- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sent a letter to the nonprofit operator of Wikipedia alleging a pattern of liberal bias in articles on the collaborative encyclopedia.
“I write to request information about ideological bias on the Wikipedia platform and at the Wikimedia Foundation,” Cruz wrote to Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander in a letter dated October 3. “Wikipedia began with a noble concept: crowdsource human knowledge using verifiable sources and make it free to the public. That’s what makes reports of Wikipedia’s systemic bias especially troubling.”
Citing research from the conservative Manhattan Institute, Cruz wrote that “researchers have found that articles on the site often reflect a left-wing bias.” Cruz alleged that “bias is particularly evident in Wikipedia’s reliable sources/perennial sources list” because it describes “MSNBC and CNN as ‘generally reliable’ sources, while listing Fox News as a ‘generally unreliable’ source for politics and science. The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center gets a top rating, but the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, is a ‘blacklisted’ and ‘deprecated’ source that Wikipedia’s editors have determined ‘promotes disinformation.’”
I recently looked into this on another forum where someone shared some articles supposedly proving bias. One article was itself highly biased to the right, so not particularly credible.
The other article, from an organization that ranked the bias of news sources, was very neutral and objective, took accusations of bias seriously, went into detail, and removed the “unbiased” classification from Wikipedia, but didn’t conclude any provable bias, leaving it unranked. The best example of bias they had was the fact that articles on socialism and communism didn’t list Soviet atrocities, but those atrocities have their own pages and are also mentioned on pages of the countries involved, so that was not a great example.
All these accusations are just the result of a massive right-wing campaign against facts and reality-based reporting. Everything that doesn’t follow their propaganda is biased, according to them.
This is really what it comes down to.
The Wikipedia page for Capitalism also doesn’t have any atrocities in my quick check; the “criticism” section is fairly short and tame. Somehow though I’m sure this doesn’t bother conservatives.
And to act like communism can only exist in a soviet context is just ridiculous. Like you said, the atrocities are very real and have their own pages because they’re not really so directly connected to communism. We shouldn’t lump every nasty thing the US has done into the capitalism page, either.
God, I just wish for once conservatives would have a thought that was even vaguely consistent across their worldview but in the end all we get is record-breaking hypocrisy and twisted feelings over any kind of sense.
That’s what you get when you build your whole worldview and political platform on feelings instead of provable facts.
What is what you get? Complete control over what was previously considered the wealthiest, most powerful nation on the planet?