The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Wikipedia's Dirty Little Secret
Wikipedia’s leftist bias is nothing new to Patriot Post readers. Nor is it even news to the site’s founder, who last year lamented that leftists control the platform. Paula Bolyard takes up that torch with new evidence:
When Wikipedia was founded, it was based on open-source principles (though it was never technically an open-source project). Basically, anyone who had access to the internet could go in and add to or edit articles. The idea was to crowdsource the vast knowledge in the universe to come up with accurate articles that could be used by anyone anywhere, free of charge. It was a great idea in theory, but it hasn’t panned out that way. In recent years it has devolved into left-wing tyranny by moderators who have an agenda, many of whom apparently have an ax to grind.
“Wikipedia claims its articles are written from a neutral point of view,” she notes. It says it strives for an “impartial tone” and “avoid[s] advocacy.” Yet advocacy and partiality litter its pages and prevent many things from being said at all. As Bolyard puts it, “Under these guidelines, any article can be manipulated or spun to say anything and everything, or nothing at all.”
She elabortes in two key ways. One is obvious leftist bias in the presentation of abortion. Wikipedia’s entry reads: > When properly done, abortion is one of the safest procedures in medicine, but unsafe abortion is a major cause of maternal death, especially in the developing world, while making safe abortion legal and accessible reduces maternal deaths. It is safer than childbirth, which has a 14 times higher risk of death in the United States.
“Safer for whom?” she asks. “Certainly not the babies who end up dead and disposed of in a medical waste bag.” And does Wikipedia really think it’s entry is “impartial” and avoids “advocacy”?
Another example is the way conservative media outlets are treated. Entries are full of references to “controversies” and “fact-checks,” when no such things exist for a slew of Leftmedia outfits.
In addition to biased reporting on controversial topics, articles about conservative media sources are singled out for fact-checks while left-wing sites are not. For example, PJ Media’s Wikipedia page consists mostly of a list of alleged “false claims” based on “fact” checks by left-wing activists who disagree with our views on issues like climate change, election integrity, and radical Islam. The silliest item on the list is an article I wrote several years ago describing my experience searching Google for stories about President Trump and finding that it was biased toward left-wing news sites. I was very clear in the article to say that my report was anecdotal rather than scientific, a fact that the Wikipedia activist and even the fact-checkers acknowledged, yet there it is in the list of “false claims” because “fact-checkers at PolitiFact rated it false.”
Do left-wing sites get the same treatment? You know the answer to that.
More important perhaps than Wikipedia’s bias, Bolyard says, is the fact that “millions of people go to Wikipedia every month believing it’s a source for unbiased information, unfiltered by the gatekeepers.” She concludes, “Nothing could be further from the truth.”