The Wikipedia Purge

Editor’s note: A fine piece of journalism on the takeover of Wikipedia by leftist thought police, intent on purging any availability through it of certain dangerous conservative sources. Our satirist friend Oleg Atbashian of the People’s Cube suffered banishment because the last thing leftists have is a sense of humor about themselves. Because of his suppression, he was contacted by a journalist from a Dutch language Belgian news site in Brussels called Sceptr. That writer, Thomas Panis, produced the article below, translated into English, through the efforts of Oleg and a Dutch-speaking friend with the help of Google Translate: (note: authorship has beeen corrected)

Wikipedia purges politically incorrect newspaper 'The Daily Mail' By Thomas Panis An influential group of Wikipedia editors decided last week no longer to accept the British right-wing newspaper 'The Daily Mail' as a reliable news source. The organization behind Wikipedia (The Wikimedia Foundation) claimed initially that it had no hand in this decision. Such cases are usually decided by an online discussion, in which each Wikipedia member can participate, but the final call is made by the more experienced 'editors' of a higher grade (called "closers"). In order to climb up the 'Wiki hierarchy' and be a 'closer', you have to be nominated by other members based on your previous work for the website. As a result of the above decision, articles from The Daily Mail can no longer be used as evidence of "notability," which is the main criterion for admitting a topic on Wikipedia. In a nutshell, if some facts are mentioned in this newspaper (the second largest tabloid after The Sun in the UK), but they are not covered by other media outlets, such facts are no longer accepted as independently proven and, therefore, can be removed from Wikipedia without much difficulty by any user willing to do so. The group of Wikipedia editors who decided to purge The Daily Mail have also made a call for a thorough overhaul and the purging of all existing 12,000 linked references to The Daily Mail articles. Yet Wikimedia supported the purge Kalev Leetaru, an employee of Forbes, contacted the Wikimedia Foundation, which finally had to admit that the founder of Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales) definitely had supported the decision to ban The Daily Mail. Leetaru raises further questions about the organizational structure of Wikipedia, where a small group of anonymous and privileged editors can place a large news site on the banned list, without any possibility to challenge this decision by the countless users on the lower rungs of the 'Wiki hierarchy. The fact that 80 to 90 percent of editors are men, according to him, shows that the website does not score high in diversity. Wikipedia is the sixth most popular website in the world and has 500 million unique visitors every month. In principle, anyone can customize each item on the site at will. Cases of vandalism or questionable content are subjected to detailed discussions and the judgment is taken by a "committee" of more experienced users. One such committee, ArbCom (Arbitration Commission) of the German Wikipedia, fell apart in December, 2016, as a result of leftist activism. Someone had discovered that an ArbCom member held membership in the German right-wing party, AfD, and the latter was told to resign. When the AfDer refused to step down, arguing that the AfD is not considered "dangerous" by the state's security services, his identity (Magister) was disclosed, followed by the resignations of several leftist anti-AfD members from ArbCom, in a move that disabled the Arbitration Committee by leaving it without the quorum for making case judgments. Remarkably, the AfD member was not accused of making errors in Wikipedia; his only error was being a member of a party that was not appreciated by some other members of ArbCom. Die Welt described the incident and pointed to the politicization of Wikipedia, but the title of the piece was worded as "Does the German Wikipedia have an AfD problem?" Prejudiced Wikipedia? Conservative circles, especially in the US, have long been accusing Wikipedia of bias. Some disgruntled users have set up Conservapedia.com, as you may have guessed, in order to provide a conservative counterweight. They compiled a list of examples of (mostly left-wing) bias in Wikipedia. Often it is about subtle differences: the page about the former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet (as it exists today) mentions that his government was a dictatorship, while Fidel Castro's page says that "critics say he was a dictator." Another recent example is a complete removal of the right-wing satirical website ' The People's Cube ' from the Wikipedia pages because of a perceived "lack of noteworthy sources." The owner of the website, the conservative author Oleg Atbashian, tells PJ Media how all information about him and his work was removed because it was largely based on references by right-wing bloggers and radio talk show hosts (such as Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin, who are well-known among American conservatives). Wikipedia's continued exclusion of newspapers such as The Daily Mail can have grave consequences. Given the immense popularity of the Wikipedia site, this can seriously undermine the global reputation of "politically incorrect" brands.