Wikipedia’s Web 2.0 Totalitarian Universe

By Kurt Nimmo
Dec. 10, 2007

Responding to a New York Times Magazine article where Wikipedia founder Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales declared some “people are idiots and shouldn’t be writing,” so long as Wikipedia and its fawnish minions make the call, Cade Metz, writing for the Register, states the obvious: “Despite its popular reputation as a Web 2.0 wonderland, Wikipedia is not a democracy. But the totalitarian attitudes of the site’s ruling clique go much further than Jimbo cares to acknowledge.”

Metz writes:

In early September, the Wikipedia inner circle banned edits from 1,000 homes and one massive online retailer in an attempt to suppress the voice of one man.

His name is Judd Bagley, and when the ban came down, he hadn’t edited Wikipedia in over a year. He was merely writing about the site, from his own domain. The Wikipedia elite blacklisted Judd Bagley because he accused them of using their powers to hijack reality.

Mr. Bagley may have rubbed tin horn dictator Wales wrong and thus his unceremonious detour to the Wikipedia memory hole. However, Wikipedia is notorious for scrubbing other entries, and not simply because a precious ego or two gets chaffed. Political correctness figures into the equation as well.

As Paul Joseph Watson noted in September, “websites such as MySpace, Wikipedia and Digg pose as virtuous online information democracies yet are bossed by bias censors and patrolled by organized armies of trolls whose sole purpose is to discredit and delete controversial information by launching unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks on the credibility of its source or its very right to be discussed (Wikipedia trolls deleted a list of Republican sex scandals, among a host of other manifestly provable controversies).”

In addition, as Watson notes, the sites are crawling with government disinfo agents:

They are also wide open to abuse from nefarious government agencies and corporations seeking to “memory hole” sensitive information from the web, as was documented by the WikiScanner scandal. In this climate, a media watchdog like Prison Planet should be welcomed, not shunned, censored and blocked off by MySpace filtering software.

Indeed, “memory hole” is an apt characterization, for Wikipedia, not unlike Winston Smith in Orwell’s famous dystopian novel 1984, shuffles the politically inconvenient to the incinerator, not one of roaring flames but rather bytes and bits overwritten on its massive database.

As documented by the UK Independent last August, Wikipedia allows “thousands of self-serving edits” and deletions. “Some of the guilty parties identified by [Virgil Griffith’s Wikiscanner project]” include the British “Labor Party, the CIA, Republican Party and the Church of Scientology,” among others, including ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical, Diebold, Boeing, the FBI, the Israeli government, the National Rifle Association, and even the Discovery Channel.

In addition to corporate and governmental monkey wrenching, Wikipedia has a hand in making sure the entries on its site reflect reality as viewed by Wales and the “community.” For instance, last July, Jimbo admitted as much during a Q & A at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. “The audience at the Commonwealth Club were far more interested in the politics of Wikipedia rather than the inner workings of search engines. How accurate are Wikipedia's posts? How does Wikipedia plan to approach censorship in China? How does Wikipedia intend to maintain neutrality of information in the face of the 2008 elections? How do you deal with paid PR firms and copyright issues?” writes Lorna Li for bub.blicio.us.

Jimbo's answers were pretty much what you'd expect from a founder of a behemoth Wiki empire. At the end of the day, it all goes back to trust in the all-powerful Community — its ability to police itself, identify and eliminate pirated content, regulate neutrality and maintain accuracy of information.

Ms. Li should have added: at the end of the day, it also includes the political bias of the controllers, who they are inclined to please, or even who they take orders from, not that there is sufficient evidence Wales and Wikipedia are a wholly owned government intelligence op.