It depends on the issue.
Reason editor (and my friend) Katherine Mangu-Ward writes:
As Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have become consumed by controversy over moderation, governance, and the definition of free speech, Wikipedia quietly continues to grow in utility, trustworthiness, and comprehensiveness.
In a literal sense, she may be right.Wikipedia may have become more trustworthy without being very trustworthy.
On issues like sports and other areas where there is not much political controversy, Wikipedia is great. But John Stossel has laid out in some detail Wikipedia’s left-wing bias that causes simple factual statements that don’t fit left-wing narratives to be deleted, often within a day, sometimes within minutes.
See, for example, what Stossel finds about the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, starting at about 2:30.
Stossel points out, at about 7:30, that when he brought this to the attention of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Wales quit communicating with him.
Maybe Katherine could still say that Wikipedia grows in trustworthiness. After all, it finally admits that Communism killed millions of people. It didn’t use to.
The picture above is of Jimmy Wales.
READER COMMENTS
Mark Barbieri
Sep 19 2022 at 9:35am
Given the difficulty in ever getting universal agreement on some points, it feels like Wikipedia needs a better means of allowing multiple viewpoints to coexist. Maybe they could create a process that allows different factions on controversial issues to have their own sections that cannot be edited by people in the other factions. Personally, I would rather read through contradictory arguments than be presented with a single version of the truth that is not widely held.
Brandon
Sep 19 2022 at 10:28am
Pretty cool idea, thanks.
How could this get pitched to Wikipedia’s higher-ups?
Walter Boggs
Sep 19 2022 at 3:13pm
The next time Jimmy e-mails me asking for a donation, I’ll throw him this curveball.
Matthias
Sep 19 2022 at 8:21pm
Wikipedia already tries something like this.
Of course, minus locking the editing for opposing factions. Because how would you even verify what faction (if any) someone is in?
Mark Brophy
Sep 20 2022 at 10:07pm
The goal of socialists is to censor opponents and they’ll settle for nothing less so don’t expect Wikipedia to change. Instead, use a competing wiki.
Todd Kreider
Sep 19 2022 at 11:33am
Wikipedia cofounder Larry Wanger told Unherd last year that until 2009 Wikipedia was neutral but then shifted to only allowing a left MSM view for many issues.
On dominating the content of a Wikipedia page, Wanger said: “It’s a very complex game to play and their are all sorts of tricks to win it.”
A summary of the 30 minute interview is included below the video:
https://unherd.com/thepost/wikipedia-co-founder-i-no-longer-trust-the-website-i-created/
David Henderson
Sep 19 2022 at 12:58pm
Thanks, Todd.
By the way, his name is Larry Sanger. In the Stossel video I linked to, he shows up briefly with his criticism.
Monte
Sep 19 2022 at 12:22pm
Nice exposé of what I suspected to be the case some time ago. There’s an entry by none other than Wikipedia itself regarding its ideological bias. In this entry, Harvard’s Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu, in a 2018 follow-up to their initial study of political bias in Wikipedia articles related to U.S. politics, found that “Wikipedia articles are more slanted towards Democratic views than are Britannica articles, as well as more biased, particularly those focusing on civil rights, corporations, and government.” They qualify this finding by suggesting that bias decreases with more revisions. But if those revisions are being deleted, as claimed by Stossel, what difference?
This prompted me to look into why Wikipedia is constantly asking for donations, giving the impression that the site is struggling to remain solvent. The real reason?
“Kolbe, a former co-editor-in-chief of Wikipedia‘s community newspaper, The Signpost, argues that the non-profit’s rising revenues and record-breaking annual donations are easily sufficient to keep the site operating. Rather than needing cash to keep Wikipedia online and independent, Kolbe suggests the WMF (Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia) wants to further boost its vast savings and fund a range of new projects.” (Wikipedia is loaded, so why’s it asking for donations?)
David Henderson
Sep 19 2022 at 12:59pm
Interesting. Thanks, Monte.
Mark Z
Sep 19 2022 at 12:42pm
There was an article in Quillette in July on wikipedia not only being biased on the topic of intelligence, but becoming increasingly so the past few years. This made me more skeptical that wikipedia is reliable on specialized topics that are seen as ‘political.’ There’s a lot of room for selection bias.
Matthias
Sep 19 2022 at 8:24pm
Gwern has written a lot on Wikipedia.
See eg https://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia-and-Other-Wikis or his defense of inclusionism. (Sorry, no link as too many URLs seem to set off the spam filter here.)
For people interested in economics, Gwern’s research of crypto currency drug markets might also be interesting.
Bill
Sep 20 2022 at 1:00pm
A few years ago, I attempted to add to Wikipedia’s page on the “Dismal Science” that the term had origins in Thomas Carlyle’s pro-slavery critique of the economics of Thomas Malthus and John Stuart Mill. At the time, the page only mentioned Malthus’s infamous prediction of population outstripping natural resources, which as others have pointed out as incorrect. I logged in to my user account, edited the page and cited the relevant source for the edit. The first time, the edit was removed within 10 minutes. I tried again a few hours later adding language like “Some argue the term originated with . . . ” Minutes alter this came down as well. I gave up and never attempted to edit the page again.
To be fair, the page as it reads now years later is much better than it was then.
David Henderson
Sep 20 2022 at 8:12pm
Wow! Interesting story and the good news is how improved the “Dismal Science” piece is.
David Seltzer
Sep 20 2022 at 1:20pm
“Wikipedia’s left-wing bias” Of course. BUT there are countervailing alternative cites for the curious and skeptical. EconLog, Mises Institute, Cato, and other libertarian and conservative outlets, to name a few.
Niko Davor
Sep 20 2022 at 8:30pm
Both EconLong and Cato are pretty hard left-wing partisan outlets, like The Economist. It would be quite a stretch to call such left-wing partisans conservative or libertarian.
Clark Irwin
Sep 20 2022 at 3:01pm
Amazing things do sneak into Wikipedia occasionally, e.g.:
“Wikipedia is not a reliable source,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_a_reliable_source, accessed 3 Nov 2020.
“Wikipedia is not a reliable source. Wikipedia can be edited by anyone at any time. This means that any information it contains at any particular time could be vandalism, a work in progress, or just plain wrong. … There are many errors that remain unnoticed for days, weeks, months, or even years. …
“Articles are only as good as the editors who have been editing them—their interests, education and background—and the efforts they have put into a particular topic or article. Since we try to avoid original research, a particular article may only be as good as (a) the available and discovered reliable sources, and (b) the subject matter may allow. Since the vast majority of editors are anonymous, you have only their editing history and their user pages as benchmarks. Of course, Wikipedia makes no representation as to their truth.”
# # #
David Jorgensen
Sep 20 2022 at 8:19pm
I agree with Katherine Mangu-Ward that Wikipedia continues to grow in utility, trustworthiness, and comprehensiveness. I use Wikipedia constantly.
But John Stossel is correct. Wikipedia’s left-wing bias is overwhelmingly obvious when you read articles related to politics and economics
Niko Davor
Sep 20 2022 at 8:24pm
““It began a long, slow slide into what I would call leftist propaganda.”
— Larry Sanger, Cofounder of Wikipedia
David Henderson mentions Larry Sanger in the comments, but he probably should be linked featured more.
I’m not surprised but disappointed to see Reason, an outlet some would call libertarian, to be shilling for blatant left-wing propaganda.
Props to Henderson for the post.
Justin
Sep 21 2022 at 3:28pm
I tried to edit Wikipedia’s “Price Ceiling” page once many years ago after reading this post: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/07/greg_mankiw_mak.html. Like most sources on the internet, Wikipedia displays a graph which incorrectly calculates the deadweight loss of a price ceiling. I made an edit deleting the graph and explaining why. The next day, the edit was undone with the following justification: “The graph may not be perfect but it is invaluable all the same.” In other words, the editor is perfectly okay with displaying incorrect information on the page. Ultimately, I was too lazy to make a proper graph, and so the incorrect graph remains to this day.
It’s always tough to say whether the editor made this decision out of left-wing bias, but I always wondered if the result would have been different if I fixed an error with the opposite political implication. If anyone was able to come up with a large list of objective errors in Wikipedia articles, it would be an easy question to answer experimentally.
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