Wikipedia

A vast, one of a kind, multi-language, multi-editor encyclopaedia.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki link Sourcewatch Wikiquote
"The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit"
Started: January 15, 2001
Founders: Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger

Owner: Wikimedia Foundation

Wikipedia has an impressive 36 million or so articles in around 300 languages. However, once over 50 thousand, the number of active English-language editors Wikipedia has been in decline since 2007, and stood by Summer 2013 at around 30 thousand.

Official Narrative

Wikipedia bills itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit".

Centralisation

Wikipedia is a website, and therefore of necessity centralised. WikiScanner has shown that media organisations, PR companies, agents of the deep state and CIA are systematically editing pages of personal interest to them.

Hierarchical Control

Anyone can edit the site, but reverting people's edits is easy, and so is blocking users or IP addresses. Not everyone can do that. Who decides who can and who can't? Wikipedia editors are kept in line with what has been called "a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere", one which gives special permissions to a very select group of editors - privileges that can be revoked if someone's decisions are deemed 'out of line' with the Official Narrative. Wikipedia is not as radically unbiased and fair as it purports to be, and increasingly reflects the agendas of those with deep pockets who have invested in shaping it to suit their commercial purposes.

Infiltration by Intelligence Agencies

Craig Murray has suggested that GCHQ and other spooks are "embedded" in Wikipedia, which would explain their failure to challenge even the most facile official narratives. In 2018 he suggested that the "Philip Cross" account was either a "morbidly obsessed" individual, or more likely was being used by multiple people for a campaign to support the UK establishment's pro-war official narrative. {{#subobject: |Has superobject=Wikipedia |Has objectClass=Quotation |Has author=Larry Sanger|+sep=, |Has text=“We do have evidence that the CIA, even as early as 2008, that the CIA and FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia,” |Is about=Wikipedia,CIA, FBI|+sep=, |Has wikipediaPage= |Has location=|+sep=, |Has publicationDate=August 1, 2023 |Sourced from= |Has sourceDetails=ca 10:19 - Wikipedia Co-Founder Condemns It: “Most Biased Encyclopedia” in History - SYSTEM UPDATE/Glenn Greenwald |Has sourceTitle= |Has sourceName= |Has sourceURL=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR6dO8U8okk

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“We do have evidence that the CIA, even as early as 2008, that the CIA and FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia,”
Larry Sanger (August 1, 2023) 

Infiltration by other interests

The business of paid edits is hard to document. Major companies hire PR agencies to improve their articles, as well as private individuals that can pay for the service. Some professional Wikipedia editors may choose to voluntary report conflicts of interest, but "Undisclosed paid editing, especially on the part of the largest PR firms, is rampant on Wikipedia,".

Professionalisation

File:Wikipedia for Pay.png

Wikipedia is not controlled by a grassroots organisation of volunteers. The number of individuals editing it has been in decline for years and nowadays it receives multi-million dollar donations from companies and grant giving foundations such as from the Ford Foundation, Omidyar Network and Google, some of which have been linked to seats on the board of the Wikimedia foundation.

Use in Wikispooks

Full article: Wikispooks:Importing From Wikipedia

Wikipedia has a lot of material, but importing large chunks from Wikipedia into Wikispooks is not recommended, since the deep political content of most articles is diluted and obscured with material of little relevance. Hand written pages are strongly preferred. If you use Wikipedia pages as references, the page version number should also be used.

Problems

Full article: Wikipedia/Problems

The core problem of Wikipedia is the problem of establishing reliability. In accordance with its increasing professionalization, its decision to depend on "reliable secondary sources such as mainstream media", echoes the pattern of commercially-controlled media the world over. It is therefore inevitable that at least on commercially or politically sensitive topics, Wikipedia tends to display a predictable pattern of symptoms:

Wikipedia's Problems:

File:Wikipedia-logo-Bias.png Bias

File:Wikipedia-logo-Censorship.png Censorship

File:Wikipedia-logo-Gaps.png Gaps

File:Wikipedia-logo-Spin.png Spin

File:Wikipedia-logo-Obfuscation.png Obfuscation

Censorship

Full article: Wikipedia/Censorship

Wikipedia is subject to censorship, either by swiftly reverting edits which expressed unwanted views (however factually based), or by disallowing edits on certain, particularly sensitive, topics by the page protection system. Page history is also increasingly subject to censorship.

See Also

• WikipediaPlus - A tool to supplement Wikipedia with content from alternative websites such as this
• Wikipediocracy - "We exist to shine the light of scrutiny into the dark crevices of Wikipedia"
• "When a primary source isn't good enough", discussion about Wikipedia's criteria for admissibility

References