Posted on 05/20/2020 5:16:11 PM PDT by DeweyCA
Larry Sanger, the founder of Wikipedia says that the project has abandoned neutrality and is now “badly biased.” Sanger is no longer involved with Wikipedia, and his co-founder, Jimmy Wales, is a far-left activist.
In a blog post on Thursday, Sanger wrote a scathing critique of the bias at his former website.
“Wikipedia’s ‘NPOV’ is dead,” Sanger began, referring to the site’s neutral point of view policy.
He specifically pointed to the entries for former President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump as examples.
“The Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal, and Fast and Furious, to say nothing of Solyndra or the Hillary Clinton email server scandal—or, of course, the developing ‘Obamagate’ story in which Obama was personally involved in surveilling Donald Trump,” Sanger explained. “A fair article about a major political figure certainly must include the bad with the good. The only scandals that I could find that were mentioned were a few that the left finds at least a little scandalous, such as Snowden’s revelations about NSA activities under Obama. In short, the article is almost a total whitewash.”
The founder points out that the entry for President Trump, on the other hand, is “unrelentingly negative.”
“Meanwhile, as you can imagine, the idea that the Donald Trump article is neutral is a joke. Just for example, there are 5,224 none-too-flattering words in the ‘Presidency’ section. By contrast, the following ‘Public Profile’ (which the Obama article entirely lacks), ‘Investigations,’ and ‘Impeachment’ sections are unrelentingly negative, and together add up to some 4,545 words—in other words, the controversy sections are almost as long as the sections about his presidency,” Sanger explains. “Common words in the article are ‘false’ and ‘falsely’ (46 instances): Wikipedia frequently asserts, in its own voice, that many of Trump’s statements are ‘false.’ Well, perhaps they are. But even if they are, it is not exactly neutral for an encyclopedia article to say so, especially without attribution. You might approve of Wikipedia describing Trump’s incorrect statements as ‘false,’ very well; but then you must admit that you no longer support a policy of neutrality on Wikipedia.”
Sanger explains that articles on religious topics show a similar pattern of bias and used the entry on Jesus as a particularly egregious example.
Likewise, scientific articles, he explained, are filled with liberal bias and “unscientific views.” He wrote that “when the Establishment (or maybe just the Establishment left) is unified on a certain view of a scientific controversy, then that is the view that is taken for granted, and often aggressively asserted, by Wikipedia.”
The pages for global warming and the MMR vaccine show particularly strong examples of the bias in this area, he explained.
“It is time for Wikipedia to come clean and admit that it has abandoned NPOV (i.e., neutrality as a policy). At the very least they should admit that that they have redefined the term in a way that makes it utterly incompatible with its original notion of neutrality, which is the ordinary and common one,” Sanger stated.
However, he concluded by acknowledging that “Wikipedians are unlikely to concede any such thing; they live in a fantasy world of their own making. This might finally be having an effect, as Wikipedia’s Alexa ranking has dropped within the last year from five to 12 or 13.”
Sanger has now proposed an entirely new and independent decentralized encyclopedia network called “The Encylosphere.”
In a speech given at TheNextWeb’s Hard Fork Summit, MRC reports, Sanger explained that, “The Encyclosphere would give everyone an equal voice in expressing knowledge (or claims to knowledge), and in rating those expressions of knowledge. There would be no single, central knowledge repository or authority.”
I was reading the entry for Mussolini today.
It said he/fascism was “far-right” but it was
locked down.
If we could only do the same with Google, Facebook, Twitter
And he just now noticed?
I stopped donating about 3+ years ago.
Gee, what happened to most so called free sites, 3 years ago?
“The Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal, and Fast and Furious, to say nothing of Solyndra or the Hillary Clinton email server scandal—or, of course, the developing ‘Obamagate’ story in which Obama was personally involved in surveilling Donald Trump,” Sanger explained. “A fair article about a major political figure certainly must include the bad with the good. The only scandals that I could find that were mentioned were a few that the left finds at least a little scandalous, such as Snowden’s revelations about NSA activities under Obama. In short, the article is almost a total whitewash.”
The founder points out that the entry for President Trump, on the other hand, is “unrelentingly negative.”
“Meanwhile, as you can imagine, the idea that the Donald Trump article is neutral is a joke. Just for example, there are 5,224 none-too-flattering words in the ‘Presidency’ section. By contrast, the following ‘Public Profile’ (which the Obama article entirely lacks), ‘Investigations,’ and ‘Impeachment’ sections are unrelentingly negative, and together add up to some 4,545 words—in other words, the controversy sections are almost as long as the sections about his presidency,” Sanger explains. “Common words in the article are ‘false’ and ‘falsely’ (46 instances): Wikipedia frequently asserts, in its own voice, that many of Trump’s statements are ‘false.’ Well, perhaps they are. But even if they are, it is not exactly neutral for an encyclopedia article to say so, especially without attribution. You might approve of Wikipedia describing Trump’s incorrect statements as ‘false,’ very well; but then you must admit that you no longer support a policy of neutrality on Wikipedia.”
Liberals crap on everything and destroy them. Wiki’s no exception. Literally all of their political entries are horseshit.
I’ve supported Wikipedia in the past. I’ll send my support elsewhere going forward.
True that. You ought to see what they say about FR. Not too kind. Not exactly rabid, it’s not that but it’s back handed enough to notice.
My thoughts exactly. 8>)
I went to the Wikipedia entry for Hillary Clinton right before the 2016 election to check on some detail. Now, I’m not making this up. About half-way down the Wikipedia page, the entry said: “Hillary’s hobby is looking at female behinds. If you have a good picture of a female behind, please send it to her.”
I couldn’t believe my eyes! Some prankster had modified Hillary’s entry, and Wikipedia had not caught it.
Now here’s the sad part. The next day I went back to take a screenshot of that entry, and the modification was gone. Drat!
I have no need of the Wiki definition on FR; having been here almost 20 years I’m well versed in their policies/political leanings.
Yep, that is so true
In liberals’ case, their Midas Touch is 100% manure
It took years for Wikipedia to earn at least a little bit of credibility.
And just like everything else they touch, SJWs will tank that hard.
High school and college students are brainwashed by their teachers. They are liberally biased. And, I suppose putting all Communist teachers against the wall for treason is a no-go...
No thanks!
That sounds like Reddit with its up votes and down votes.
Try an experiment.
Go to the Reddit subforum r/politics.
Say something good--that is demonstrably true--about Donald Trump. You'll have negative votes.
Now say something bad--that is just totally false--and you'll have hundreds of up votes.
The Encyclosphere would devolve the same way.
Bookmark.
I find myself regularly comparing the article on Rationalwiki to the Wikipedia variant. Rationalwiki is far superior.
There is no reason to use Wikipedia as there are plenty of alternatives.... here’s one. https://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page
Scopes looked into the claim that Wiki is biased, and found it false.
And Wiki’s self-examination says that Wiki leans right.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.