<
https://www.thewikipedian.net/p/right-wing-media-vs-wikipedia-reliability>
"From Elon Musk’s public trolling to the Manhattan Institute’s advocacy
research, and from
Pirate Wires’ tech-world polemics to conservative outrage
over Wikipedia’s handling of the Israel-Palestine conflict, right-wing figures
and institutions expanded their attacks on Wikipedia in 2024, seeking to make
it another front in the culture wars.
When
The Wikipedian ranked conservative agitation against Wikipedia as the #5
top Wikipedia story of 2024, tensions were already high. In early 2025, they’ve
only intensified.
Last month, the Heritage Foundation—recently in the news for organizing Project
2025, Donald Trump’s blueprint for dismantling the federal bureaucracy—was
revealed to be planning to “identify and target” Wikipedia editors it deemed to
be “abusing their position.” As
Slate’s Stephen Harrison put it, “Targeting
Wikipedia editors personally, instead of debating their edits on the platform,
marks a dangerous escalation.”
Then last week, the Media Research Center’s
NewsBusters blog launched a
broadside against Wikipedia’s handling of sources with the dramatic headline:
EXCLUSIVE: Wikipedia Effectively Blacklists ALL Right-Leaning Media;
Smearing Trump, GOP and Conservatives
Echoing last summer’s controversy over Wikipedia’s partial deprecation of the
Anti-Defamation League, this latest uproar marks another attempt to frame
Wikipedia’s editorial processes as a left-wing conspiracy.
NewsBusters offers little to no evidence of Wikipedia “smearing” right-wing
figures—that isn’t really Wikipedia’s M.O. But the claim that Wikipedia favors
left-leaning sources over right-leaning ones isn’t entirely baseless. The
problem is that MRC’s “study”—at best a cursory skim of Wikipedia’s exhaustive
catalog of source reliability—never bothers to ask why that might be."
Via Molly White’s
[citation needed] Issue 77 – Whenever presidents get
involved, if they become angry, you don’t want to be there:
https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-77/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
