When Wikipedia Fails

PetManimal writes "Frank Ahrens of The Washington Post looks at how Wikipedia stumbles when entries for controversial people are altered by partisan observers. Case in point: Enron's Kenneth Lay, who died of natural causes last week, shortly after being sentenced to prison. His Wikipedia entry was altered repeatedly to include unfounded rumors that he had killed himself, or the stress from his trial had caused the heart attack. From the article: '... Here's the dread fear with Wikipedia: It combines the global reach and authoritative bearing of an Internet encyclopedia with the worst elements of radicalized bloggers. You step into a blog, you know what you're getting. But if you search an encyclopedia, it's fair to expect something else. Actual facts, say. At its worst, Wikipedia is an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop, not information.'"

Comments

Re:Square peg, round hole.

[Moofie]

Your retarded.

Re:Too recent & controversial for an encyclope

[XchristX]

The fallacy in your argument is that wikipedia does NOT favor a neutral point of view. Wikipedia favors the person who is most DETERMINED to present his point of view. The Islamic extremist is a classic example of that. The moderate may try to neutralize the article, but then he will be attacked by users with suspiciously muslim names, blocked from editing, banned, have their user pages vandalized and defaced, threatened, insulted, the list of libel and slander is rather large...

Take articles on Hindu-Muslim communalism on wikipedia, for instance. The articles are hopelessly biased in favor of muslims, and either ignore or excuse all of their violence towards Hindus. However, they mercilessly attack all hindus and all of India (despite the fact that a nontrivial fraction of India's popolation is muslim), filling it with anti-India/anti-Hindu bile and outright hate-speech. If you look at the article history, all of the editors have muslim names or are sock puppets of muslims disguised with hindu-sounding names (you can tell that they are sock puppets by looking at their edit history). Administrators who are largely ignorant of this go with the 'majority' consensus and keep the Islamist POV on wikipedia.

This problem has even leaked into articles on Zionism and Israel, where muslims vandalize articles relentlessly with biased anti-Semitic and outright RACIST POV (most articles on Zionism have been protected from editing for this reason), filled with all of the usual anti-semitic canards like blood libels , Protocols of Zion, carrot-and-stick etc. Unfortunately, Hindus are a softer and weaker target than Jews and so they don't neutralize articles about us that are edited by muslim extremists as well as we need to.

The bottom line is that wikipedia is not edited by people with a scholarly detachment, and articles often become highly polemical, biased and often full of hate-speech and bigotry.

Now, in a country such as the United States (where wikimedia servers are housed), free speech rights mandate that all speech, even hate-speech, disgusting as it is, should be allowed. The problem is the PROMINENCE with which it is displayed (on wikipedia) and the fact that it is disguised as scholarly work on wikipedia. A google search on a topic points first to the corresponding wikipedia article, and people are misled into thinking that the hate-speech is factually accurate, leading to subtle forms of brainwashing that, in turn, breeds more hate.

Wikipedia has become little more than a electronic supermarket rag when it comes to articles on politically charged issues.