User beware: Wikipedia has fallen for groupthink

The internet started in the 1990s as a counterpoint to mainstream, establishment views. But increasingly it has come under the thumb of powerful corporations and governments.

“Wikipedia has simply become crib notes for the establishment, at least for any topic remotely political,” writes Adam Creighton.

I was surprised to recently find out that I am – apparently – an “arch neoliberal”, and a purveyor of “false comparisons” who has been “flatly contradicted” by scientific research.

This is according to Wikipedia, the supposedly neutral, publicly available encyclopaedia that’s become one of the most influential websites in the world. The short entry about me cites only Crikey’s Guy Rundle and an obscure Guardian journalist, Jason Wilson, who lives in Oregon, two writers unlikely to be well disposed to News Corp.

The idea I am “neoliberal”, which might be defined as being pro big business and tax cuts for the wealthy, coupled with an aggressive US foreign policy, is laughable.

For years I’ve been writing columns advocating for land and inheritance taxes, a higher top marginal tax rate for very high incomes, tougher bank and pharmaceutical regulation, scrapping negative gearing and a universal age pension, and I even advocated against privatisation of energy markets and US meddling in other countries.

None of these is remotely a “neoliberal” position. But such bias is sadly just one example of a depressing trend. Wikipedia has simply become crib notes for the establishment, at least for any topic remotely political. And even Larry Sanger, one of the two co-founders of Wikipedia in 2001, who coined the name, agrees, saying his creation had “become an establishment mouthpiece”.

“It was supposed to be neutral … you shouldn’t be able to tell whether an article was written by Democrat or Republican … But unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way,” he told journalist Glen Greenwald in an interview on Rumble last week.

As Greenwald, one of the best journalists around, said: “Wikipedia arguably does more to shape people’s reputations and the perception of political controversies than almost any other single site and has degraded into blunt political propaganda.”

Google – which has become a powerful establishment censor – has donated millions of dollars to the Wikimedia Foundation (which runs Wikipedia) at the same time as boosting the site’s influence via its dominant search engine. This has served to only increase Wikipedia’s grip on the hotly contested information universe.

Joe Biden and son Hunter Biden

A quick look at Wikipedia’s entries on some of the biggest issues and prominent people of our day reveal extraordinary levels of political bias. President Joe Biden’s entry, for instance, says “no evidence was produced of any wrongdoing by the Bidens” in relation to his son Hunter’s various lucrative foreign business dealings, despite mounting evidence (including testimony under oath as well as bank and FBI records) that point to systematic malfeasance over years.

Indeed, a separate Wikipedia entry – called the Biden-Ukraine Conspiracy Theory – condemns the evidence as a “series of false allegations”. Not just allegations, mind you, but “false” allegations – so much for readers being allowed to make up their own mind.

Interestingly, I couldn’t find an entry for the Russia Collusion Hoax, the baseless idea Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to swing the 2016 election, which animated much of America’s mainstream media reporting for at least four years. It was perhaps the most politically damaging hoax in US history for an incumbent president.

The entry on Covid Lab Leak Theory spends the first paragraph telling readers it’s wrong, claiming “most scientists believe the virus spilt into human populations through natural zoonosis” and “there is no evidence SARS-CoV-2 existed in any laboratory prior to the pandemic”. Strikingly, it also ignores the batch of emails and Slack messages unearthed last month by a House of Representatives committee that showed the very group of scientists that sought to rubbish the idea of a lab leak in early 2020 privately believed SARS-Cov2 was engineered.

The entry on Covid lockdowns laughably claims “research and case studies have shown that lockdowns were generally effective at reducing the spread of Covid-19”. It might be true that some, tendentious, research has, but vastly more has shown the opposite, concluding they were among the worst policy errors in history, a fact that isn’t even mentioned.

Wikipedia classifies news outlets according to their trustworthiness. The New York Times, which denied for over a year that Hunter Biden’s laptop was genuine, is given the top score, while the New York Post, which got the story right from the start, is given an orange exclamation mark, alongside the disclaimer “there is no consensus regarding its reliability”.

Fox News, along with CNN, is the best daytime source of news in the US, but is described as only “reliable for news coverage on topics other than politics and science”. Yet MSNBC, whose top host, Rachel Maddow, throughout 2021 continually told Americans the Covid-19 vaccine stopped transmission, gets the top score for reliability.

Epidemic control workers wear PPE to prevent the spread of Covid-19 in Beijing, China.

Smaller news sites, such as my friend Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone, get the lowest rating even though he has never had to retract a story he commissioned. Wikipedia’s massive influence has spawned an industry of paid propagandists, hired to massage personal and corporate reputations. For $US600 you can have your own flattering page. Perhaps I should avail myself of this service!

A study by Purdue University in 2012 found “the top 1 per cent of writers/editors on Wikipedia create about 80 per cent of the content”. Wikipedia itself says a few thousand users make more than 100 edits a month, suggesting the platform is not as decentralised and democratic as some might believe. I’m guessing a high share of these super editors are public servants or academics with a political axe to grind and a lot of time on their hands.

Wikipedia is unquestionably useful, especially for time-pressed journalists seeking to check basic facts. But users should be highly sceptical of the site’s entries that touch on politics or current events, where control of information is critical to supporting immediate political outcomes.

The internet started in the 1990s as a counterpoint to mainstream, establishment views. But increasingly it, along with most of the tech giants, has come under the thumb of powerful corporations and governments.