Who Controls Wikipedia? Who Sponsors Wikipedia? ( George Soros )

Price System analysis from: Technocracy technate information site ^ | November 2009

[DaveTesla]

Yea...
Buried in the three pages of praise.
calligraphy, Literary figure, blah blah blah

[Star Traveler]

I went there to check that out, as you say... and I found it in the first three paragraphs of that article on him... so it didn't look to be "buried" to me... but quite plain to see...

In addition the entire article is organized into grouping and there's a table of contents and you can to straight to the area of information (about him) that you want, very quickly...

Here's how it's organized...

 1 Early life
 2 Political ideas
 3 War
 4 Leadership of China
   4.1 Great Leap Forward
   4.2 Cultural Revolution
 5 Death: Mao's final week & days
 6 Cult of Mao
   6.1 Popular culture
 7 Legacy
 8 Genealogy
 9 Personal life
10 Writings and calligraphy
   10.1 Literary figure
11 See also
12 References
13 Further reading
14 Annotated writings
15 External links

Sorry, but I don't see the problem there... :-)

Here's the link for anyone to check it out for themselves and see if there is a problem there...

Mao Zedong

[WhistlingPastTheGraveyard]

I don't need an extra time to fiddle around. When I search for something, the Wiki results show up with everything else. I ignore them. Wikipedia is not a credible website, it's a propaganda machine. I find better information elsewhere and I do it quickly.

if you want it quick, fast and with as little problem as possible, I'll guarantee you ... that's the place to go...

I'm sorry you don't like it, but "them's the facts"

Not a fact, an opinion. Wikipedia confuses the two as well. Although they do so with malicious intent.

[zeugma]

It works great for ordinary stuff that is not part of a political debate... LOL...

That's really the key. You have to know what to look for there, and what is going to politically slanted. If you're looking up stuff on fluid dynamics, it's a great resource. If you want straight dope on a topic of political relevance, not so much.

[WhistlingPastTheGraveyard]

Easily linkable? Anything you can find, you can link. A story at bob.com is no easier to link than a graph at clamont.edu/graph?look/sunspots.jpg would be.

If you made good use of something on Wiki, fine. That doesn't mean its usefulness outweighs the overall damage it has done to facts, history and truth. It is a propaganda outlet dominated by people who want to radically transform our existence. That's not something I'm willing to overlook in a source, regardless of how convenient it may be to click on that first link at the top of my Bing search.

There's a reason Soros supports it. Because his vast minions can manipulate it. And manipulate it they do.

BTW, I found a nice animated graph covering 400 years of sunspot activity in under a minute:

[Star Traveler]

You were saying ...

Wikipedia is not a credible website, it's a propaganda machine.

So, how does that apply to some of the things that I mentioned regarding Wikipedia. I'll go over them again (and there were some on another thread, too...).

I looked up ...

• USNS Glomar Explorer (T-AG-193)

• Project Azorian

• Golf class submarine

• Soviet submarine K-129 (1960)

• Howard Hughes

• Maunder Minimum

• Dalton Minimum

• 24 TV Series

• Jack Bauer

• Kiefer Sutherland

• 24 (season 8)

• Mao Zedong

• Dallas

• Antlers, OK

• Portland, Oregon

• Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

Now, if you could look at those items, which I was just looking up in the last two hours (I'm not going back in the last 24 hours... LOL...) -- can you tell me where the problems are with those items... ?

[Star Traveler]

You were saying ...

Easily linkable? Anything you can find, you can link. A story at bob.com is no easier to link than a graph at clamont.edu/graph?look/sunspots.jpg would be.

I'm sorry, but that is not necessarily true. There are sites which have algorithms to block the posting of hot linked items, and they do so on purpose to prevent from happening the very thing that people do.

Others have "time sensitive links" for stuff you're looking at and the link works for a while, but it's killed in a short period of time. So you actually can link for a limited amount of time, but then it disappears after a short while. That's another mechanism that is used on some websites to prevent hot-linking.

You may not have run across these mechanisms but I have and that's what I meant by easily linkable...

---

BTW, I found a nice animated graph covering 400 years of sunspot activity in under a minute:

Yes, and that's nice. It would be okay (at least for me, anyway) as an additional graph but I wouldn't use it as the primary graph.

You saw the graph I included... and that (to me) represents the best graph I've seen for showing the entire graph of the Maunder Minimum, the Dalton Minimum and showing sunspot activity to the present -- and this fits into the issue of "Anthropogenic Global Warming" so I use it a lot.

I haven't found a better graph to date for doing this. And the entire comparison at once is preferable, from my standpoint (of how I look at it).

And I get information that is useful, from Wikipedia, that is useful in the Anthropogenic Global Warming debate and that's even in spite of the fact that some have pointed out the bias on some articles on Wikipedia, in favor of Anthropogenic Global Warming.

[dsc]

“can you tell me where the problems are with those items...”

I’ll tell you two things wrong with the article on Mao after just a glance.

Nowhere in the opening paragraphs do the words “mass murderer” or “child molester” appear, and those are the first two things anyone should learn about that POS.

[1010RD]

Actually, Wikipedia has been lurching left more and more. I noticed several pieces where criticisms or pertinent facts just disappear.

It seemed like a good idea, until the Controllers took over.

Just like the MSM.

[Star Traveler]

You were saying ...

Nowhere in the opening paragraphs do the words “mass murderer” or “child molester” appear, and those are the first two things anyone should learn about that POS.

Someone mentioned that earlier (regarding killing millions), and it was reported in the third paragraph. I checked it and it is there. You can see the comments, up above, on that one. I don't know about child molester, because I didn't look for that. I'll have to go back and search it. But, it shouldn't be surprising, as any dictator is usually quite decadent, too.

But, for comparison's sake, what sources are listed with that information. I mean, comparable with Wikipedia -- like Encyclopedia Britannica for instance, or Funk and Wagnalls (maybe). Do you have a reference in those cases (or another encyclopedia)? I haven't looked in Conservapedia... does it have Mao listed with that... then?

As I said, I would like to compare other sources and see what they say in regards to what Wikipedia says on it... like for like...

I'll look up on Conservapedia and get back to you on Mao as to what they say...

And also, what about the rest of the articles that I just listed... or is Mao the only problem one there, and in those two instances you mentioned?

[Star Traveler]

I just went over to the conservative counterpart to Wikipedia -- Conservapedia -- and looked up Mao. And I found nothing there that mentions being a child molester. I did a search on those two words and nothing came back.

In addition, I looked up the information on being a mass murderer and all I find is it's not even mentioned until far down in the article. You can see how far down it is, from this list of "Table of Contents" of the article. It's under #5...

1 Soviet national liberation movement
2 Subversion
3 Three Years of Disasters
4 Cultural Revolution
5 Mass murder
6 Little Red Book
7 Legacy
8 Further reading
9 References

[dsc]

Are you rebutting my assertion that there’s something wrong with Wikipedia by pointing out the shortcomings of a different site?

It is indeed a disgrace that the entire world has allowed the commies in the State Department to bury the information on Mao’s repellent sexual habits.

[dsc]

“Someone mentioned that earlier (regarding killing millions), and it was reported in the third paragraph. I checked it and it is there.”

No, it isn’t. It says, “Mao’s policies and political purges from 1949 to 1975 are widely believed to have caused the deaths of between 50 to 70 million people.”

What a bunch of mealy-mouthed crap. He was an evil, murdering psychopath. It wasn’t that “his policies caused” those deaths, it was that *he* killed those people.

And to say that it is “widely believed” is to invite the sort of numbnuts that becomes a leftist to assume that the “conventional wisdom” must be wrong.

This entire article is slanted at about 60 degrees off level, and the only honest thing in it is his name.

[WhistlingPastTheGraveyard]

What a bunch of mealy-mouthed crap. He was an evil, murdering psychopath. It wasn’t that “his policies caused” those deaths, it was that *he* killed those people.

Bingo.

The whitewash isn't even subtle. How anyone can defend that garbage site is beyond me. It's existence is an affront to truth.

[Eye of Unk]

Better yet..

Who needs Wikipedia?

I won’t use it for any reference for absolute factual truths anymore.

[Star Traveler]

You were saying ...

What a bunch of mealy-mouthed crap. He was an evil, murdering psychopath. It wasn’t that “his policies caused” those deaths, it was that *he* killed those people.

I went to Conservapedia to see what they said, and that's the conservative counterpart to Wikipedia. It's been touted here several times.

---

Conservapedia on Mao

As the leader of China, Mao initiated the Great Leap Forward, an economic plan intended to rapidly industrialize China's then largely rural economy. In the end it proved a ruinous failure, preventing the peasants from producing needed food and causing massive famines; up to 38 million starved to death or were killed for opposing the economic plan.

...

Overall, historians believe that around 43 million people died under Mao's rule, due mostly to starvation from disastrous socialist economic policies such as the "Great Leap Forward" but now known in China as The Three Years of Disaters. This is 7 times the common figure given for the Holocaust but it is much less known.

...

In their book Mao: The Unknown Story, authors Jung Chang and Jon Halliday state that in his first five years of power, 700,000 were claimed by Mao to be dead, but another 700,000 died in local excesses and 700,000 committed suicide out of fear of Mao. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao deliberately killed peasants by shipping food to the USSR and Eastern Europe in exchange for aid in building arms plants. As well, Mao's plans for peasants to make steel and build canals meant that in 1959-60 nobody grew any food. Thus, the worst famine in history occurred. Huge numbers were killed by puppets of Mao in the Cultural Revolution, which actually was launched to get rid of Mao's rivals in the Chinese Communist Party.

---

And here is Wikipedia on Mao

Mao's policies and political purges from 1949 to 1975 are widely believed to have caused the deaths of between 50 to 70 million people.

...

Under the direction of Mao, it is reported that horrible methods of torture took place[15] and given names such as sitting in a sedan chair, airplane ride, toad-drinking water, and monkey pulling reins."[15] The wives of several suspects had their breasts cut open and their genitals burned.[15] It has been estimated that 'tens of thousands' of suspected enemies,[16] perhaps as many as 186,000,[17] were killed during this purge. Critics accuse Mao's authority in Jiangxi of being secured and reassured through the revolutionary terrorism, or red terrorism.[18]

...

In 1948, the People’s Liberation Army starved out the Kuomintang forces occupying the city of Changchun. At least 160,000 civilians are believed to have perished during the siege, which lasted from June until October. PLA lieutenant colonel Zhang Zhenglu, who documented the siege in his book White Snow, Red Blood, compared it to Hiroshima: “The casualties were about the same. Hiroshima took nine seconds; Changchun took five months.”[23]

...

Along with Land reform, during which significant numbers of landlords were beaten to death at mass meetings organized by the CPC as land was taken from them and given to poorer peasants,[26] there was also the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries,[27] which involved public executions targeting mainly former Kuomintang officials, businessmen accused of "disturbing" the market, former employees of Western companies and intellectuals whose loyalty was suspect.[28] The U.S. State department in 1976 estimated that there may have been a million killed in the land reform, 800,000 killed in the counterrevolutionary campaign.[29]

Mao himself claimed that a total of 700,000 people were executed during the years 1949–53.[30] However, because there was a policy to select "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution",[31] the number of deaths range between 2 million[31][32] and 5 million.[33][34] In addition, at least 1.5 million people,[35] perhaps as many as 4 to 6 million,[36] were sent to "reform through labour" camps where many perished.[36] Mao played a personal role in organizing the mass repressions and established a system of execution quotas,[37] which were often exceeded.[27] Nevertheless he defended these killings as necessary for the securing of power.[38]

Starting in 1951, Mao initiated two successive movements in an effort to rid urban areas of corruption by targeting wealthy capitalists and political opponents, known as the three-anti/five-anti campaigns. A climate of raw terror developed as workers denounced their bosses, wives turned on their husbands, and children informed on their parents; the victims often being humiliated at struggle sessions, a method designed to intimidate and terrify people to the maximum. Mao insisted that minor offenders be criticized and reformed or sent to labor camps, "while the worst among them should be shot." These campaigns took several hundred thousand additional lives, the vast majority via suicide.[39] In Shanghai, people jumping to their deaths became so commonplace that residents avoided walking on the pavement near skyscrapers for fear that suicides might land on them.[40] Some biographers have pointed out that driving those perceived as enemies to suicide was a common tactic during the Mao-era. For example, in his biography of Mao, Philip Short notes that in the Yan'an Rectification Movement, Mao gave explicit instructions that "no cadre is to be killed," but in practice allowed security chief Kang Sheng to drive opponents to suicide and that "this pattern was repeated throughout his leadership of the People's Republic."[41]

...

Programs pursued during this time include the Hundred Flowers Campaign, in which Mao indicated his supposed willingness to consider different opinions about how China should be governed. Given the freedom to express themselves, liberal and intellectual Chinese began opposing the Communist Party and questioning its leadership. This was initially tolerated and encouraged. After a few months, Mao's government reversed its policy and persecuted those, totalling perhaps 500,000, who criticized, as well as those who were merely alleged to have criticized, the Party in what is called the Anti-Rightist Movement. Authors such as Jung Chang have alleged that the Hundred Flowers Campaign was merely a ruse to root out "dangerous" thinking.[42]

...

There is a great deal of controversy over the number of deaths by starvation during the Great Leap Forward. Until the mid 1980s, when official census figures were finally published by the Chinese Government, little was known about the scale of the disaster in the Chinese countryside, as the handful of Western observers allowed access during this time had been restricted to model villages where they were deceived into believing that Great Leap Forward had been a great success.

---

And there is a lot more mixed in with a phrase or a sentence here and there...

SO... in comparing the two, between Wikipedia and Conservapedia... I would say that Wikipedia presents a much more gruesome picture of Mao than does Conservapedia by a long shot.

And it looks fairly accurate to me...

In addition, I would say that you could go to any encyclopedic entry (either a Encyclopedia Brittanica or any other encyclopedia that you could name), and you won't be coming up with any more than this.

Of course, there are books written by authors, but Conservapedia and Wikipedia are not books, but are encyclopedias, referencing other sources like books and articles and so on.

And I don't find a problem with the Mao article and neither do I find a problem with those entries I gave you up above. And since you don't fine any problems either fromt those entries I included to you, I'll assume that your problems are solely with it not being a "book" and it doesn't include enough information... LOL...

I think if you're looking for a complete history in book form..., you need to go to Amazon.com. You're just in the wrong place. This is an encyclopedia on the net, not a book... :-)

[Star Traveler]

You were saying ...

I won’t use it for any reference for absolute factual truths anymore.

I don't find a problem with Wikipedia in excess of 99% of all the material written there.

I do know of a few things here and there which are slanted, and that's why I've said I don't find a problem in over 99% of the information presented in Wikipedia. The other 1% is the information that I would have a problem with.

And for me, that's excellent, because I've found that when I get books at the library, or articles on the net, or read a local newspaper, I'm liable to find more than 1% of the stuff that I don't think is true.

I can't complain at all about Wikipedia in that regard.

I use it all the time and I even gave a list of links that I had checked on information in the last two hours (before the post) in which I asked if anyone found any problems with them. There was only one link out of all those links I gave in which anyone found a problem, and I posted what showed that Wikipedia was "more informative" on the article than was the conservative counterpart to Wikipedia, which is Conservapedia.

So, I go to Wikipedia all the time and I would easily advise anyone else to do so, too.

And I have always said that there is no source of information that is reliable, whether it's a named conservative or a conservtive website (even here, the information presented by FReepers is not reliable; there is a lot of disagreement and controversy almost over ever piece of information presented here...).

And since there is no source of information that is reliable, even posts here on Free Republic... that means that you cannot totally trust any source of information and you must always do your own checking on it... :-)

[Star Traveler]

You were saying ...

The whitewash isn't even subtle. How anyone can defend that garbage site is beyond me. It's existence is an affront to truth.

In Post #36, I listed the information on Wikipedia as compared to a conserative site, doing the exact same thing... i.e., presenting "encyclopedic information" on the net. That's Conservapedia.

And I don't find the "whitewash" that you're talking about. When I list the two, one right under the other, on that post, I find that Wikipedia is far more brutal and direct about Mao than Conservapedia ever is, and Conservapedia is touted (by some here) as a better conservative alternative to Wikipedia.

But, from what I can see, Conservapedia is not.

They may be for perhaps 1% of the information that I find from time to time over at Wikipedia that I don't think is true or presents that different "slant"... and so, I may reference Conservapedia for that 1% of information that I search out.., while I'll reference Wikipedia for the other 99% of the information that I'm looking for... LOL...

[Star Traveler]

You were saying ...

Are you rebutting my assertion that there’s something wrong with Wikipedia by pointing out the shortcomings of a different site?

Yes, I am... I'm using the conservative counterpart to Wikipedia, which is "Conservapedia" to show you a comparison between the conservative version of the information and the so-called (as you assert) liberal version of the information -- using Mao as that example (since it has been discussed here already).

But, please... feel free to give me another encyclopedic source of information on the net that will present more complete information than either Wikipedia or Conservapedia. I would like to have that as a reference, too... :-) [and I do have both of those sites listed on my bookmarks here...]

And in that comparison of your asserted "liberal presentation" (which you say is Wikipedia), I find that presentation to be much more complete and gruesome about Mao as a dictator and killing millions of people than I find in Conservapedia, which is supposed to be the "conservative version".

WELL... the fact of the matter is that whether you want to label Wikipedia liberal or not -- they do present more complete information on this article, they reference from sources that are listed, they are not holding back on Mao in his gruesome details and in just about every category of Mao, I see more complete information about him in Wikipedia.

Sorry..., but I'm going to take more complete information and those references that they cite (which enables me to check out sources...).

I would rather be working with more complete information than a paltry little bit that I found over at Conservapedia.

So, when I want a quick reference to something and some quick details and need encyclopedic information on the net... I do know where to go as the first "entry point" for getting that information -- and that's at Wikipedia. And then, from that point, I can easily research out any more detailed information that I need from various sources that I may find, after that -- if I need to even do that at all.

And in most case, I never even need to do that, because I'm only looking for a little piece of information here or there, and that's it.

[WhistlingPastTheGraveyard]

Conservapedia on Mao's famine:

During the Great Leap Forward, Mao deliberately killed peasants by shipping food to the USSR and Eastern Europe in exchange for aid in building arms plants. As well, Mao's plans for peasants to make steel and build canals meant that in 1959-60 nobody grew any food. Thus, the worst famine in history occurred.

Wikipedia on Mao's famine:

The extent of Mao's knowledge as to the severity of the situation has been disputed. According to some, most notably Dr. Li Zhisui, Mao was not aware of anything more than a mild food and general supply shortage until late 1959.

Nowhere in their "Great Leap Forward" does Wiki acknowledge that the famine was mass-murder engineered by a delusional, psychotic leader. Instead, it presents Mao's "side of the story" and leaves open the possibility that the famine was aided by Mao's opponents hoarding of grain, adding:

Whatever the case, the Great Leap Forward led to millions of deaths in China.

That's as blatant a re-write of history as you're going to find. It's not even particularly skillful.

One of the millions of reason Wikipedia is not only not credible... it's poison.