Thanks for this piece, Dan. I do think there is one other element that may play an incidental role. Those who write or edit Wikepedia articles come dominantly from the highly educated class, that class skews left, and this will have impacts. Things left-leaning people don't think to question often strike right wing or libertarian readers as biased.
An example, selected at random: In the Wikipedia article on the electoral college one finds:
"Critics object to the inequity that, due to the distribution of electors, individual citizens in states with smaller populations have more voting power than those in larger states."
The idea that the distribution is an inequity is stated as fact. This is not a fact. It depends on one's views of what equity is in the structure of a federal republic.
It is nearly impossible to eliminate biases like this from one's own writing, so an encyclopedia written and edited by left-leaning authors will skew left. That does not detract from the great value.
Finally, my view would be that the current Republican party no longer reflects Ronald Reagan in any way.
I had to read your example twice and think about it carefully before I could conclude, "yeah, he's right." Which at least suggests an alternative hypothesis is plausible: Someone wrote it with the intention of saying critics object to *what they see as* an inequity, which would make it a neutral description of facts. But they left out the phrase that would have tied the judgment to the critics and so no it's ambiguous and can be read to mean the author judges that to be an inequity.
Solution: edit it. Say why. Betcha it stands up.
That said, I'm not dismissing your point. I believe I wrote exactly that about human biases right in that essay! The solution is to allow people with different perspective to come together, share notes, argue and edit. The end result will be something better than any one person could have produced because of that synthesis of perspectives. That is precisely what Wikipedia is. The whole, huge thing is a monument to that very process.
The claim under discussion is not that Wikipedia can't be improved. Anything is possible. The claim is that it hasn't been improved, that it is Wokepedia *as it currently stands.* Paul gave a fairly obvious and plausible reason why that is to be expected, and illustrated it with an example. You didn't respond to his argument. Instead, you claimed it is not Wokepedia because "I betcha it can be changed!"
And on this specific comment, he was NOT alleging "Wikipedia" is "Wokepedia," only giving one instance of something that is not appropriately phrased. I AGREE that it is not appropriately phrased. And that the fix is easy.
Grant, your framing is wrong. Others allege that Wikipedia is biased in a particular way. That is their claim. It is their responsibility to prove it with evidence.
I think you're misunderstanding the point, which was made also in comments on your initial post announcing your collaboration with Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia entries are subject to editorial control, which in the case of subjects with any political aspect results in the editor's political leaning showing through. That's why Wikipedia can't be completely trusted as a source of balanced information on such topics.
It's fairly trustworthy on most topics, but on political/politicized topics it should be viewed with thoughtful skepticism. Wikipedia is certainly useful but should never be regarded as an unimpeachable source and necessarily better than others.
Not only do I agree that Wikipedia "should be viewed with thoughtful skepticism" on political matters, I think it "should be viewed with thoughtful skepticism" on literally everything.
Not because Wikipedia is unusually flawed but because "thoughtful skepticism" should be applied to literally when using any source.
Similarly, I agree that Wikipedia "should never be regarded as an unimpeachable source and necessarily better than others" on political matters. But I think exactly the same applies to all subjects in Wikipedia. As I wrote, it's a human creation, and human creations are flawed. Caveat lector.
So why do you think we disagree? I think it's because you have missed the point: In my essay, I picked apart and dismissed a conservative claim that Wikipedia is "Wokepedia." That claim is not "thoughtful skepticism." That claims is not merely calling for readers to exercise care. It is a sweeping and utterly dismissive claim which is not supported by evidence: THAT is the sole point of my essay. Feel free to agree or disagree with that, but that, and that alone, is the point I made.
Dan, your framing is wrong. Others have given their judgment - their conclusion - that Wikipedia is politically biased in a particular way. The only way they could "prove it with evidence" is by going through all of the articles they have read line by line that informs their judgment, and explain it to you. That's not something anyone can be expected to devote their life to, if they have any ambitions outside of Wikipedia commentary. So instead they give a few representative examples of the bias, and invite you to apply your own judgment when reading other political topics. But you don't want to do the hard work of applying your own judgment to the endless political commentary on Wikipedia. Instead, you dismiss this as mere anecdoodling; you say even if the example were correct, Wikipedia can be changed so it isn't *really* biased in some existential sense; you admit that nobody ever claimed Wikipedia is perfect... This is all utterly lame; it isn't a valuable contribution to the discussion you took up. It is saying you have nothing worthwhile to say on the topic of the (alleged) political bias on Wikipedia.
"Here are some lawyers who behaved badly. Lawyers are scum." See the problem? Yes, you do. Yet here, the numbers are much bigger, so the enormous gap between the evidence and the claim becomes a canyon. Seems like a pretty straightforward objection, but you see no value in it? None? Because people have some "representative examples of bias"? Question, Grant: How do you know they are "representative"? You can't. Unless you produce some broader empirical analysis. Which they haven't done. So, no, they're not "representative"?
But why do I bother corresponding with you, Grant? You're now going to do what you always do -- ignore my argument, repeat yourself, and grandly declare my writing to have no worth. Which is odd. If my writing has no worth, you are wasting your time reading it, and wasting more time writing about it. I urge you to cease doing both.
I practiced law; I know and interacted with many lawyers. I have a low opinion of the profession in general. I was also a university professor; I spent most of my adult life in universities; and I have a low opinion of university professors in general. I left both professions in disgust. I don't feel I need to justify that opinion to you; you can take it or leave it as you please.
Likewise, politicians and political commentators who call it Wokepedia are not academicians; they have no reason to try to prove anything to you with (necessarily incomplete) statistical analyses. They are not in a court of law where they bear the onus of proof. They are campaigning. All you are saying here is that your judgment is different, albeit dolled up with "anecdotes are not data" and "but it can be edited to make it less biased."
Paul and I have given you several general reasons why you should expect a website like Wikipedia to have a left-wing bias. That's not direct evidence of the bias - nothing would satisfy you in that regard - but they are recognizable forms of indirect evidence. You have studiously ignored these arguments. But why do I bother corresponding with you, Dan? You're now going to do what you always do -- ignore my argument, repeat yourself, make a personal attack, and grandly declare my writing to have no worth. Which is odd.
(You are doing this for the subscription money. I'm writing for the benefit of other audience members. That shouldn't be too hard for a bright guy like you to figure out.)
So, basically, some people read some articles they don’t like, so they get to call the whole thing flawed? The people who don’t like an article, can edit or amend that article, can’t they? To claim the entire enterprise is flawed because you found a few articles you don’t agree with, is a not so subtle play for censorship, isn’t it? Don’t fall for it. Ugh.
Paul, another general reason to expect leftist bias on Wikipedia is that leftists are more likely to believe that politics is the most important thing in life, that politics should pervade every aspect of life, so they are more motivated to devote their life to pushing their political narratives. Right wingers, by contrast, are more likely to think that God, family, community, and work are what life is all about, and politics is merely a framework within everyone should be permitted to pursue these things in their own way. As Woody Allen quipped long ago, "The problem with socialism is all the meetings." People with lives to lead can't be bothered with all the meetings, the consensus-building, the process. Wikipedians who write on political topics LIVE for the chance to influence politics.
"Wikipedians who write on political topics LIVE for the chance to influence politics." You say this with such conviction, as if you are stating what you ate for breakfast. But how do you know this? Have you worked with a lot of "Wikipedians who write on political topics"? Know lots of them personally? Chatted with them about their motives over a pint now and then? How?
Yet another reason of general application why we should expect Wikipedia to have a left-wing bias is that right-wingers tend to believe in free speech while left-wingers tend to believe in censorship. Wokesters think that mere exposure to certain ideas does harm to people: words are violence. So even if right-wingers and left-wingers were equally likely to be motivated to contribute political commentary on Wikipedia - which is not admitted but denied - right-wingers would be more likely to let woke comments stay while wokesters would do everything in their power to have "harmful" right-wing ideas suppressed.
This is my conjecture. It is stated with a bit of hyperbole for emphasis. Again, you nit-pick about phraseology while failing to grapple with the substance of the argument.
With respect to a single author using the royal "we" instead of "I", I was trained by one of my PhD advisors to do the same thing. So much time has passed that I cannot remember his explicit reasoning, but I think it was because "I" seems too self-absorbed, as if the author is taking too much credit for research which could not be done without learning from the work and advice of other people.
I figured it must be something like that. A few decades ago, there were newspaper columnists who would never, ever write the word "I." While the underlying sentiment was laudable -- it was to prevent belly-button gazing -- it was, in practice, painfully affected and silly.
I don't know Dan, this is a practice I (we) would like to see resurrected. So many columnists and reporters seem to freely inject themselves into their copy these days. Using "I" gives the reader the automatic impression that what follows is totally subjective, further confirming that objectivity in news reporting is dead.
Maybe you could mold this into an article someday.
Yeah, it had/has a legitimate point (as I alluded). And yes, a lot of modern columnists have treated the subjective pronoun as licence to shove their heads firmly up their belly buttons. I just don't think the royal "we" is a good solution to that. A much better one is an editor giving the columnist a good boot up the ass. (Yes, I'm old school.)
Good morning! Thank you for this article on Wikipedia. Fascinating—I didn’t really know much about how Wikipedia functioned. And hadn’t realized that those in the right-wing camp called it “ Wokepedia”. But then I don’t follow Musk, J.D. Vance and Trump. Guess that makes me “woke” 😂 It’s a joy to read something so reasonable and rational in these days of sensationalism. And your ending, “Reality is so much bigger than politics.” 👏🏻 Well said!
I appreciate the thoughtful postscript and the reflective essay. Since you mentioned my article, I figure it may be worth sharing my own perspective on this in brief.
On almost every apolitical topic, Wikipedia is as reliable as ever. I've met a number of passionate, serious Wikipedia editors, and seen how much passion people put into the project. Several of my friends defend it as one of the treasures of the internet, and I'm not unsympathetic to that view. I think the vast majority of editors, for the vast majority of articles, edit in good faith with the intent to improve the encyclopedia.
That said, the demographic interested in editing Wikipedia is not random. Most of the people who choose to devote their time and attention to editing the encyclopedia, inasmuch as they have strong political opinions, lean liberal to progressive. This isn't unique to Wikipedia--in my essay "The Republican Party is Doomed" (https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-republican-party-is-doomed), I examine how the same phenomenon is occurring across a wide range of "knowledge fields" from journalism to education to law and policy--and so far as I can tell it's not the result of anything sinister, but it is reality.
In most cases, that has minimal impact. It does mean something important for culture war–tinged articles, though: if a motivated culture warrior comes along to "defend" an article, the ambient culture of the website is thoroughly prepared to drive right-wing ones away but is much slower to act against left-wing ones (who broadly share the biases of the rest of the site). I document one case study of that in Reliable Sources, but I could demonstrate similar examples across a wide range of highly politicized topics, where a few editors who have very little interest in creating an encyclopedia and a lot of interest in defending an emotionally charged narrative against their enemies drown every good-faith editor in bad-faith rules-lawyering to defend tendentious and often false narratives. Unfortunately, this is a widespread problem, and it's one unsolvable purely at the editing level: several of these editors (as with the one I write about) are longstanding admins, a number of them actively participate in "one-layer-back" decision-making as with determining which sources will be allowed on the Reliable Sources list or topic-banning other users, and quite frankly their biases are comfortable enough to the median Wikipedia user that it takes a great deal of effort and tact to push against them in a way amiable to the editor population as a whole.
Watching the site for the response to my article, I saw several admins/editors take it seriously and in good faith, while a few tried to intimidate other users into dropping the topic. I really do think the bulk of Wikipedia editors and admins operate in good faith, but the site as a whole has been much too slow to notice and take action against the minority of motivated narrative-pushing editors. The net impact, so far as I can tell, is that the site is highly reliable for non-controversial topics, but cannot be relied on for anything touching on heated political issues. I respect the work people have put into the site, but you severely underestimate how poor its coverage of politicized issues has become as the result of a relatively small number of motivated editors.
Thanks very much for this thoughtful response. I wish I could offer a worthy response now but I can't as I'm swamped with work. I just wanted you to know I appreciate this and hope to respond properly in the near future.
“The net impact, so far as I can tell, is that the site is highly reliable for non-controversial topics, but cannot be relied on for anything touching on heated political issues. I respect the work people have put into the site, but you severely underestimate how poor its coverage of politicized issues has become as the result of a relatively small number of motivated editors.“
Couldn’t agree more.
But keep in mind an ever- increasing number of topics are politicized. It’s not just the culture war stuff, even as that is the most brazen, obvious part. Things related to climate change and fossil fuels face similar, if not as extreme, challenges.
As I have stated before, as a long-standing user of Wikipedia (approx. 20 years) I have seen it evolve and can say with anecdotal authority it is more politically biased that it was. It can and has been weaponized repeatedly over the years for personal and sociopolitical purposes (just ask Jimmy Wales himself about the Rachel Marsden saga and her webpage). Even Larry Sanger says it is compromised, although I suppose current Wikipedians would like to deny he had anything to do with Wikipedia a la Greenpeace and Patrick Moore.
But I reject the neologism Wokepedia, as I find Wikipedia useful still, and agree that probably most editors are apolitical male detailed-oriented obsessive nerds. But things like the Cultural Marxism page are perfect examples of the kinds of politicized editorial changes made (see image at https://mediatricks.org/cultural-marxism-articles-on-wikipedia-2014-vs-2021). I know for fact this change was made and remains as-is, as I used to go to that page before it changed. I am not sure when it was changed. All it takes it a few politically-motivated editors to dominate the more commonly used culture war sections to make it appear the whole site this is now totally compromised. It also really doesn't help that Kathryn Maher types end up being the face of the network, and it is simply untenable to deny her aggressive political bias based on a variety of her tweets (which I presume she wishes could be memory-holed). But agree that she herself probably had little to no effect on detailed editorial content.
It remains useful. but one must remain vigilant about the material presented. Like the MSM it now simply requires more work on the part of the user to cross-verify what is presented.
"Even Larry Sanger...." I can't believe people keep saying that. Wikipedia launched in January, 2001. Larry Sanger left in March, 2002, when Wikipedia was a baby in the crib. Sanger then went on to launch a series of projects intended to compete with Wikipedia, while vociferously criticizing Wikipedia. His projects failed. This brings us up to today. This is a man who has literally spent almost the entire lifespan of Wikipedia hammering Wikipedia while pushing competing projects, but still people like you say "even Larry Sanger!" as if that is some devastating revelation.
Look, as I said, Wikipedia is not remotely perfect. I have ZERO doubt that some of its pages and subjects are flawed, deficient, skewed, whatever. If you identify such a deficiency, make your case. I'll listen. Or better: Become a Wikipedian. Go to those pages. Make your case to your fellow volunteers. That's how Wikipedia was built and what makes it great.
Again, Dan, conceding every "anecdote" while challenging the anecdoter to become a Wikipedian and make improvements does NOT defend the project against the accusation of political bias. So far, every example I have come across in these comments is an anecdote about how Wiki is biased against the right or in favour of the left. If it were not a systemic bias, you might expect some counter-examples to crop up from time to time. Ask yourself why the dog didn't bark in the middle of the night - i.e. why leftists don't call it Conservopedia.
This is a great piece, thanks for writing! I think, as you reiterate, the point of how many articles there are in comparison to potentially a few “biased” ones is important and highlights how incredibly reactionary people can be to just a few pieces of information. It’s tough because most people can’t spend all their time scouring for as much data as possible to prove their point, so a couple anecdotes tend to do and end up speaking for far more than they should.
Most right-wing critiques of Wikipedia as biased are themselves more biased than Wikipedia, however, rather than refuting them, we must hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Since no source is perfect or even free of bias, let us proactively work to identify Wikipedia's imperfections so that they might be addressed. Dismiss the trolls, but do not move to "dismiss the case."
With respect, I think you have misunderstood. Please read that section again.
I didn't declare that essay bad or wrong or misleading and "dismiss" it. In fact, I very carefully and explicitly didn't judge the essay at all but instead assumed for the purposes of my argument that it is entirely complete and correct. I then concluded that even if that is so, that essay does not support ***the conservative accusation of "Wokepedia."***
As to your comment "since no source is perfect," yes, I agree. Identifying flaws and failings and improving them is much of what Wikipedia editors do. If someone has screwed up, fixing that is good! So, sure, if I were a Wikipedia editor I'd want to get into the details of the story laid out in that essay. But I'm not. And that's not what I was writing about.
Finally, you conclude I shouldn't "dismiss the case." Please don't confuse the issue. The "case" I "dismissed" is the conservative case that Wikipedia has become "Wokepedia." It is NOT the case brought by that essay, which, if I may repeat myself, I very explicitly did not judge.
Are you serious? I wrote not one word of what you are objecting to. It's all your invention.
I don't know the politics of the author of that piece. And I'm not even mildly curious what they are. I included that piece because it is typical of a type of evidence that is very widely cited by the sort of conservatives that I am criticizing. Because it is. And I dismissed it not because it's "conservative" -- note that I did not do that even with the Manhattan Institute study, which is from an avowedly conservative think tank -- but because it is an anecdote which I find deeply unpersuasive for the reasons I outlined in the essay. I may be right or I may be wrong, but please judge my writing based on what I wrote, not what you imagine.
You're right. I re-read that paragraph and it could be read to mean I am including that piece as having the same aim as the "Wokepedia" crowd. That certainly wasn't my intention. I'll think I'll add a post-script or footnote or something.
That said, in the context of my essay, yes, a story about an editor behaving badly, however long and detailed, is still, as a matter of evidence for the "Wokepedia" charge, only an anecdote. It can establish than an editor behave badly. But it does not remotely support the "Wokepedia" charge.
Now, in light of the foregoing, why did I include it? Simple: The people shouting "Wokepedia" waved that article about like a bloody shirt. Perhaps (and I hope) the author didn't intend that. But that's exactly what happened.
By the way, I'd say there's a lot of Excluded Middle Fallacy and knocking down of weak arguments here. It's easy for a right-winger blogger to toss off some culture-war clickbait about the Reds under the bed, now updated to the alleged "woke" hordes. That's silly stuff, and there is indeed a lot of it. However, refuting clickbait is not the same as dealing with the serious critiques. Unfortunately, that's very difficult and time-consuming to write. Additionally, it comes with a culture-war problem of potentially getting harassed by (extremists) of the criticized side, and an incentive to be part of the other side to have tribal support. I'm in awe of the Tracing Woodgrains article, given all the apparent careful work which went into it.
There's a lot of Wikipedia criticism which has been written by now. A great amount of it is bad. It's easy to refute it for poor reasoning. But that shouldn't be selectively used as a kind of "guilt by association" to whitewash Wikipedia.
Then, whether by my fault or yours, you have failed to understand my argument.
It was *not* to intention to absolve Wikipedia of *all* criticisms levelled against it. It was my intention to test the evidence for the most sweeping and aggressive attack levelled against it, namely that the whole thing is "Wokepedia," a left-wing propaganda platform. What you are accusing me of here is not something I intended nor something I did.
To be clear, I think that more targeted criticisms, whether of this or that article, or Wikipedia's coverage of this or that subject, or of the behaviour of this or that editor, are not only fine to make, they are, if civil and substantive, very much in keeping with the spirit of Wikipedia -- which is to have open discussions and debates about what's wrong, what needs to be fixed, and how to fix it.
Regrets, perhaps there is indeed a failure of communication. The article does read to me as dismissive of entire concepts based on the weakest arguments.
This is key: "test the evidence for the most sweeping and aggressive attack leveled against it" - Why bother? Such things are certain to be overblown and little more than rage-fodder. If this is rephrased as "test the evidence for the most poorly-reasoned and least-supported attack leveled against it", is the problem clearer?
This is especially off-putting:
"But instead of celebrating Wikipedia, lots of people are bitching and moaning about "Wokepedia" — because they think a very small subset of those seven million articles are politically biased."
This is akin to: if the government hurts *you*, don't bitch and moan about it, instead be happy to have a civilization where millions of people live in peace and prosperity.
Can you see where the combination of cheerleading Wikipedia, and seeming to deride critics overall, while focusing on weak arguments, might give an unfavorable impression?
Look, there is a clear (and sweeping) argument about Wikipedia becoming “Wokepedia.” I tested the evidence that others have brought forth to support it. I find that evidence empty. That’s the entirety of the essay. I don’t see anything wrong with that and, frankly, I don’t understand what you’re objecting to now.
Sorry, let me step back. I think you're new to these topics.
There's an extensive amount of serious Wikipedia criticism, including the problems of its perspective. You have not "tested the evidence that others have brought forth to support it". You have tested some of the most superficial and simplistic attacks done by culture-warriors, wrapped up with a lot of rhetorical flourishes which tend to set critics' teeth on edge (this last is not your "fault", but it does explain some of the pushback you've gotten). Is that "wrong"? Well, it depends on what you want to do. If you want to knock down clickbait, I can't say that's wrong. If you want to deal with serious Wikipedia critique, that's something else (and a lot more work).
Two things can simultaneously be true: 1) Wikipedia is an amazing achievement and 2) wokeness has found its way into Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia articles are edited by humans, and as humans have been infected by wokeness, therefore so has Wikipedia. Even though Wikipedia articles are supposed to have a neutral point of view (NPOV), decisions are made by consensus, vulnerable to who is paying attention to an article as a given time. Previously NPOV was reinforced by the Wikipedia requirement that articles cite reliable sources, but as journalism has become less objective, it has allowed Wikipedia editors to include fully-sourced non-neutral content. Politics has infected everything and Wikipedia is not immune.
I agree with all of this, but would balk at the second-last sentence as I'm not sure the claim about declining objectivity is true. But more generally, I would say, not only is it likely that some Wikipedians are "woke" and this has influenced their judgements, I would say it is a statistical and psychological inevitability. (See my paragraph about bias and flaws being universal.) But the same can be said about a host of intellectual/cultural influences. And to say "woke" thought appears here and there -- in illegitimate ways -- says nothing about how prevalent that is. And therefore it does not support being so sweepingly dismissive of Wikipedia as to call it "Wokepedia."
I suppose the threshold at which the name calling begins is a personal opinion. I'd say wokeness pops its head in virtually any Wikipedia article that might have any political angle, but that's certainly not all of them. I personally wouldn't call it "Wokepedia."
It's often very subtle, such as refusing to describe Any Ngo as a journalist in the opening sentence of his article. Or the Charlie Kirk article describing many of his political positions as false. It's the kind of thing you'll find peppered throughout Wikipedia these days. Wikipedia editors may have always skewed left personally, but they used to be more committed to the articles being neutral.
Many leftists do not like free speech, they like censorship. The woker they are, the greater this tendency. So, yeah, the skewing is a ratchet that goes in only one direction.
The real bummer is that Wikipedia used to be the best place to find information about any topic. If the topic was contentious, Wikipedia presented both sides and you were free to follow the various sources and decide for yourself. I still use Wikipedia every day, but now I can't trust it to give me all sides of an issue and have to do some Goggling of my own.
This is a useful addition to the Wikipedia debate.
I've been a huge fan of Wikipedia (W) since the beginning, and many, many years ago I had the pleasure of introducing Jimmy Wales to an Open Source event I was hosting. I told him that W was the most significant contribution to human knowledge since the Great Library of Alexandria, and I still believe that. I've also been an occasional minor donor, and a "small-time" Wikipedia editor for over 20 years now (by which I mean: I still only have a few thousand edits and a handful of original pages under my belt), and I've seen the aggregate ideological slant of the site evolve a few times.
The first W slant was, like most of the World Wide Web in the 90s, a left-libertarian slant - common to the 20/30-something (slightly Asperger's) white men who dominated computing then. During the 2000s, as W became popular and gained many more editors, the slant moved towards a more moderate and centrist liberal position. As this was not far off the centre of gravity of the West generally, a lot of people were, if not happy, then content with this.
The most recent slant, kicking off in the 2010s, is towards what is best called "progressivism", under the influence of Social Justice ideology - which is now the overwhelmingly dominant cultural ideology in academia and among young university educated activists, but actually a small minority opinion in the general public. Given the way that Social Justice ideology and activism (often unhelpfully termed 'woke') has swept through pretty much every institution in the Western world in the last decade, it would actually be *remarkable* in itself if W has somehow - and almost uniquely - totally escaped this major cultural revolution that has affected every other aspect of society. How could it not be affected? Well, it *is* affected. This isn't a surprise.
(I discount the surprisingly common but obviously bad-faith position that the Social Justice phenomenon is an illusion "invented by the Right Wing Media" - that's neither a serious position.)
There has always been a problem with pages in W being "defended" by possessive editors - often historic contributors defending their own additions. There has also always been a problem with contentious pages being defended by cliques of ideologically motivated editors. But what I feel is a development of the last decade is that the ideological motive of the large majority of defended pages is now unified in a way that it never has been before. I.e. the ideological slant for nearly all page defence now is that of Social Justice ideology vs The World .
This hasn't happened in the last few years, this is the culmination of a decade-long evolution and embedding of systemic bias into the rules - and crucially *consensus interpretation* of those rules - of the W project; e.g. particularly in WP:RS (reliable sources) and WP:UNDUE. It wouldn't be possible to just flick a switch and reverse this slant now, even if it was accepted as true.
I'll give a short example. Reference has been made by others regarding the rules and established consensus around "reliable sources". This is a particular problem now, that makes removing the bias on many egregious pages de facto impossible. Political bias in the wider mainstream media means that sites like e.g. the NYT and Guardian - which remain "reliable" - often deliberately omit to report at all on issues that they feel will harm their preferred narrative ju-jour. If the only sites that report on some contentious events are those that have been cast as "unreliable" then - from a W point of view - the event never happened, and mentioning it on a W page is not allowed. This has a major effect on some pages, where events that are common knowledge to have happened, and not denied by anyone serious, cannot be mentioned due to WP:RS. Note that this kind of de facto W censorship is only possible due to the now-widespread deliberate habit of non-reporting of "unhelpful" news in the mainstream media; a feature across the political spectrum in the 2020s.
In the first two sections, author Dan dismissed W critiques as anecdotes on a few bad apple-editors. That's fair, but he needs to explain why the bad apples *always* fall from the same ideological tree. In the third section Dan argues both that the bias is false because W likes Reagan, or true because Trump is a criminal. Yes, Trump is indeed a criminal, but Reagan was coincidentally the last Republican that lots of liberals voted for. But most importantly, Dan rather obviously avoids addressing the much more striking and reliable bias in US senator data. So while this is an interesting article, and it's a useful addition to the current debate over ideological bias at Wikipedia, it's not particularly convincing, in my opinion.
I still use W multiple times a day, but I always read the 'talk' page, where you'll usually see if ideological activists are at work. Sadly I don't donate to W any more (nor other formerly liberal but now strongly progressivist institutions, e.g. Amnesty International). If I had advice for W I'd say: first use management ability to fix the very real ideological bias in the reliable sources "consensus". There are too many radical Left-wing (and even extreme Left-wing) activist publications and gossip-sites considered 'reliable', while serious moderate Right and even centrist publications are cast as 'unreliable' and de facto banned. Good luck!
There are lots of reasonable criticisms to be made and explored. You've enumerated some of them. And frankly, if everybody talked about WIkipedia's flaws the ways you are, I may not have even bothered writing that essay. Unfortunately, the people making the argument I took on are not so reasonable, and are instead repeating a ridiculously sweeping message which could seriously damage the reputation, and eventually the quality, of the greatest collection of knowledge in human history.
But the funny thing is, lots of what you write here is the sort of stuff Wikipedians debate all the time. Reliable sources? Have you read the debates around how publications should be designated? They are stunningly exhaustive. It's amazing how much time and energy people of good faith have put into them. Now, if someone wants to say, for example, that the debate around publication X had a disproportionate number of people of viewpoint Y, so the discussion was skewed and the outcome unreasonable, that's not only fair game, that's a positive contribution. If I were a Wikipedian, I would welcome that sort of scrutiny. It just improves discussions and makes Wikipedia better.
Your point about how that which isn't reported can't make it into Wikipedia is well taken. It's a serious problem. But your turn this into a left-right thing by claiming that the mainstream media frequently refused to publish news if it's not politically advantageous. I think that's a gross overstatement, but maybe I'm wrong. The biggest implication of the problem you identify has nothing to do with left-right squabbles: The collapse of newspapers, particularly in mid- and small markets, means an increasingly large volume of news is never published in a mainstream outlet. Hence, it's never available to be cited in Wikipedia. That's a big and growing problem, but of course because it doesn't involve left-right tribalism, no one cares to even mention it. (You want to talk about how public discourse is impoverished? The all-consuming obsession with left-right partisan politics is a good place to start.)
Now, you also write that what you think of as a progressive bias is "the culmination of a decade-long evolution and embedding of systemic bias into the rules." Oh? Conservapedia was created explicitly as a reaction to what a conservative thought was Wikipedia's awful progressive bias ... in 2006. Wikipedia had barely begun. And most of the rules you think are rigged didn't exist.
As to your paragraph on Trump, Reagan, etc, you have misunderstood my argument. I am simply saying sentiment is not stance so using a measure of sentiment as a measure of stance is illegitimate. And no, it isn't on me to explain every seeming imbalance. The onus, as always, is on those making a claim. Now, I could hypothesize why that Senate chart is the way it is -- Republican discourse in general has become much more negative and oppositional at least since the Tea Party era and is now largely a reflection of the man who dominates the party with discourse that is massively negative -- but what does that matter? If the measure is being used to measure something it manifestly does not measure, that's the end of the argument. That evidence gets tossed. (And I can't help but notice that when you accuse me of ignoring evidence because it's awkward, I could note that you ignored the evidence (like the US think tank and UK MP data) that doesn't fit what you're writing. And imply you are being intellectually dishonest. But I won't. Instead, I will assume you didn't mention that because you were not writing a comprehensive essay getting into the weeds of all possible details and the omission was perfectly innocent. Please extend me the same courtesy.)
You expand importantly upon some arguments that I and others have alluded to above. Dan studiously avoids responding to actual arguments like these - at best dismissing them as anecdotes. Only an impossibly exhaustive statistical analysis will satisfy Dan the purist. /eye roll
Have you read the (endless) pages on which editors argue about which sources are reputable and which are not? Those are the sources of those decisions. And what I see on those pages is a lot of people wrestling hard with what are inherently complex and epistemologically difficult questions. What I do NOT see is a bunch of leftist zealots advancing a cause.
Two other tacks one could try, if one wanted to measure whether Wikipedia ass a woke bias are:
(1) measure the likelihood of facts that're pro-woke being removed from Wikipedia (or never being put there in the first place) versus facts that're anti-woke
(2) try to measure the political leaning of Wikipedia editors directly
The problem is that it is impossible to do an exhaustive analysis of Wikipedia, because of the volume of material on the website. And Dan will dismiss anything less than exhaustive as mere anecdoodling. He sets up an impossible task, and then complains that the critics can't meet it.
Yes, I ask for evidence proportionate to, and supportive of, the sweeping assertion conservatives make. How unfair of me.
Look, as I've said repeatedly to anyone who will listen, it is not only fair game, it is positively constructive for people to examine articles, subjects, and editorial decisions on Wikipedia and criticize them when warranted. That's how Wikipedia will get better. And, in fact, it's how Wikipedia became as good as it is now because that is precisely what Wikipedians do every day. What I object to are sweeping dismissals of the whole project -- like "Wokepedia" -- that are simply not warranted by the available evidence.
Compare: Government is vast, and nobody can claim to know everything that goes on in government. But scandal and corruption turn up so frequently, in so many nooks and crannies of government, regardless of the administration or political orientation, that some *dare* to make the generalization that there is lots of corruption and scandal in government that the public are unaware of. Indeed, that scandal and corruption are endemic to public administration. Is that a crazy position to hold or to state? No, of course not! One can give some reasons of general application why endemic corruption is to be expected in government - incentives are such that it will spring forth, oversight is under-funded, there is not enough transparency, the people who benefit from the corruption make and apply the rules, etc. - but the only way to really know how bad the problem is would be to go inside government and look carefully - which is impossible. So we are all supposed to remain neutral and skeptical about charges of corruption and scandal in government, and to blithely want more and bigger government? That's silly.
What's unfair is taking something some conservatives say in the context of political campaigning or commentary, and treating it as though it were a scientific proposition. Perhaps those who call it "Wokepedia" are perfectly aware of all of the nuances you bring to the discussion. Perhaps they know they are generalizing from their own limited investigations. Still, politics isn't a fair game, and calling it "Wokepedia" is certainly fair enough for politics. There is enough truth to the charge that it is worth stating the case as a caution to others - and as a prod to do better.
I agree with you that there is no short-cut to proving that Wikipedia is, or is not, politically biased. Your anecdote about the folks you met at the conference in Poland proves nothing - "It is not data" - since as you say, "Reality is so much bigger than politics. And so is Wikipedia." To examine political bias, you first have to weed out the 99.9% of articles - along with their authors & editors - that have no bearing on hot political topics of the day. Your observation that there is no "top-down," coordinated direction-taking by :independent volunteers" is irrelevant, because nobody is proposing a conspiracy theory here. Rather, the suggestion is that in the tiny percentage of articles with contemporary political implications, Wikipedia is subject to the same herd mentality you find everywhere in politics. Authors & editors cycle around popular views and sentiments, right or wrong.
The only way to test the hypothesis is to read the impugned articles and exercise judgment about their content. You say that a perfectly neutral, factual article on Trump would necessarily contain a lot of negative sentiment - but would it be negative sentiment *toward* Trump, or rather toward the circumstances he finds himself in because of his political enemies? Maybe a fair article on Trump would eschew the vast quantities of utter bullshit about him, and focus more on his accomplishments. There's no obvious reason why a Wikipedia article on Trump should devote more space to his rape & defamation trial than to the decline in black unemployment during his presidency, for example. The latter is *vastly* more important that the former. Same with the January 6th nonsense, the Russia collusion hoax, and the ridiculous impeachments. Maybe if the article gave proper weight to what is important, a neutral article on Trump would be highly positive...
There really is no such think as a value-neutral judgment about political commentary. Consider Trump's rape & defamation trial. To form a worthwhile judgment on the Wikipedia entry about this event, you have to know a lot about the law, and the values behind the law. A perfectly neutral legal analysis of this event would focus on how the NY legislature changed the statute of limitations specifically to afford his accuser a brief window of opportunity to make an accusation 30 years after the fact, which is unprecedented. It would focus on the judge's unprecedented rulings on the admissibility and inadmissibility of various kinds of evidence. It would focus in the accuser's many inconsistencies and bizarre memory lapses - she couldn't even pin down the event to a particular year (making it impossible for Trump to prove from his business records that he was somewhere else at the alleged time). And so on and so forth. That is, it would accurately depict Trump as the victim of a political witch-hunt. It would appear to be sympathetic toward Trump, and hostile to the travesty cooked up by his enemies.
Does Wikipedia meet this test? I don't know; I haven't bothered to check. But I doubt it, and I suspect this is the kind of consideration that leads Musk and those aligned with his way of thinking to call it Wokepedia.
Dan, your simplistic arguments do not even begin to dismiss the case against Wikipedia, I'm afraid.
"Your observation that there is no "top-down," coordinated direction-taking by "independent volunteers" is irrelevant, because nobody is proposing a conspiracy theory here." I quoted a recent article saying precisely that. It's even in the sub-hed. Please read again.
On the paragraph following, I agree. If people want to look at particular articles, or subjects, and consider how they are treated, and whether they lived up to the "neutral point of view" standard, is perfectly reasonable. But the people pushing the "Wokepedia" line aren't interested in anything so reasonable. Instead, they want to label and dismiss. And they simply don't have the evidence to justify such sweeping conclusions.
On the following paragraph, you don't understand what Wikipedia is. "Neutral point of view" means that where there are significant disputes about facts, Wikipedia should lay out the differing views but not take a position as to which is correct. Trump's convictions are a perfect example: A Wikipedia article should lay out the case for why they are justice done along with the case for why they are justice abused. And leave it at that. You, by contrast, seem to think that the view you think is correct is therefore the one Wikipedia should present, and it is only to the extent that Wikipedia does that that it does its job "properly." With respect, you're wrong. That's not and never has been how Wikipedia works.
As to your concluding sentence: You have ignored my "simplistic arguments" and ignored the evidence for and against. You have simply presented your own feeling as fact. You will forgive me if I find it considerably less than persuasive.
There is an infinite number of stupid arguments one could make on any side of any topic. And in politics, most of them have been made. You pretend that it is Wikipedia's role to catalogue every stupid argument that has ever been given, and in doing so remain "neutral" between them. That would very quickly render Wikipedia useless, as it would rapidly fill up with nonsense.
No, the role of an editor is to keep out the dross. That requires judgment, which apparently is frequently lacking in Wikipedia entries on political matters. Judgment about what is important and what is distraction; judgment about what is sound, tried & true, and what is unprecedented and silly. An encyclopedia that is fulfilling the role would perhaps not say that Trump's rape trial was a travesty of justice; but it would explain that everything about it was hinkey as assessed by tried & true legal principles. If you don't think so, you lack sound legal judgment - and there's no persuading someone of unsound judgment.
Grant, you are demonstrating that you don't know anything about Wikipedia and how it was/is created, and don't care to learn. So I think we'll end this now. Good night.
I'll just note that labelling something isn't dismissing it. A label is a characterization; it's up to the reader/listener to decide whether to ponder or dismiss.
Loved you essay. Since Fox News came onto the scene, I have often thought about bias in the news, especially the rights assertion of bias.
Since Fox and its various personalities -- Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, etc.-- consisently lie, like Trump, the right projects their malfeasance on institutions for reporting the truth. The truth has become liberal, woke, or fake news.
Actually, they don't. There may be individuals, but generally, no. That's why whenever supported facts are made known Trump, Fox, and Friends label them fake news or tell another lie.
As an example consider "Mostly peaceful protests" to describe BLM arson riots. The pro-woke media cannot be relied on to tell the truth, any more than Fox can.
Yeah, progressives are so deep in their bubble they can't imagine anyone but the opposition being liars. Other examples are "some very good people on both sides," and the Russia collusion hoax that they kept going for 6 years. It's to cry for.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I strongly disagree, especially on Canadian Wikipedia posts. They tend to be as negative as possible, especially regarding anyone who's been prominent in politics and media. Articles tend to ignore achievements and are loaded up with negativity. This is especially true of articles about conservatives and I am anything but one. People who are trendy among the college crowd tend to get a much more positive entry. I have had my own problems with Wikipedia. If someone starts a page about you, you're not allowed to change it or add to it, even if the material is false and defamatory. If you tell them the material is libelous. you're quickly banned from making a legal threat. I had to actually begin legal action to get my page fixed and, of course, I am banned for life. Ask Jimmy about Rachel Marsden and her Wikipedia page, and how her complaint to him about it resulted in a sexual relationship between the two. I strongly suggest you look at all the incarnations of the Marsden page, how I was treated for saying Fraser Institute material was not evidence to hang her with, and the brutal blowback from Canadian editors. They are not lovable nerds and Wales is no hero. In my line of work, having sex with someone who came to me with a problem would get me disbarred. I see many Wikipedia "editors" as not much better than online conservative and leftist trolls who push agendas and are not interested in accurately portraying reality in the entries they write. The first solution: have people "edit" under their own name. There's a reason why academics and authors don't write non-fiction under pseudonyms, and it applies to Wikipedia.
Mark, really? My response to this is right in the piece: I have no doubt whatsoever that within the vast universe that is Wikipedia, there is this, that, and the other problem(X1000). But identifying one — I’ll assume you’re right — hardly amounts to proof that Wikipedia, in toto, can dismissed as “Wokepedia” or anything else. It is proof that Wikipedia is flawed and in need of improvement. But no one — not least any Wikipedian — ever said Wikipedia is flawless.
You can't slough this behaviour off as fringe. It's much more than that. Yes, there are are many thousands of articles that are OK, but in anything political, there are cliques who push their point of view and drive out anyone who disagrees. I can show you many entries that are no more than hit jobs on living people. They are the first thing that comes up when the names of these people are googled. Marsden is a stellar case study: defamed by Wikipedia for months, then talking to Wales, who immediately slept with her, then broke up with her by posting on Wikipedia. Is she crazy, as her entry and talk pages suggested, and imply now? Maybe, but being literally screwed when trying to get help can't do mush for one's mental health. As for the original assault allegation -- which has its own pages, which is something -- I've done a lot of sports law and that kind of allegation is not only common, too often they turn out to be true, or unprovable. The sexism in Wikipedia has been commented about for years, and it's real. So is the tall poppy syndrome. Balancing hundreds of entries that are biographies, geographic entries, etc against pain inflicted on real people now empowers people to keep doing this. Wales made himself into a sort of cult leader. Wikipedia has at least one co-founder who is critical of what's happened. You can go ahead and write the book, but maintain your high standards and don't get sucked in.
I have no problem accepting that this article, or that subject, is flawed, biased, etc. I have no problem accepting that there may be cliques contributing to same. If people want to make those arguments, good, let's look at specifics. What I have a problem with is the sweeping dismissal -- "Wokepedia" -- I wrote about. It's not supported by good evidence. Period.
Interesting, but I think this discussion is overly focused not only on English Wikipedia but specifically on Wikipedia in the U.S. It's a shame that there isn't much research on the influence of Wikipedia in other languages, which makes it difficult to extend the discussion in an evidence-informed way. Personally, as a native Spanish speaker, I find Wikipedia to be an oasis of curated and relevant information. It’s not perfect, but for many everyday uses, it’s far better than the alternatives, and for that, I’m very grateful. If you're writing a book with Jimmy, it might be worthwhile to explore its global influence more and not focus so heavily on its impact in the U.S. Thanks.
Thanks for this piece, Dan. I do think there is one other element that may play an incidental role. Those who write or edit Wikepedia articles come dominantly from the highly educated class, that class skews left, and this will have impacts. Things left-leaning people don't think to question often strike right wing or libertarian readers as biased.
An example, selected at random: In the Wikipedia article on the electoral college one finds:
"Critics object to the inequity that, due to the distribution of electors, individual citizens in states with smaller populations have more voting power than those in larger states."
The idea that the distribution is an inequity is stated as fact. This is not a fact. It depends on one's views of what equity is in the structure of a federal republic.
It is nearly impossible to eliminate biases like this from one's own writing, so an encyclopedia written and edited by left-leaning authors will skew left. That does not detract from the great value.
Finally, my view would be that the current Republican party no longer reflects Ronald Reagan in any way.
I had to read your example twice and think about it carefully before I could conclude, "yeah, he's right." Which at least suggests an alternative hypothesis is plausible: Someone wrote it with the intention of saying critics object to *what they see as* an inequity, which would make it a neutral description of facts. But they left out the phrase that would have tied the judgment to the critics and so no it's ambiguous and can be read to mean the author judges that to be an inequity.
Solution: edit it. Say why. Betcha it stands up.
That said, I'm not dismissing your point. I believe I wrote exactly that about human biases right in that essay! The solution is to allow people with different perspective to come together, share notes, argue and edit. The end result will be something better than any one person could have produced because of that synthesis of perspectives. That is precisely what Wikipedia is. The whole, huge thing is a monument to that very process.
The claim under discussion is not that Wikipedia can't be improved. Anything is possible. The claim is that it hasn't been improved, that it is Wokepedia *as it currently stands.* Paul gave a fairly obvious and plausible reason why that is to be expected, and illustrated it with an example. You didn't respond to his argument. Instead, you claimed it is not Wokepedia because "I betcha it can be changed!"
And on this specific comment, he was NOT alleging "Wikipedia" is "Wokepedia," only giving one instance of something that is not appropriately phrased. I AGREE that it is not appropriately phrased. And that the fix is easy.
Grant, your framing is wrong. Others allege that Wikipedia is biased in a particular way. That is their claim. It is their responsibility to prove it with evidence.
I think you're misunderstanding the point, which was made also in comments on your initial post announcing your collaboration with Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia entries are subject to editorial control, which in the case of subjects with any political aspect results in the editor's political leaning showing through. That's why Wikipedia can't be completely trusted as a source of balanced information on such topics.
It's fairly trustworthy on most topics, but on political/politicized topics it should be viewed with thoughtful skepticism. Wikipedia is certainly useful but should never be regarded as an unimpeachable source and necessarily better than others.
I find this a little befuddling.
Not only do I agree that Wikipedia "should be viewed with thoughtful skepticism" on political matters, I think it "should be viewed with thoughtful skepticism" on literally everything.
Not because Wikipedia is unusually flawed but because "thoughtful skepticism" should be applied to literally when using any source.
Similarly, I agree that Wikipedia "should never be regarded as an unimpeachable source and necessarily better than others" on political matters. But I think exactly the same applies to all subjects in Wikipedia. As I wrote, it's a human creation, and human creations are flawed. Caveat lector.
Now, does it sound like I am condemning Wikipedia? Hardly. What I just wrote is what Wikipedians have always said about Wikipedia. In Wikipedia's official policies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Researching_with_Wikipedia
So why do you think we disagree? I think it's because you have missed the point: In my essay, I picked apart and dismissed a conservative claim that Wikipedia is "Wokepedia." That claim is not "thoughtful skepticism." That claims is not merely calling for readers to exercise care. It is a sweeping and utterly dismissive claim which is not supported by evidence: THAT is the sole point of my essay. Feel free to agree or disagree with that, but that, and that alone, is the point I made.
Dan, your framing is wrong. Others have given their judgment - their conclusion - that Wikipedia is politically biased in a particular way. The only way they could "prove it with evidence" is by going through all of the articles they have read line by line that informs their judgment, and explain it to you. That's not something anyone can be expected to devote their life to, if they have any ambitions outside of Wikipedia commentary. So instead they give a few representative examples of the bias, and invite you to apply your own judgment when reading other political topics. But you don't want to do the hard work of applying your own judgment to the endless political commentary on Wikipedia. Instead, you dismiss this as mere anecdoodling; you say even if the example were correct, Wikipedia can be changed so it isn't *really* biased in some existential sense; you admit that nobody ever claimed Wikipedia is perfect... This is all utterly lame; it isn't a valuable contribution to the discussion you took up. It is saying you have nothing worthwhile to say on the topic of the (alleged) political bias on Wikipedia.
"Here are some lawyers who behaved badly. Lawyers are scum." See the problem? Yes, you do. Yet here, the numbers are much bigger, so the enormous gap between the evidence and the claim becomes a canyon. Seems like a pretty straightforward objection, but you see no value in it? None? Because people have some "representative examples of bias"? Question, Grant: How do you know they are "representative"? You can't. Unless you produce some broader empirical analysis. Which they haven't done. So, no, they're not "representative"?
But why do I bother corresponding with you, Grant? You're now going to do what you always do -- ignore my argument, repeat yourself, and grandly declare my writing to have no worth. Which is odd. If my writing has no worth, you are wasting your time reading it, and wasting more time writing about it. I urge you to cease doing both.
I practiced law; I know and interacted with many lawyers. I have a low opinion of the profession in general. I was also a university professor; I spent most of my adult life in universities; and I have a low opinion of university professors in general. I left both professions in disgust. I don't feel I need to justify that opinion to you; you can take it or leave it as you please.
Likewise, politicians and political commentators who call it Wokepedia are not academicians; they have no reason to try to prove anything to you with (necessarily incomplete) statistical analyses. They are not in a court of law where they bear the onus of proof. They are campaigning. All you are saying here is that your judgment is different, albeit dolled up with "anecdotes are not data" and "but it can be edited to make it less biased."
Paul and I have given you several general reasons why you should expect a website like Wikipedia to have a left-wing bias. That's not direct evidence of the bias - nothing would satisfy you in that regard - but they are recognizable forms of indirect evidence. You have studiously ignored these arguments. But why do I bother corresponding with you, Dan? You're now going to do what you always do -- ignore my argument, repeat yourself, make a personal attack, and grandly declare my writing to have no worth. Which is odd.
(You are doing this for the subscription money. I'm writing for the benefit of other audience members. That shouldn't be too hard for a bright guy like you to figure out.)
So, basically, some people read some articles they don’t like, so they get to call the whole thing flawed? The people who don’t like an article, can edit or amend that article, can’t they? To claim the entire enterprise is flawed because you found a few articles you don’t agree with, is a not so subtle play for censorship, isn’t it? Don’t fall for it. Ugh.
Link is here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College?wprov=sfti1
We will see if any thinks this is serious enough to spend 2 minutes to edit it.
“Critics object to the inequity…”
Yes. Are you going to edit the page to insert the word “particular “ before inequity?
Oh right, that was the original phrasing.
When I reread it though maybe it’s fine as is because:
a) it’s clear this is the view of critics; and
b) in terms of ‘voting power’ the inequity is factual.
Does that make sense?
My thought was simply adding the word particular makes it explicit that there maybe other types of inequity to consider.
Paul, another general reason to expect leftist bias on Wikipedia is that leftists are more likely to believe that politics is the most important thing in life, that politics should pervade every aspect of life, so they are more motivated to devote their life to pushing their political narratives. Right wingers, by contrast, are more likely to think that God, family, community, and work are what life is all about, and politics is merely a framework within everyone should be permitted to pursue these things in their own way. As Woody Allen quipped long ago, "The problem with socialism is all the meetings." People with lives to lead can't be bothered with all the meetings, the consensus-building, the process. Wikipedians who write on political topics LIVE for the chance to influence politics.
"Wikipedians who write on political topics LIVE for the chance to influence politics." You say this with such conviction, as if you are stating what you ate for breakfast. But how do you know this? Have you worked with a lot of "Wikipedians who write on political topics"? Know lots of them personally? Chatted with them about their motives over a pint now and then? How?
Yet another reason of general application why we should expect Wikipedia to have a left-wing bias is that right-wingers tend to believe in free speech while left-wingers tend to believe in censorship. Wokesters think that mere exposure to certain ideas does harm to people: words are violence. So even if right-wingers and left-wingers were equally likely to be motivated to contribute political commentary on Wikipedia - which is not admitted but denied - right-wingers would be more likely to let woke comments stay while wokesters would do everything in their power to have "harmful" right-wing ideas suppressed.
This is my conjecture. It is stated with a bit of hyperbole for emphasis. Again, you nit-pick about phraseology while failing to grapple with the substance of the argument.
With respect to a single author using the royal "we" instead of "I", I was trained by one of my PhD advisors to do the same thing. So much time has passed that I cannot remember his explicit reasoning, but I think it was because "I" seems too self-absorbed, as if the author is taking too much credit for research which could not be done without learning from the work and advice of other people.
I figured it must be something like that. A few decades ago, there were newspaper columnists who would never, ever write the word "I." While the underlying sentiment was laudable -- it was to prevent belly-button gazing -- it was, in practice, painfully affected and silly.
I don't know Dan, this is a practice I (we) would like to see resurrected. So many columnists and reporters seem to freely inject themselves into their copy these days. Using "I" gives the reader the automatic impression that what follows is totally subjective, further confirming that objectivity in news reporting is dead.
Maybe you could mold this into an article someday.
Yeah, it had/has a legitimate point (as I alluded). And yes, a lot of modern columnists have treated the subjective pronoun as licence to shove their heads firmly up their belly buttons. I just don't think the royal "we" is a good solution to that. A much better one is an editor giving the columnist a good boot up the ass. (Yes, I'm old school.)
Good morning! Thank you for this article on Wikipedia. Fascinating—I didn’t really know much about how Wikipedia functioned. And hadn’t realized that those in the right-wing camp called it “ Wokepedia”. But then I don’t follow Musk, J.D. Vance and Trump. Guess that makes me “woke” 😂 It’s a joy to read something so reasonable and rational in these days of sensationalism. And your ending, “Reality is so much bigger than politics.” 👏🏻 Well said!
I appreciate the thoughtful postscript and the reflective essay. Since you mentioned my article, I figure it may be worth sharing my own perspective on this in brief.
On almost every apolitical topic, Wikipedia is as reliable as ever. I've met a number of passionate, serious Wikipedia editors, and seen how much passion people put into the project. Several of my friends defend it as one of the treasures of the internet, and I'm not unsympathetic to that view. I think the vast majority of editors, for the vast majority of articles, edit in good faith with the intent to improve the encyclopedia.
That said, the demographic interested in editing Wikipedia is not random. Most of the people who choose to devote their time and attention to editing the encyclopedia, inasmuch as they have strong political opinions, lean liberal to progressive. This isn't unique to Wikipedia--in my essay "The Republican Party is Doomed" (https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-republican-party-is-doomed), I examine how the same phenomenon is occurring across a wide range of "knowledge fields" from journalism to education to law and policy--and so far as I can tell it's not the result of anything sinister, but it is reality.
In most cases, that has minimal impact. It does mean something important for culture war–tinged articles, though: if a motivated culture warrior comes along to "defend" an article, the ambient culture of the website is thoroughly prepared to drive right-wing ones away but is much slower to act against left-wing ones (who broadly share the biases of the rest of the site). I document one case study of that in Reliable Sources, but I could demonstrate similar examples across a wide range of highly politicized topics, where a few editors who have very little interest in creating an encyclopedia and a lot of interest in defending an emotionally charged narrative against their enemies drown every good-faith editor in bad-faith rules-lawyering to defend tendentious and often false narratives. Unfortunately, this is a widespread problem, and it's one unsolvable purely at the editing level: several of these editors (as with the one I write about) are longstanding admins, a number of them actively participate in "one-layer-back" decision-making as with determining which sources will be allowed on the Reliable Sources list or topic-banning other users, and quite frankly their biases are comfortable enough to the median Wikipedia user that it takes a great deal of effort and tact to push against them in a way amiable to the editor population as a whole.
Watching the site for the response to my article, I saw several admins/editors take it seriously and in good faith, while a few tried to intimidate other users into dropping the topic. I really do think the bulk of Wikipedia editors and admins operate in good faith, but the site as a whole has been much too slow to notice and take action against the minority of motivated narrative-pushing editors. The net impact, so far as I can tell, is that the site is highly reliable for non-controversial topics, but cannot be relied on for anything touching on heated political issues. I respect the work people have put into the site, but you severely underestimate how poor its coverage of politicized issues has become as the result of a relatively small number of motivated editors.
Thanks very much for this thoughtful response. I wish I could offer a worthy response now but I can't as I'm swamped with work. I just wanted you to know I appreciate this and hope to respond properly in the near future.
“The net impact, so far as I can tell, is that the site is highly reliable for non-controversial topics, but cannot be relied on for anything touching on heated political issues. I respect the work people have put into the site, but you severely underestimate how poor its coverage of politicized issues has become as the result of a relatively small number of motivated editors.“
Couldn’t agree more.
But keep in mind an ever- increasing number of topics are politicized. It’s not just the culture war stuff, even as that is the most brazen, obvious part. Things related to climate change and fossil fuels face similar, if not as extreme, challenges.
As I have stated before, as a long-standing user of Wikipedia (approx. 20 years) I have seen it evolve and can say with anecdotal authority it is more politically biased that it was. It can and has been weaponized repeatedly over the years for personal and sociopolitical purposes (just ask Jimmy Wales himself about the Rachel Marsden saga and her webpage). Even Larry Sanger says it is compromised, although I suppose current Wikipedians would like to deny he had anything to do with Wikipedia a la Greenpeace and Patrick Moore.
But I reject the neologism Wokepedia, as I find Wikipedia useful still, and agree that probably most editors are apolitical male detailed-oriented obsessive nerds. But things like the Cultural Marxism page are perfect examples of the kinds of politicized editorial changes made (see image at https://mediatricks.org/cultural-marxism-articles-on-wikipedia-2014-vs-2021). I know for fact this change was made and remains as-is, as I used to go to that page before it changed. I am not sure when it was changed. All it takes it a few politically-motivated editors to dominate the more commonly used culture war sections to make it appear the whole site this is now totally compromised. It also really doesn't help that Kathryn Maher types end up being the face of the network, and it is simply untenable to deny her aggressive political bias based on a variety of her tweets (which I presume she wishes could be memory-holed). But agree that she herself probably had little to no effect on detailed editorial content.
It remains useful. but one must remain vigilant about the material presented. Like the MSM it now simply requires more work on the part of the user to cross-verify what is presented.
"Even Larry Sanger...." I can't believe people keep saying that. Wikipedia launched in January, 2001. Larry Sanger left in March, 2002, when Wikipedia was a baby in the crib. Sanger then went on to launch a series of projects intended to compete with Wikipedia, while vociferously criticizing Wikipedia. His projects failed. This brings us up to today. This is a man who has literally spent almost the entire lifespan of Wikipedia hammering Wikipedia while pushing competing projects, but still people like you say "even Larry Sanger!" as if that is some devastating revelation.
Look, as I said, Wikipedia is not remotely perfect. I have ZERO doubt that some of its pages and subjects are flawed, deficient, skewed, whatever. If you identify such a deficiency, make your case. I'll listen. Or better: Become a Wikipedian. Go to those pages. Make your case to your fellow volunteers. That's how Wikipedia was built and what makes it great.
Again, Dan, conceding every "anecdote" while challenging the anecdoter to become a Wikipedian and make improvements does NOT defend the project against the accusation of political bias. So far, every example I have come across in these comments is an anecdote about how Wiki is biased against the right or in favour of the left. If it were not a systemic bias, you might expect some counter-examples to crop up from time to time. Ask yourself why the dog didn't bark in the middle of the night - i.e. why leftists don't call it Conservopedia.
This is a great piece, thanks for writing! I think, as you reiterate, the point of how many articles there are in comparison to potentially a few “biased” ones is important and highlights how incredibly reactionary people can be to just a few pieces of information. It’s tough because most people can’t spend all their time scouring for as much data as possible to prove their point, so a couple anecdotes tend to do and end up speaking for far more than they should.
Most right-wing critiques of Wikipedia as biased are themselves more biased than Wikipedia, however, rather than refuting them, we must hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Since no source is perfect or even free of bias, let us proactively work to identify Wikipedia's imperfections so that they might be addressed. Dismiss the trolls, but do not move to "dismiss the case."
I highly recommend this carefully researched story https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin?r=47raq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web @tracingwoodgrains
With respect, I think you have misunderstood. Please read that section again.
I didn't declare that essay bad or wrong or misleading and "dismiss" it. In fact, I very carefully and explicitly didn't judge the essay at all but instead assumed for the purposes of my argument that it is entirely complete and correct. I then concluded that even if that is so, that essay does not support ***the conservative accusation of "Wokepedia."***
As to your comment "since no source is perfect," yes, I agree. Identifying flaws and failings and improving them is much of what Wikipedia editors do. If someone has screwed up, fixing that is good! So, sure, if I were a Wikipedia editor I'd want to get into the details of the story laid out in that essay. But I'm not. And that's not what I was writing about.
Finally, you conclude I shouldn't "dismiss the case." Please don't confuse the issue. The "case" I "dismissed" is the conservative case that Wikipedia has become "Wokepedia." It is NOT the case brought by that essay, which, if I may repeat myself, I very explicitly did not judge.
Are you serious? I wrote not one word of what you are objecting to. It's all your invention.
I don't know the politics of the author of that piece. And I'm not even mildly curious what they are. I included that piece because it is typical of a type of evidence that is very widely cited by the sort of conservatives that I am criticizing. Because it is. And I dismissed it not because it's "conservative" -- note that I did not do that even with the Manhattan Institute study, which is from an avowedly conservative think tank -- but because it is an anecdote which I find deeply unpersuasive for the reasons I outlined in the essay. I may be right or I may be wrong, but please judge my writing based on what I wrote, not what you imagine.
You're right. I re-read that paragraph and it could be read to mean I am including that piece as having the same aim as the "Wokepedia" crowd. That certainly wasn't my intention. I'll think I'll add a post-script or footnote or something.
That said, in the context of my essay, yes, a story about an editor behaving badly, however long and detailed, is still, as a matter of evidence for the "Wokepedia" charge, only an anecdote. It can establish than an editor behave badly. But it does not remotely support the "Wokepedia" charge.
Now, in light of the foregoing, why did I include it? Simple: The people shouting "Wokepedia" waved that article about like a bloody shirt. Perhaps (and I hope) the author didn't intend that. But that's exactly what happened.
I added a PS. Please see the revised essay.
By the way, I'd say there's a lot of Excluded Middle Fallacy and knocking down of weak arguments here. It's easy for a right-winger blogger to toss off some culture-war clickbait about the Reds under the bed, now updated to the alleged "woke" hordes. That's silly stuff, and there is indeed a lot of it. However, refuting clickbait is not the same as dealing with the serious critiques. Unfortunately, that's very difficult and time-consuming to write. Additionally, it comes with a culture-war problem of potentially getting harassed by (extremists) of the criticized side, and an incentive to be part of the other side to have tribal support. I'm in awe of the Tracing Woodgrains article, given all the apparent careful work which went into it.
There's a lot of Wikipedia criticism which has been written by now. A great amount of it is bad. It's easy to refute it for poor reasoning. But that shouldn't be selectively used as a kind of "guilt by association" to whitewash Wikipedia.
Then, whether by my fault or yours, you have failed to understand my argument.
It was *not* to intention to absolve Wikipedia of *all* criticisms levelled against it. It was my intention to test the evidence for the most sweeping and aggressive attack levelled against it, namely that the whole thing is "Wokepedia," a left-wing propaganda platform. What you are accusing me of here is not something I intended nor something I did.
To be clear, I think that more targeted criticisms, whether of this or that article, or Wikipedia's coverage of this or that subject, or of the behaviour of this or that editor, are not only fine to make, they are, if civil and substantive, very much in keeping with the spirit of Wikipedia -- which is to have open discussions and debates about what's wrong, what needs to be fixed, and how to fix it.
Regrets, perhaps there is indeed a failure of communication. The article does read to me as dismissive of entire concepts based on the weakest arguments.
This is key: "test the evidence for the most sweeping and aggressive attack leveled against it" - Why bother? Such things are certain to be overblown and little more than rage-fodder. If this is rephrased as "test the evidence for the most poorly-reasoned and least-supported attack leveled against it", is the problem clearer?
This is especially off-putting:
"But instead of celebrating Wikipedia, lots of people are bitching and moaning about "Wokepedia" — because they think a very small subset of those seven million articles are politically biased."
This is akin to: if the government hurts *you*, don't bitch and moan about it, instead be happy to have a civilization where millions of people live in peace and prosperity.
Can you see where the combination of cheerleading Wikipedia, and seeming to deride critics overall, while focusing on weak arguments, might give an unfavorable impression?
Look, there is a clear (and sweeping) argument about Wikipedia becoming “Wokepedia.” I tested the evidence that others have brought forth to support it. I find that evidence empty. That’s the entirety of the essay. I don’t see anything wrong with that and, frankly, I don’t understand what you’re objecting to now.
Sorry, let me step back. I think you're new to these topics.
There's an extensive amount of serious Wikipedia criticism, including the problems of its perspective. You have not "tested the evidence that others have brought forth to support it". You have tested some of the most superficial and simplistic attacks done by culture-warriors, wrapped up with a lot of rhetorical flourishes which tend to set critics' teeth on edge (this last is not your "fault", but it does explain some of the pushback you've gotten). Is that "wrong"? Well, it depends on what you want to do. If you want to knock down clickbait, I can't say that's wrong. If you want to deal with serious Wikipedia critique, that's something else (and a lot more work).
Two things can simultaneously be true: 1) Wikipedia is an amazing achievement and 2) wokeness has found its way into Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia articles are edited by humans, and as humans have been infected by wokeness, therefore so has Wikipedia. Even though Wikipedia articles are supposed to have a neutral point of view (NPOV), decisions are made by consensus, vulnerable to who is paying attention to an article as a given time. Previously NPOV was reinforced by the Wikipedia requirement that articles cite reliable sources, but as journalism has become less objective, it has allowed Wikipedia editors to include fully-sourced non-neutral content. Politics has infected everything and Wikipedia is not immune.
I agree with all of this, but would balk at the second-last sentence as I'm not sure the claim about declining objectivity is true. But more generally, I would say, not only is it likely that some Wikipedians are "woke" and this has influenced their judgements, I would say it is a statistical and psychological inevitability. (See my paragraph about bias and flaws being universal.) But the same can be said about a host of intellectual/cultural influences. And to say "woke" thought appears here and there -- in illegitimate ways -- says nothing about how prevalent that is. And therefore it does not support being so sweepingly dismissive of Wikipedia as to call it "Wokepedia."
I suppose the threshold at which the name calling begins is a personal opinion. I'd say wokeness pops its head in virtually any Wikipedia article that might have any political angle, but that's certainly not all of them. I personally wouldn't call it "Wokepedia."
It's often very subtle, such as refusing to describe Any Ngo as a journalist in the opening sentence of his article. Or the Charlie Kirk article describing many of his political positions as false. It's the kind of thing you'll find peppered throughout Wikipedia these days. Wikipedia editors may have always skewed left personally, but they used to be more committed to the articles being neutral.
Many leftists do not like free speech, they like censorship. The woker they are, the greater this tendency. So, yeah, the skewing is a ratchet that goes in only one direction.
The real bummer is that Wikipedia used to be the best place to find information about any topic. If the topic was contentious, Wikipedia presented both sides and you were free to follow the various sources and decide for yourself. I still use Wikipedia every day, but now I can't trust it to give me all sides of an issue and have to do some Goggling of my own.
This is a useful addition to the Wikipedia debate.
I've been a huge fan of Wikipedia (W) since the beginning, and many, many years ago I had the pleasure of introducing Jimmy Wales to an Open Source event I was hosting. I told him that W was the most significant contribution to human knowledge since the Great Library of Alexandria, and I still believe that. I've also been an occasional minor donor, and a "small-time" Wikipedia editor for over 20 years now (by which I mean: I still only have a few thousand edits and a handful of original pages under my belt), and I've seen the aggregate ideological slant of the site evolve a few times.
The first W slant was, like most of the World Wide Web in the 90s, a left-libertarian slant - common to the 20/30-something (slightly Asperger's) white men who dominated computing then. During the 2000s, as W became popular and gained many more editors, the slant moved towards a more moderate and centrist liberal position. As this was not far off the centre of gravity of the West generally, a lot of people were, if not happy, then content with this.
The most recent slant, kicking off in the 2010s, is towards what is best called "progressivism", under the influence of Social Justice ideology - which is now the overwhelmingly dominant cultural ideology in academia and among young university educated activists, but actually a small minority opinion in the general public. Given the way that Social Justice ideology and activism (often unhelpfully termed 'woke') has swept through pretty much every institution in the Western world in the last decade, it would actually be *remarkable* in itself if W has somehow - and almost uniquely - totally escaped this major cultural revolution that has affected every other aspect of society. How could it not be affected? Well, it *is* affected. This isn't a surprise.
(I discount the surprisingly common but obviously bad-faith position that the Social Justice phenomenon is an illusion "invented by the Right Wing Media" - that's neither a serious position.)
There has always been a problem with pages in W being "defended" by possessive editors - often historic contributors defending their own additions. There has also always been a problem with contentious pages being defended by cliques of ideologically motivated editors. But what I feel is a development of the last decade is that the ideological motive of the large majority of defended pages is now unified in a way that it never has been before. I.e. the ideological slant for nearly all page defence now is that of Social Justice ideology vs The World .
This hasn't happened in the last few years, this is the culmination of a decade-long evolution and embedding of systemic bias into the rules - and crucially *consensus interpretation* of those rules - of the W project; e.g. particularly in WP:RS (reliable sources) and WP:UNDUE. It wouldn't be possible to just flick a switch and reverse this slant now, even if it was accepted as true.
I'll give a short example. Reference has been made by others regarding the rules and established consensus around "reliable sources". This is a particular problem now, that makes removing the bias on many egregious pages de facto impossible. Political bias in the wider mainstream media means that sites like e.g. the NYT and Guardian - which remain "reliable" - often deliberately omit to report at all on issues that they feel will harm their preferred narrative ju-jour. If the only sites that report on some contentious events are those that have been cast as "unreliable" then - from a W point of view - the event never happened, and mentioning it on a W page is not allowed. This has a major effect on some pages, where events that are common knowledge to have happened, and not denied by anyone serious, cannot be mentioned due to WP:RS. Note that this kind of de facto W censorship is only possible due to the now-widespread deliberate habit of non-reporting of "unhelpful" news in the mainstream media; a feature across the political spectrum in the 2020s.
In the first two sections, author Dan dismissed W critiques as anecdotes on a few bad apple-editors. That's fair, but he needs to explain why the bad apples *always* fall from the same ideological tree. In the third section Dan argues both that the bias is false because W likes Reagan, or true because Trump is a criminal. Yes, Trump is indeed a criminal, but Reagan was coincidentally the last Republican that lots of liberals voted for. But most importantly, Dan rather obviously avoids addressing the much more striking and reliable bias in US senator data. So while this is an interesting article, and it's a useful addition to the current debate over ideological bias at Wikipedia, it's not particularly convincing, in my opinion.
I still use W multiple times a day, but I always read the 'talk' page, where you'll usually see if ideological activists are at work. Sadly I don't donate to W any more (nor other formerly liberal but now strongly progressivist institutions, e.g. Amnesty International). If I had advice for W I'd say: first use management ability to fix the very real ideological bias in the reliable sources "consensus". There are too many radical Left-wing (and even extreme Left-wing) activist publications and gossip-sites considered 'reliable', while serious moderate Right and even centrist publications are cast as 'unreliable' and de facto banned. Good luck!
There are lots of reasonable criticisms to be made and explored. You've enumerated some of them. And frankly, if everybody talked about WIkipedia's flaws the ways you are, I may not have even bothered writing that essay. Unfortunately, the people making the argument I took on are not so reasonable, and are instead repeating a ridiculously sweeping message which could seriously damage the reputation, and eventually the quality, of the greatest collection of knowledge in human history.
But the funny thing is, lots of what you write here is the sort of stuff Wikipedians debate all the time. Reliable sources? Have you read the debates around how publications should be designated? They are stunningly exhaustive. It's amazing how much time and energy people of good faith have put into them. Now, if someone wants to say, for example, that the debate around publication X had a disproportionate number of people of viewpoint Y, so the discussion was skewed and the outcome unreasonable, that's not only fair game, that's a positive contribution. If I were a Wikipedian, I would welcome that sort of scrutiny. It just improves discussions and makes Wikipedia better.
Your point about how that which isn't reported can't make it into Wikipedia is well taken. It's a serious problem. But your turn this into a left-right thing by claiming that the mainstream media frequently refused to publish news if it's not politically advantageous. I think that's a gross overstatement, but maybe I'm wrong. The biggest implication of the problem you identify has nothing to do with left-right squabbles: The collapse of newspapers, particularly in mid- and small markets, means an increasingly large volume of news is never published in a mainstream outlet. Hence, it's never available to be cited in Wikipedia. That's a big and growing problem, but of course because it doesn't involve left-right tribalism, no one cares to even mention it. (You want to talk about how public discourse is impoverished? The all-consuming obsession with left-right partisan politics is a good place to start.)
Now, you also write that what you think of as a progressive bias is "the culmination of a decade-long evolution and embedding of systemic bias into the rules." Oh? Conservapedia was created explicitly as a reaction to what a conservative thought was Wikipedia's awful progressive bias ... in 2006. Wikipedia had barely begun. And most of the rules you think are rigged didn't exist.
As to your paragraph on Trump, Reagan, etc, you have misunderstood my argument. I am simply saying sentiment is not stance so using a measure of sentiment as a measure of stance is illegitimate. And no, it isn't on me to explain every seeming imbalance. The onus, as always, is on those making a claim. Now, I could hypothesize why that Senate chart is the way it is -- Republican discourse in general has become much more negative and oppositional at least since the Tea Party era and is now largely a reflection of the man who dominates the party with discourse that is massively negative -- but what does that matter? If the measure is being used to measure something it manifestly does not measure, that's the end of the argument. That evidence gets tossed. (And I can't help but notice that when you accuse me of ignoring evidence because it's awkward, I could note that you ignored the evidence (like the US think tank and UK MP data) that doesn't fit what you're writing. And imply you are being intellectually dishonest. But I won't. Instead, I will assume you didn't mention that because you were not writing a comprehensive essay getting into the weeds of all possible details and the omission was perfectly innocent. Please extend me the same courtesy.)
You expand importantly upon some arguments that I and others have alluded to above. Dan studiously avoids responding to actual arguments like these - at best dismissing them as anecdotes. Only an impossibly exhaustive statistical analysis will satisfy Dan the purist. /eye roll
Check out their approved sources page. That can give you an idea.
Have you read the (endless) pages on which editors argue about which sources are reputable and which are not? Those are the sources of those decisions. And what I see on those pages is a lot of people wrestling hard with what are inherently complex and epistemologically difficult questions. What I do NOT see is a bunch of leftist zealots advancing a cause.
Two other tacks one could try, if one wanted to measure whether Wikipedia ass a woke bias are:
(1) measure the likelihood of facts that're pro-woke being removed from Wikipedia (or never being put there in the first place) versus facts that're anti-woke
(2) try to measure the political leaning of Wikipedia editors directly
The problem is that it is impossible to do an exhaustive analysis of Wikipedia, because of the volume of material on the website. And Dan will dismiss anything less than exhaustive as mere anecdoodling. He sets up an impossible task, and then complains that the critics can't meet it.
Yes, I ask for evidence proportionate to, and supportive of, the sweeping assertion conservatives make. How unfair of me.
Look, as I've said repeatedly to anyone who will listen, it is not only fair game, it is positively constructive for people to examine articles, subjects, and editorial decisions on Wikipedia and criticize them when warranted. That's how Wikipedia will get better. And, in fact, it's how Wikipedia became as good as it is now because that is precisely what Wikipedians do every day. What I object to are sweeping dismissals of the whole project -- like "Wokepedia" -- that are simply not warranted by the available evidence.
Compare: Government is vast, and nobody can claim to know everything that goes on in government. But scandal and corruption turn up so frequently, in so many nooks and crannies of government, regardless of the administration or political orientation, that some *dare* to make the generalization that there is lots of corruption and scandal in government that the public are unaware of. Indeed, that scandal and corruption are endemic to public administration. Is that a crazy position to hold or to state? No, of course not! One can give some reasons of general application why endemic corruption is to be expected in government - incentives are such that it will spring forth, oversight is under-funded, there is not enough transparency, the people who benefit from the corruption make and apply the rules, etc. - but the only way to really know how bad the problem is would be to go inside government and look carefully - which is impossible. So we are all supposed to remain neutral and skeptical about charges of corruption and scandal in government, and to blithely want more and bigger government? That's silly.
What's unfair is taking something some conservatives say in the context of political campaigning or commentary, and treating it as though it were a scientific proposition. Perhaps those who call it "Wokepedia" are perfectly aware of all of the nuances you bring to the discussion. Perhaps they know they are generalizing from their own limited investigations. Still, politics isn't a fair game, and calling it "Wokepedia" is certainly fair enough for politics. There is enough truth to the charge that it is worth stating the case as a caution to others - and as a prod to do better.
I agree with you that there is no short-cut to proving that Wikipedia is, or is not, politically biased. Your anecdote about the folks you met at the conference in Poland proves nothing - "It is not data" - since as you say, "Reality is so much bigger than politics. And so is Wikipedia." To examine political bias, you first have to weed out the 99.9% of articles - along with their authors & editors - that have no bearing on hot political topics of the day. Your observation that there is no "top-down," coordinated direction-taking by :independent volunteers" is irrelevant, because nobody is proposing a conspiracy theory here. Rather, the suggestion is that in the tiny percentage of articles with contemporary political implications, Wikipedia is subject to the same herd mentality you find everywhere in politics. Authors & editors cycle around popular views and sentiments, right or wrong.
The only way to test the hypothesis is to read the impugned articles and exercise judgment about their content. You say that a perfectly neutral, factual article on Trump would necessarily contain a lot of negative sentiment - but would it be negative sentiment *toward* Trump, or rather toward the circumstances he finds himself in because of his political enemies? Maybe a fair article on Trump would eschew the vast quantities of utter bullshit about him, and focus more on his accomplishments. There's no obvious reason why a Wikipedia article on Trump should devote more space to his rape & defamation trial than to the decline in black unemployment during his presidency, for example. The latter is *vastly* more important that the former. Same with the January 6th nonsense, the Russia collusion hoax, and the ridiculous impeachments. Maybe if the article gave proper weight to what is important, a neutral article on Trump would be highly positive...
There really is no such think as a value-neutral judgment about political commentary. Consider Trump's rape & defamation trial. To form a worthwhile judgment on the Wikipedia entry about this event, you have to know a lot about the law, and the values behind the law. A perfectly neutral legal analysis of this event would focus on how the NY legislature changed the statute of limitations specifically to afford his accuser a brief window of opportunity to make an accusation 30 years after the fact, which is unprecedented. It would focus on the judge's unprecedented rulings on the admissibility and inadmissibility of various kinds of evidence. It would focus in the accuser's many inconsistencies and bizarre memory lapses - she couldn't even pin down the event to a particular year (making it impossible for Trump to prove from his business records that he was somewhere else at the alleged time). And so on and so forth. That is, it would accurately depict Trump as the victim of a political witch-hunt. It would appear to be sympathetic toward Trump, and hostile to the travesty cooked up by his enemies.
Does Wikipedia meet this test? I don't know; I haven't bothered to check. But I doubt it, and I suspect this is the kind of consideration that leads Musk and those aligned with his way of thinking to call it Wokepedia.
Dan, your simplistic arguments do not even begin to dismiss the case against Wikipedia, I'm afraid.
"Your observation that there is no "top-down," coordinated direction-taking by "independent volunteers" is irrelevant, because nobody is proposing a conspiracy theory here." I quoted a recent article saying precisely that. It's even in the sub-hed. Please read again.
On the paragraph following, I agree. If people want to look at particular articles, or subjects, and consider how they are treated, and whether they lived up to the "neutral point of view" standard, is perfectly reasonable. But the people pushing the "Wokepedia" line aren't interested in anything so reasonable. Instead, they want to label and dismiss. And they simply don't have the evidence to justify such sweeping conclusions.
On the following paragraph, you don't understand what Wikipedia is. "Neutral point of view" means that where there are significant disputes about facts, Wikipedia should lay out the differing views but not take a position as to which is correct. Trump's convictions are a perfect example: A Wikipedia article should lay out the case for why they are justice done along with the case for why they are justice abused. And leave it at that. You, by contrast, seem to think that the view you think is correct is therefore the one Wikipedia should present, and it is only to the extent that Wikipedia does that that it does its job "properly." With respect, you're wrong. That's not and never has been how Wikipedia works.
As to your concluding sentence: You have ignored my "simplistic arguments" and ignored the evidence for and against. You have simply presented your own feeling as fact. You will forgive me if I find it considerably less than persuasive.
There is an infinite number of stupid arguments one could make on any side of any topic. And in politics, most of them have been made. You pretend that it is Wikipedia's role to catalogue every stupid argument that has ever been given, and in doing so remain "neutral" between them. That would very quickly render Wikipedia useless, as it would rapidly fill up with nonsense.
No, the role of an editor is to keep out the dross. That requires judgment, which apparently is frequently lacking in Wikipedia entries on political matters. Judgment about what is important and what is distraction; judgment about what is sound, tried & true, and what is unprecedented and silly. An encyclopedia that is fulfilling the role would perhaps not say that Trump's rape trial was a travesty of justice; but it would explain that everything about it was hinkey as assessed by tried & true legal principles. If you don't think so, you lack sound legal judgment - and there's no persuading someone of unsound judgment.
Grant, you are demonstrating that you don't know anything about Wikipedia and how it was/is created, and don't care to learn. So I think we'll end this now. Good night.
I'll just note that labelling something isn't dismissing it. A label is a characterization; it's up to the reader/listener to decide whether to ponder or dismiss.
Loved you essay. Since Fox News came onto the scene, I have often thought about bias in the news, especially the rights assertion of bias.
Since Fox and its various personalities -- Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, etc.-- consisently lie, like Trump, the right projects their malfeasance on institutions for reporting the truth. The truth has become liberal, woke, or fake news.
Hahahaha! And progressive commentators *don't* "consistently lie"?? Hahahahaha.
Actually, they don't. There may be individuals, but generally, no. That's why whenever supported facts are made known Trump, Fox, and Friends label them fake news or tell another lie.
As an example consider "Mostly peaceful protests" to describe BLM arson riots. The pro-woke media cannot be relied on to tell the truth, any more than Fox can.
Yeah, progressives are so deep in their bubble they can't imagine anyone but the opposition being liars. Other examples are "some very good people on both sides," and the Russia collusion hoax that they kept going for 6 years. It's to cry for.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I strongly disagree, especially on Canadian Wikipedia posts. They tend to be as negative as possible, especially regarding anyone who's been prominent in politics and media. Articles tend to ignore achievements and are loaded up with negativity. This is especially true of articles about conservatives and I am anything but one. People who are trendy among the college crowd tend to get a much more positive entry. I have had my own problems with Wikipedia. If someone starts a page about you, you're not allowed to change it or add to it, even if the material is false and defamatory. If you tell them the material is libelous. you're quickly banned from making a legal threat. I had to actually begin legal action to get my page fixed and, of course, I am banned for life. Ask Jimmy about Rachel Marsden and her Wikipedia page, and how her complaint to him about it resulted in a sexual relationship between the two. I strongly suggest you look at all the incarnations of the Marsden page, how I was treated for saying Fraser Institute material was not evidence to hang her with, and the brutal blowback from Canadian editors. They are not lovable nerds and Wales is no hero. In my line of work, having sex with someone who came to me with a problem would get me disbarred. I see many Wikipedia "editors" as not much better than online conservative and leftist trolls who push agendas and are not interested in accurately portraying reality in the entries they write. The first solution: have people "edit" under their own name. There's a reason why academics and authors don't write non-fiction under pseudonyms, and it applies to Wikipedia.
Mark, really? My response to this is right in the piece: I have no doubt whatsoever that within the vast universe that is Wikipedia, there is this, that, and the other problem(X1000). But identifying one — I’ll assume you’re right — hardly amounts to proof that Wikipedia, in toto, can dismissed as “Wokepedia” or anything else. It is proof that Wikipedia is flawed and in need of improvement. But no one — not least any Wikipedian — ever said Wikipedia is flawless.
You can't slough this behaviour off as fringe. It's much more than that. Yes, there are are many thousands of articles that are OK, but in anything political, there are cliques who push their point of view and drive out anyone who disagrees. I can show you many entries that are no more than hit jobs on living people. They are the first thing that comes up when the names of these people are googled. Marsden is a stellar case study: defamed by Wikipedia for months, then talking to Wales, who immediately slept with her, then broke up with her by posting on Wikipedia. Is she crazy, as her entry and talk pages suggested, and imply now? Maybe, but being literally screwed when trying to get help can't do mush for one's mental health. As for the original assault allegation -- which has its own pages, which is something -- I've done a lot of sports law and that kind of allegation is not only common, too often they turn out to be true, or unprovable. The sexism in Wikipedia has been commented about for years, and it's real. So is the tall poppy syndrome. Balancing hundreds of entries that are biographies, geographic entries, etc against pain inflicted on real people now empowers people to keep doing this. Wales made himself into a sort of cult leader. Wikipedia has at least one co-founder who is critical of what's happened. You can go ahead and write the book, but maintain your high standards and don't get sucked in.
I have no problem accepting that this article, or that subject, is flawed, biased, etc. I have no problem accepting that there may be cliques contributing to same. If people want to make those arguments, good, let's look at specifics. What I have a problem with is the sweeping dismissal -- "Wokepedia" -- I wrote about. It's not supported by good evidence. Period.
Interesting, but I think this discussion is overly focused not only on English Wikipedia but specifically on Wikipedia in the U.S. It's a shame that there isn't much research on the influence of Wikipedia in other languages, which makes it difficult to extend the discussion in an evidence-informed way. Personally, as a native Spanish speaker, I find Wikipedia to be an oasis of curated and relevant information. It’s not perfect, but for many everyday uses, it’s far better than the alternatives, and for that, I’m very grateful. If you're writing a book with Jimmy, it might be worthwhile to explore its global influence more and not focus so heavily on its impact in the U.S. Thanks.
I take your points. But the "Wokepedia" accusation is mostly (not entirely) a charge brought by American conservatives. Hence the focus of this piece.