The theory is great, but in practice Wikipedia, like most media ventures, is a vehicle for liberal ideas.Posted on 10/06/2018 7:10:17 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Wikipedia pretends to be a new kind of crowd-sourced, non-profit “people’s encyclopedia” containing fair and unbiased material. In theory, anyone is allowed to edit material, thus providing a wide range of input rather than one expert’s ideas as in conventional encyclopedias.
I have written one entire entry, on my great-grandfather, who was a candidate for president. I have edited a few other entries to correct errors.
The theory is great, but in practice Wikipedia, like most media ventures, is a vehicle for liberal ideas.
Two examples may suffice:
The Wikipedia entry on fascism follows the liberal line that the political spectrum runs from fascism on the right to communism on the left. This is nonsense, and the basis for the constant references to conservatives as “Nazis” by liberals, who fancy Nazis to be fascists. Any meaningful political spectrum would run from total freedom, or anarchy, on the right to totalitarian government with no freedom on the left. The Nazis were, in fact, socialists and as Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism, differed from the Soviet communists only in methods, not intended results.
When I edited the entry to provide some balance, it was rejected in its entirety.
In its entry on Fox News, Wikipedia says “Fox News has been described as practicing biased reporting in favor of the Republican Party, the George W. Bush and Donald Trump administrations, and conservative causes.” I added to that paragraph, "just as networks such as CNN and CBS have been accused of biased reporting in favor of liberal causes."
It took the editors eight minutes to reject and remove my addition.
This despite the fact that the entry has this label:
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
It’s great if you want to read the plot of a movie without watching it or find out about the history of a famous building. It just can’t be trusted for anything controversial.
It is a quick way to give me some idea who or what someone \ something is.
I would never use it for any of today’s hot button issues as there is too much bias.
Wikipedia is only on illusion for idiots.
I cannot count the number of liberals that I have educated about Wackapedia. Anyone at anytime can edit it. Truth? Honesty? Hah!!
Personal experience.
Some wiki articles on leftists are “frozen” by wikipedia. So the existing leftist praise for the subject can’t be countered by facts. I tried, and was rejected.
Pretty much agree with you (heck, Conservapedia has quite a few articles highlighting the leftist bias on Wikipedia, as you can see here: https://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia). However, I do massively disagree with you on ONE thing, and that’s your inference that anarchism is of the far right. It actually isn’t of the far right, if anything, like Nazism and Communism, it is of the far left. Don’t believe me? Just look at Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Sacco and Vazetti, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bill Ayers, Noam Chomsky, and the like, heck, even Pierre Proudhun, the guy who founded anarchism. You are right that Nazism is not even close to being right of center, let alone the far right, however.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.