Wicked, Wicked Wikipedia: The Corruption And Collapse Of The Legendary People’s Encyclopedia
By Richard Gale and Gary Null, Natural Blaze
It is time to take a serious, critical look at Wikipedia and its mission. Is it everything it purports to be as an objective encyclopedic source of knowledge or just another anti-democratic social media dynasty resorting to the censorship and suppression of unorthodox medical science, social criticism and political dissent contrary to its founder’s rigid ideological beliefs? With over 5.6 million articles totaling 45 million pages, Wikipedia offers an enormous amount of information, and the majority of it is recognizably accurate.
Over 30 million people are registered as editors for the site, but the number of active editors fluctuates around 130,000 and is decreasing steadily. On the other hand, entries on contemporary issues that elicit controversy and debate, often when commercial interests and public policies are at stake, have become opportunities for editors to post propaganda, gossip, launch character assassinations, add flagrant misinformation and untruths, and delete truthful data to spin and strengthen specific ideologies, beliefs, and conflicts of interest contrary to the encyclopedia’s rules.
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Today all major media, Left and Right, as well as the larger Silicon Valley firms that support it, employ news and commentary that serve as weapons for mass public ignorance. It is common for people’s reputations to be destroyed. Conservatives and liberals alike claim the other disseminates fake news and each attempts to demonize and censor the other regardless of the accuracy or relevancy of what is being reported.
There are still many investigative journalists with deep integrity and a commitment to expose the truth, such as the late Robert Parry from Consortium News, Chris Hedges and Robert Scheer at Truthdig, Bruce Dixon and Glen Ford at the Black Agenda Report, Henry Giroux and William River Pitts at Truthout and others who have since had their sites blocked by Google and Facebook. But these are only several of hundreds of other online outlets and news blogs that have been banned and left without any recourse to address grievances. There is no arbitration. And this trend is increasing at lightning speed.
For over a decade we have been reviewing hundreds of articles on a daily basis about medicine and health, climate change and the environment, geopolitics and culture. We apply a strong litmus test to determine accuracy and trustworthiness. Consistently we discover that the public is being misled by special interest groups on both sides of the political spectrum. The Left and Right control large segments of the media through advertising or direct ownership. Billions of dollars are spent annually on lobbyists, consultants, think tanks and foundations, public relations firms, and astroturf groups. And behind these entities are even more powerful organizations such as federal intelligence and health agencies, the Business Roundtable, the Atlantic Council, the mega-internet firms, and of course the pharmaceutical industry.
Control of the media and the internet, to silence important voices, denies the public an opportunity to gaze upon the larger picture. For the powerful, it is preferable for the public to see only a small sliver of reality in order to keep citizens in check. For example, in the past, it was not the federal CDC, FDA or the National Cancer Institute that initiated efforts to warm the public about the risks of smoking or to avoid exposure to asbestos. Instead it was from people of conscience, such as whistleblowers, insiders and independent scientists and journalists, who alerted Americans and spoke in opposition to the corporations determined to keep the health risks hidden away in the dark. It was an insider Daniel Ellsberg who brought the Pentagon Papers to public attention, and without Edward Snowden we would not know the full extent of the government’s surveillance state. Mainstream media of its own volition would have remained silent about it.
After many hundreds of hours of investigative research into Wikipedia, a shocking story is being uncovered. Throughout the Wikimedia Foundation’s organizational structure, and reaching into the editorial hierarchy of its open-sourced encyclopedia, are multiple layers of deception, dangerous ideologies, extreme biases, and conflicts of interests. The site has built a wall harboring a cesspool of unprofessional and undefinable editors to obfuscate the truth and slander people and entire professions. In short, a kind of deep state is now acting with authority to control Wikipedia articles.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has shown his personal intolerance towards topics he disagrees with, particularly non-conventional and alternative medicine and whatever else that does not fit into his picture of the reality or whatever he decides is phony or “fake news.” More recently, Wales mission has been to fight fake news. As we demonstrate below, Wales also presumes the prevailing pharmaceutical drug paradigm and the Skeptics support of the Science-Based Medicine ideology is science’s final word for determining the diagnosis and treatment of disease; all other medical modalities outside Big Pharma’s purview is fair game for ridicule, incrimination and ultimately censorship.
Censorship is exclusion from public discourse and debate. Institutions that hold and maintain power are always the least welcoming of contrarian and dissenting voices; therefore the powerful make every effort to define the parameters of debate and select the participants worthy in its eyes. In its wake, censorship silences important stories, enormous bodies of research, science and expertise necessary to sustain democratic integrity. The public is left impoverished for it is denied invaluable knowledge, even information that can be life-saving.
Democracy is steadily being threatened by Silicon Valley, including the San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation, which holds the gatekeeper’s keys for allowing or obscuring the free-flow of reliable knowledge and commentary to the public. In concert with Google, Facebook, Twitter and other major internet firms promoting the large media conglomerates, the Foundation has entered the frenzy to censor and denigrate individuals, medical disciplines, and political voices threatening the dominant citadels of power and hegemony. And Wikipedia editors have been undermining entire fields of knowledge and wisdom for over a decade unbeknownst to the vast majority of its users.
In February 2017, the British tabloid The Daily Mail, the UK’s second large daily newspaper reaching over 4.5 million readers and surpassing the New York Times as the world’s most visited news site on the internet, was banned by Wikipedia as an unreliable news source. Jimmy Wales decided the paper was a distributor of “fake news.” Speaking on CNBC, Wales accused the Daily Mail of “mastering the art.. of running stories that simply aren’t true.”
Founded in 1896, the paper publishes editions in Scotland, Ireland, Continental Europe and North Africa. On seven occasions since 1995 it has earned the prestigious British Press’ “National Newspaper of the Year” Award for breaking noteworthy stories. It is worth noting that Google’s artificial intelligence laboratory, DeepMind Technologies, relies upon the Daily Mail‘s extensive archives as one of its two primary sources to “teach” its computers “to read” and acquire “verbal reasoning.”
Wales’ decision to ban the Mail sets a dangerous precedent that should delegitimize any Wikimedia claims of fairness and objectivity. According to Wikipedia’s own guidelines, it is the responsibility of editors to undertake fact-checking before referencing any source. The banning of news sources is in short an egregious cop out that will only accelerate the current trend of censorship to favor the powerful who hold sway over what the public can know and what should be denied.
The initiator behind the Daily Mail ban is a 35-year old regular Wikipedia editor and British misfit named Michael Cockram, who goes by the pseudonym Hillbillyholiday (perhaps taken from a Massachusetts musical band by the same name). Only a tiny fraction (under 1%) of Wikipedia’s administrators voted in favor of including the Mail on its blacklist. At the time of the controversy, when not editing for Wikipedia, Cochram spent his time on his personal Facebook page that was found to be filled with obscenities, sexism, and racist and Islamophobic remarks. In his first posts in the Wikipedia discussions arguing about the ban, he indicated Wales would approve of the decision.
No doubt, the Mail, sometimes described as the UK’s equivalent to Fox News, is not without its controversies. Many of its stories are outright silly. It has been caught and charged with poor journalism and for reporting misleading and spun stories; however, this is becoming endemic in most mainstream corporate media, including the New York Times which promoted the Bush-Cheney lie about Sadaam Hussain’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. Or there was the Washington Post‘s false claim that Russian hackers penetrated the nation’s electrical grid. All the major networks and news outlets were completely wrong about the charitable White Helmets’ operations in Syria.
The group has now been confirmed conclusively by independent Western journalists on the ground in Syria and testimonies of residents living in the vicinity of the Helmets’ activities, to serve as a propaganda operation behind the US-supported anti-Assad extremists associated with terrorists groups such as al-Nusra and al-Qaeda But nobody would call the Washington Post a fake newspaper although it upsets the Right because it definitely leans heavily towards Democrat positions. Nor can Fox News qualify as a “fake news” source for its full embrace of the Right. Truth and lies are found throughout both sides of the political spectrum.
DISCLAIMER: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.
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