You think the BBC is biased? Check out Wokepedia
Who would you name as the most influential media company in the world? Some might offer Fox, Disney or the BBC. Or AT&T and Comcast, the largest media giants by revenue. In fact, the real answer may be hidden in plain view: Wikipedia.
The operation not only receives far more clicks (23 billion a month) than the world’s most popular news organisations, but if you ask Alexa or Siri a question, it’s likely you’ll be returned a Wikipedia-generated fact. Even if you never click on the site, you’ll be served Wikipedia entries at the top of your search page. No media company in history has ever dreamed of such ubiquity…
Faced with such riches, WMF did what every bureaucracy loves to do, and expanded. The Foundation now lists 450 staff and contractors; law firms and lobbyists have been beneficiaries too. Aside from the occasional grant, the coal-face workers who create the content continue unpaid…
The Wikimedia Foundation has long had friendly ties to the Clintons, and these have grown closer. Since 2016 it has used the Clintons’ PR guru, Craig Minassian, whose firm became the WMF’s highest paid external contractor, while Minassian retained his full-time role with the Clintons. And it chose to lodge the endowment with the Tides Foundation. The Tides network allows anonymous donors to support left-leaning causes, and has been described as a ‘dark money group’ for Democrat Party interests…
One person who certainly thinks political bias is a problem is Wikipedia’s co-founder Larry Sanger, who set up the project with Jimmy Wales, but left after a year. Last year Sanger contrasted the honeyed entry for Barack Obama – a scandal-free zone, he noted – with the peppery entry for Donald Trump.
But Wikipedia’s biases may be deeper and more subtle. It reflects the values and prejudices of Silicon Valley’s elite. For example, the Wikipedia search result for antitrust law redirected to an article that tactfully omits Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. All the tech giants have relationships with Wikipedia – but unlike in a typical newspaper, these dealings are omitted…
With “facts” generated by Wikipedia worming themselves into every corner of our digital lives, such as your Alexa speaker or iPhone, perhaps it’s the ubiquity of information that’s the problem – and something that should concern us all. Olenick was astonished when on a WMF conference call he heard Wikipedia expert Andrew Lih relay that Google and Facebook had suggested that major tech companies should collaborate to support Wikipedia as a single source of information.
“There should never be a single source of information,” he says. “On many topics, is there a single truth?” he asks. For conservatives, it might not be one they recognise.
