Cruz sends letter demanding answers from Wikimedia Foundation.

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.’”

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    Left wing bias = says objectively true things about me I don’t like.

    I mean, there’s definitely an Americanized liberal valence to Wikipedia editing, primarily because the website is administered and edited by a bunch of libertarian-leaning liberals. But that’s not the only source of editing. In fact, the primary problem with Wikipedia is that there are so many blind spots the admins can’t track and such a huge incentive to fudge history in your own favor. The idea that the website is objective is fucking horseshit and instances of manipulation are well-documented.

    Wikipedia Scanner – the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith – offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

    Inspired by news last year that Congress members’ offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.

    …

    Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.

    The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization’s net address has made.

    Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.

    Cruz’s problem is that he’s wildly unpopular. Consequently, the site tends to be bombarded by folks posting “Ted Cruz fucked it again” tags to his biography far faster than his own team can polish his hagiography and take down negative news bits. If he was less high profile or more popular, he wouldn’t have this problem.