Can You Trust Wikipedia?

5-Minute Video Presented by Ashley Rindsberg

Wikipedia is the most widely used source of information in human history.

Think about it.

When you Google anything—from historical events to current events —Wikipedia dominates the results.

Google ranks Wikipedia articles in the first spot on 80% of topic searches, and uses Wikipedia articles to populate its "knowledge panels" that are displayed next to these searches.

With this kind of reach, we would all want Wikipedia to be fair, objective, and accurate.

And if you’re doing research on Roman emperors, or Isaac Newton’s laws of motion or Beethoven’s Fifth symphony, it usually is.

But when it comes to contemporary political and social issues, Wikipedia has become something else entirely: a battlefield where ideology outranks accuracy.

When you're researching immigration, climate change, or international conflicts, you'll find not neutral information, but carefully crafted narratives.

On these issues Wikipedia is neither fair, nor objective, nor accurate.

How did this happen? Through coordinated groups of editors who systematically control what information stays and what gets deleted.

And anyone who challenges their preferred narrative gets shut down.

On issue after issue only one point of view is permitted.

Take Israel.

Over the past few years, a group of 40 anti-Israel editors have engaged in a campaign to fundamentally delegitimize the Jewish state and whitewash the crimes of Hamas and other terrorist groups.

These editors have scrubbed ties between Israel and the Jewish people from dozens of articles. They’ve contorted the definition of Zionism from a call for “restoration of the Jews to their homeland” to a call for “the colonization of Palestine by European Jews.”

Almost all things related to Israel have been tainted. For example, two of the main editors from this group contributed over 90% of the content to an article they created originally called “Zionism, race and genetics,” which attempts to smear Zionism by comparing it to Nazi race science.

The group isn’t just focused on tarring Israel. It also works round the clock to whitewash the crimes of Islamist groups.

One editor removed mention of Hamas’ genocidal charter. Others have tried to deny atrocities of the October 7, 2023, massacre.

Working in tandem, two editors went on “speed runs” to delete dozens of human rights abuses committed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

But this isn’t just about Israel and its enemies. Wikipedia articles related to American politics, racism, transgenderism and dozens of other subjects have seen a similar effect play out.

Wikipedia wasn't always like this.

There was a time—not long ago—when it was actually neutral.

What changed?

2016.

When Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, the left didn't just lose an election.

It lost its mind.

Clinton blamed her loss on Russian disinformation.

She declared a "fake news epidemic" before Congress.

For the left, the message was clear: control the Internet or lose again.

Enter the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) — Wikipedia's parent organization.

It saw an opportunity.

The Foundation's Executive Director, Katherine Maher, declared Wikipedia's neutrality a "white male Westernized construct."

Her solution? Something that came to be known as the Wikimedia Movement Strategy.

Its mission wasn't subtle: transform Wikipedia from an encyclopedia into a social justice platform. Internal documents from this period, now public, show a deliberate shift towards what WMF termed "knowledge equity" – effectively prioritizing certain political perspectives over others.

That would take gobs of money. Tens of millions.

They got it.

A big chunk came from an organization called the Tides Foundation which is funded by progressive billionaire George Soros.

His acolytes now fill Wikimedia's leadership ranks.

They, in turn, empowered the left-wing editors who now control the Wikipedia narrative, a narrative which is anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-Western, and anti-Christian.

Unfortunately, Wikipedia’s influence doesn’t stop at its own website anymore. That would be bad enough.

Every major AI system—from ChatGPT to Google’s Gemini—feeds on Wikipedia’s massive database.

That means the future of unbiased information itself is in jeopardy. And the source of that unbiased information is harder to identify because it is embedded in AI systems.

Every student writing a term paper with the help of AI.

Journalist fact-checking a story.

Policymaker researching an issue.

They're all using Wikipedia, whether they know it or not.

So, how can we bring Wikipedia back to its original mission?

We must let them know that we are on to their game. For example, call them out on social media if you know they have something wrong.

I’ve seen posts like these and done stories on them.

The concept behind the site was a brilliant one: a decentralized crowd-sourced encyclopedia—countless articles written by countless contributors each fact-checking the work of others.

We must demand a return to that model.

Until that return comes, it’s incumbent on all of us to seek out other sources of information. We must become our own fact-checkers.

We can’t outsource that responsibility to anyone.

Least of all Wikipedia.

I'm Ashley Rindsberg, Senior Editor at Pirate Wires, for Prager University.

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