imposing a “code of conduct” advancing left-wing identity politics, editors actively pushing a Black Lives Matter agenda, disputes regarding its medical coverage, an ongoing purge of conservative media, and aiding the 2020 Presidential campaign of Joe Biden. Affiliated sites in other languages also saw controversy over widespread errors.
Big Tech has heavily relied on content from Wikipedia in recent years, particularly in the wake of concerns about “fake news” online. Last week, the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, announced that it is launching Wikimedia Enterprise, a commercial service catering to major corporate clients. It aims to provide the service exclusively to corporations already using site content under its free license, specifically providing easier and more reliable access than under the current free system.
The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, announced last week that its Board of Trustees has approved a new “code of conduct” for the site and its affiliated sites. Plans for a code of conduct had been announced last year and an early draft pushing left-wing identity politics submitted for public comment a few months later. Several clarifying changes were made following the comment period, with final changes after approval broadening the scope of restrictions on “intimidating” content.
A study published Tuesday in the Journal of Management Information Systems examined the gender bias of Wikipedia articles. Comparing Wikipedia’s treatment of 50 female Fortune 1000 CEOs to similar groups of male CEOs, the study found the men were 22 percent less likely to have articles on the site than female executives, and the women had generally higher-quality articles as well. The researchers concluded this demonstrates activist editors overcorrecting for the site’s gender bias, leading to a bias towards women and suggested similar overcorrection could arise in other groups.
Leading up to the 2020 Presidential election, Wikipedia editors worked tirelessly to swing articles towards Democratic nominee Joe Biden. This started with slanting articles on President Donald Trump’s impeachment where allegations against Biden figured strongly. It continued with editors pushing the Black Lives Matter agenda on which Biden sought to capitalize and sanitizing pages of his vice-presidential prospects, including Kamala Harris. Finally, editors sought to suppress revelations about Biden family corruption, aided by well-timed restrictions on conservative media.
Since Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 presidential election victory, Wikipedia editors have been gradually purging conservative media from the site claiming to fight “fake news” and leading to the recent suppression of the New York Post’s Biden corruption revelations. The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the site, has leaned into these efforts to tout Wikipedia’s reliability, which has been echoed by mainstream media. This messaging followed a strategy recommended to the Wikimedia Foundation in 2016 by Minassian Media, a firm run by the Clinton Foundation’s Head of Communications.
Silicon Valley has repeatedly proclaimed that Wikipedia is the best way to deal with “fake news” on their platforms. Co-founder Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation that owns the site have touted its sourcing policies in agreement and been amplified by establishment media. Yet just as Big Tech suppressed prominent conservative media following President Donald Trump’s election, most recently censoring New York Post revelations regarding alleged Biden family corruption, Wikipedia’s community of editors has done the same by slowly purging conservative outlets from use as sources.
In a piece for British magazine the Critic, American academics analyzed evidence of left-wing bias on Wikipedia. Noting research into Wikipedia’s left-wing bias and its increasing bans of conservative media, the authors point to a greater sign of bias: the enforcement of site policies on major political topics by administrators with special privileges on the site. They find in their analysis that editors favoring right-leaning views were six times more likely to be sanctioned than those favoring left-leaning views.
The World Health Organization and the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, announced a collaboration last week responding to “misinformation” on the coronavirus pandemic. As part of the collaboration, the W.H.O. has released several “fact-check” graphics on a free license so they can be used on Wikipedia and other sites owned by the Foundation. The partnership prompted criticism from some Wikipedia editors due to the W.H.O.’s mishandling of the pandemic in its early stages in China.
In a decision last month by Wikipedia’s community, statements in “userboxes” on editor profile pages were no longer allowed if they expressed or implied opposition to gay marriage. Breitbart’s coverage of the decision prompted Christian media and organizations, as well as family groups, to condemn Wikipedia for censoring the views of traditional marriage supporters.
Wikipedia users are no longer allowed to include “userboxes” on their profile page that express opposition to gay marriage following a discussion where predominantly left-wing editors argued such a stance was “discriminatory” and against site policy. Most userboxes pre-dated a U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage and were used by hundreds of editors. This included one expressing a personal view favoring traditional marriage, but advocating for states to decide.
An audit of the Wikipedia-affiliated dictionary Wiktionary for the Malagasy language, the national language of Madagascar, found the site to be littered with errors. The errors were attributed to bots mostly programmed by the site’s sole active administrator, which mass-produced almost all six million entries included on the Malagasy Wiktionary. Noting the problems were too comprehensive to be resolved manually, the audit recommended deleting most entries on the site.
Having previously pledged to impose a “code of conduct” on all sites owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, staff have finally published a draft version of the document for review by contributors to Foundation-owned sites. Numerous provisions, including on “preferred pronoun” usage, immediately raised concerns among users about their implications for free speech with some harassment provisions also seen as potentially undermining efforts to rein in bad editing.
Members of a Reddit group for discussing Scotland found many articles on the Scots-language Wikipedia, purporting to be written in the language, were really written in a broken English imitation. Further examination of the articles revealed they were all edited or authored primarily by a single user who is one of Scots Wikipedia’s few administrators, users with special privileges on the site. The administrator is an American teenager not fluent in the language.
Since the death of George Floyd in police custody in late May, Wikipedia has been subject to a wide-ranging campaign by left-wing editors favorable to the Black Lives Matter movement with encouragement from the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the site. Articles have been regularly stripped of material detrimental to the movement and the site’s front page used as a platform for messages favorable to their cause and harmful to President Donald Trump.
Wikipedia editors have censored the page about the police-involved shooting of Rayshard Brooks by removing any mention of Brooks’ violent criminal history, despite him violently resisting arrest which precipitated police use of force. Criticism of District Attorney Paul Howard’s decision to charge officer Garrett Rolfe with felony murder has also been removed.
Last month Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, often likened to a Supreme Court, sanctioned a member of the Board of Trustees for the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the site. The board member, Dr. James Heilman, was barred from edits related to drug pricing in medical articles following disputes with other Wikipedia editors about the propriety of such edits. Heilman, an ER doctor, argued for the inclusion of drug prices in articles and accused the American drug industry of seeking to conceal such details.
Throughout June, Wikipedia activists have been conducting an “edit-a-thon” started by a newly-established Black Lives Matter group on the site, creating large amounts of content on “racial justice” issues. Among their efforts, editors have got numerous articles on racism or alleged police brutality to appear on the front page with several articles having already been featured, including one smearing President Donald Trump and one promoting a book pushing “white guilt” on readers.
The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, last Wednesday joined the chorus of companies organizations supporting the Black Lives Matter movement following the police-involved death of George Floyd. In its announcement, the Foundation stated there was “no neutral stance” on racial justice. They further committed to making Wikipedia and other Foundation-owned sites more “inclusive” through measures such as a “universal code of conduct” the Foundation Board recently demanded.
The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, recently announced that it will impose a “universal code of conduct” on the site and others owned by the Foundation to make them “safe spaces” and improve the “diversity” of the community. The move comes a year after the Foundation took the unprecedented step of banning a veteran administrator, breaching the traditionally self-governing nature of Wikipedia’s community and sparking a revolt that ultimately saw the ban overturned.
Five years ago Wikipedia got sucked into the controversy over GamerGate, the anti-corruption movement in gaming. The narrative found on Wikipedia, like many others about GamerGate, is a lie. Wikipedia’s treatment of GamerGate foreshadows the site’s treatment of many political issues during the Donald Trump presidency.
Numerous high-profile pages on Wikidata, a data site affiliated with Wikipedia, contained long-standing defamatory vandalism according to criticism site Wikipediocracy. This included First Lady Melania Trump, who was labeled a “former sex worker and porn star” on Wikidata for more than a week. Many Wikipedia-affiliated sites use Wikidata’s information, so the description consequently appeared at her page on Simple Wikipedia, whose target audience expressly includes children, and remained for over a week.
In June, the Foundation that owns Wikipedia banned “Fram” who was one of the site’s veteran administrators, prompting an editor revolt with administrators resigning en masse and some using their advanced privileges to override the Foundation’s actions. The Foundation eventually backed down and allowed Wikipedia’s community-elected Arbitration Committee to review the ban, which they lifted, giving the revolt a notable victory — but Fram’s adminstrator privileges were not restored.
After the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, took the unprecedented action of banning a veteran administrator from the site for a year, the site’s editing community revolted with mass resignations and repeated efforts to overturn Wikimedia’s actions. The Foundation, at the urging of its board, has relented by referring the ban back to the Wikipedia community-elected Arbitration Committee for review.
Google’s Jigsaw research division and the Wikimedia Foundation collaborated on an automated “harassment detection” tool called Detox to help identify hostile comments on Wikipedia. Users recently found the tool would rate comments directed at women as more hostile than the same comments directed at men. Foundation staff shut down the tool after it was also found to treat people identifying themselves as gay to be hostile.
In an unprecedented move mid-June, the foundation that owns Wikipedia banned one of the site’s long-time administrators for one year over unspecified complaints of harassment. Many of the site’s most influential users accused the Wikimedia Foundation of undermining the editorial independence of the traditionally self-regulating online encyclopedia and called for the ban to be lifted, including by attempting to remove the ban themselves.
Facebook, NBC, and Axios all reportedly paid for flattering Wikipedia pages — managing to get negative sections removed, and positive sections added in. Google currently prioritizes information from Wikipedia at the top of search results.
Google is donating over $3 million to Wikipedia parent company Wikimedia as part of a new partnership between the two companies, despite several controversies in 2018 surrounding misinformation in Google search results taken from Wikipedia.
Wired wants to replace Zuck with the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which funds the hilariously biased Wikipedia.
