Vox Day thinks that Wikipedia is the worst. But the things that bug him aren’t the typical complaints you’ll hear about the crowd-sourced encyclopedia—that it’s plagued by trolls, say, or that its pages on Pokémon lore are overly comprehensive.

Day is bothered because he believes that Wikipedia is a Democratic tool, run “by the left-wing thought police who administer it,” he tells me over email. Yet the millions of articles and stubs that make up the end product are used as fact. And that makes the science fiction writer and alt-right personality, who uses Vox Day as his pen name, angry.

So last fall, in the midst of a public debate about what, exactly, constitutes a fact, Day decided it was time to do something about the Wikipedia problem. He chose to launch his own version of it. He made a copy of the entire site and invited his followers to start rewriting its pages. “Wikipedia was the easiest and the most important of the social justice-converged social media giants to replace,” Day told me.

Alexis Sobel Fitts is senior editor at Backchannel. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter.

That site, Infogalactic, is made with Wikipedia’s MediaWiki software—so by design it looks a lot like Wikipedia. At first glance, so does its content. On the homepage is a featured article about peregrine falcons; a highlighted image of a Botticelli masterwork, housed in the Uffizi in Florence, is featured underneath.

But break into some of the more contentious topics and differences begin to emerge. On Infogalactic, Mike Cernovich is a respected bestselling author, “independent journalist,” “writer, attorney, and documentary filmmaker.” On Wikipedia, the Twitter pundit is a “social media personality, writer, and conspiracy theorist.”

The idea is that a stringent, Trump-supporting member of the alt-right shouldn’t have to read the same ideas as a Marxist, or a bleeding-heart college professor. (Day initially considered the tagline, "your universe, your view.”) But Infogalactic is only one of a number of crowdsourced encyclopedias tailored to various conservative factions. There’s Metapedia, a wiki with a white supremacist bent, which is published in 16 languages but is especially popular in Hungary and Germany. (On Metapedia, Barack Obama isn’t just a former president, he’s a “mixed race former president,” and the Holocaust is a genocide only according to "politically correct history.") Or there’s Conservapedia, a version aimed at religious conservatives and created by Andrew Schlafly, son of the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly. There’s even a wiki devoted solely to Pizzagate: pizzagate.wiki.

On their own, none of these sites draws a huge audience. According to Alexa’s traffic rankings, Conservapedia is the 18,066th most popular site in the US. Infogalactic clocks in at 14,710. Wikipedia, by comparison, ranks fifth. But since last fall—just as the notion of alternative facts gained cultural primacy—such sites have seen a clear rise in traffic and interest. In the subreddit The_Donald, complaints about Wikipedia’s entries on Hillary Clinton, Seth Rich, Breitbart, and Pizzagate have become opportunities for commenters to steer readers to Infogalactic and Metapedia. Breitbart, meanwhile, has published numerous stories calling out lefty bias on Wikipedia.

As what was once the political fringe becomes increasingly entrenched in the halls of power, members of the alt-right are looking to formalize their ideology beyond the White House. With the notion of facts under siege, they are taking aim at the documents that most closely resemble a holy text of mainstream consensus reality: Wikipedia.

It’s not much of a stretch to call Wikipedia a miracle. Sure, in the almost two decades the site has owned information on the internet, it’s bred its share of scandals—factual mistakes, conflicts of interest, racism, misogyny, and, of course, the trolls. Yet with limited oversight and minimal funding, it thrives. “We have this saying,” Juliet Barbara, communications director at the Wikimedia foundation, tells me. "'It’s a good thing it works in practice because it would never work in theory."'