Tag: wikipedia

MiniTru Strikes Again: Wikipedia Wipes Out Josh Shapiro’s History Ahead of Likely VP Selection

Welcome to Oceania, Twitchy readers. Here, we are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia. And that will remain the only truth you need to know until we go to war with Eurasia (who we then will also have always been at war with). 

In case you haven’t noticed, our beloved Ministry of Truth has been busy dutifully scrubbing the histories of preferred Democrats in anticipation of the totally legitimate and not-at-all-rigged election coming in November. 

As apparatchiks do.

First, Wikipedia went to work eliminating all references on its website to Kamala Harris as border czar (which she never was, and don’t you dare say otherwise). Not to be outdone, the politician-rating website GovCheck found that their own rating of Harris as the most liberal Senator in America was inconvenient, so … poof. Now there’s no evidence they ever rated her that way.

Room 101 awaits anyone who would question this new reality. 

This weekend, however, in their clumsy fashion, many Democrats have leaked that Harris is likely to select Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate (who also received no primary votes). With Shapiro’s voterless coronation looming, it meant the Ministry of Truth had to get back to work. 

Poor guys. There’s no rest for the weary censor. 

Yesterday, Wikipedia was back at it, this time deleting Shapiro’s past work with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

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Wikipedia Entry on the History of the Chair Becomes Culture War Battleground

A simple Wikipedia entry about the history of the chair reveals how the site’s far-left editors desperately try to reframe the past in real time.

The Wikipedia page describing the history of the chair initially read, “Chairs are known from Ancient Egypt and have been widespread in the Western world from the Greeks and Romans onwards.”

“They were in common use in China from the twelfth century, and were used by the Aztecs. In Sub-Saharan Africa, chairs were not in use before introduction by Europeans.”

That final sentence, believe it or not, is currently the subject of a culture war struggle.

One editor removed it entirely using the justification, “This seems unnesesary and frankly pretty racist.”

In other words, basic historical fact can now be amended if some demented shitlib gets offended by it.

The page is now going back and forth with people re-adding the true history and then having it removed again by leftist moderators.

Apparently, progressives are desperately to maintain some Wakanda-like idealized version of Sub-Saharan Africa where it was more advanced than western civilization.

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A cautionary tale about Wikipedia censorship and the Twitter Files

For the illiberal left, it’s not enough that you submit to their cultural revolution. You must also underwrite it.

This happens not only at the state level, with issues such as abortion and public-school curricula, but at the private level as well. A good recent example includes efforts by certain Wikipedia editors to censor mentions of a journalism award handed out recently to the journalist behind the so-called Twitter Files.

Wikipedia: glad-handing for donations on the front end, while certain “master editors” censor factual events on the back end!

On November 1, journalist Matt Taibbi received a journalism award for his efforts to uncover the incestuous relationship between Big Tech and censorious federal apparatchiks. More specifically, for his part in casting a light on the government’s clandestine coordination with Twitter to censor inconvenient speech, the National Journalism Center, where I serve as program director, and the Dao Feng and Angela Foundation awarded Taibbi and his colleagues — former New York Times op-ed staff editor Bari Weiss and author Michael Shellenberger —a shared prize of $100,000 for excellence in investigative journalism.

In accepting the honor, Taibbi himself reiterated the purpose of the honor: to recognize journalism that challenges power rather than protect it.

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Ramaswamy Paid Wikipedia Editor to Delete Reference to Harvard Vaccine Scientist ‘Mentor’ Days before Announcing Campaign

Days before announcing his presidential bid, Vivek Ramaswamy paid a Wikipedia editor to remove information about his close relationship with a scientist who helped pioneer mRNA vaccines, suggesting Ramaswamy believed the association with technology that was ultimately used to create the Covid-19 vaccines could be a detriment to his campaign. 

Mediaite first revealed in May that Ramaswamy had paid an editor with the screen name “Jhofferman” to make edits to his biographical details on Wikipedia. Those edits included the removal of lines about Ramaswamy’s receipt of a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans in 2011 and his position on Ohio’s Covid-19 Response Team. The report revealed that the Covid work was removed by Ramaswamy’s request, while the editor deleted the fellowship information after finding it was “extraneous material.”

Now, a National Review analysis reveals the paid editor also removed references to Ramaswamy’s religion and his relationship with professor Douglas Melton.

Melton, a stem-cell chemist who was one of the pioneers of the mRNA vaccine, was previously mentioned as a “mentor” to Ramaswamy on his wikipedia page. The biotech entrepreneur-turned-presidential candidate had worked for Melton in his lab while studying biology at Harvard. 

On February 9, 2023, 12 days before Ramaswamy formally announced his entrance to the race, Jhofferman also deleted a sentence in the Wikipedia bio that indicated “Ramaswamy identifies as a Hindu.” The edit reveals the line was removed at the subject’s request.

While the Wikipedia bio currently does not contain any reference to Melton’s mentorship of Ramaswamy, shortly after Jhofferman deleted the reference to Ramaswamy’s Hindu faith, a different editor added a line noting that Ramaswamy “is a Hindu, and has stressed his belief in one God.”

A section about Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign reads: “During his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, he sought to appeal to evangelical Christian right and Christian nationalist voters, an important part of the Republican base, some of whom were unwilling to support a non-Christian presidential candidate such as Ramaswamy (who is Hindu). In campaign stops and interviews, Ramaswamy has criticized secularism. He said that the U.S. was founded on ‘Christian values’ or ‘Judeo-Christian values’; that he shares those values; and that he believes in one God.”

National Review’s analysis of the Wikipedia edits to Ramaswamy’s page also reveal a pair of edits made in November 2022 and July 2022 were made from an IP address in Ohio, where Ramaswamy lives. 

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CIA moderating Wikipedia – former editor

Wikipedia is one of many tools used by the US liberal establishment and its allies in the intelligence community to wage “information warfare,” the site’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, has told journalist Glenn Greenwald.

Speaking on Greenwald’s ‘System Update’ podcast, Sanger lamented how the site he helped found in 2001 has become an instrument of “control” in the hands of the left-liberal establishment, among which he counts the CIA, FBI, and other US intelligence agencies.

“We do have evidence that, as early as 2008, that CIA and FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia,” he said. “Do you think that they stopped doing that back then?” 

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The Purge: Wikipedia Slanders Pulitzer Prize Winner Seymour Hersh, Giving Kremlin a Field Day

Mainstream media desperately tried to memory-hole the biggest bombshell report of the year, Seymour Hersh’s Nord Stream revelations, attacking the Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist instead. It was a field day for the Kremlin, which delighted in pointing out what ridiculous propaganda tools the mainstream media have become.

Instead of trying to verify or question Hersh’s minutely researched report based on an inside source familiar with the alleged CIA attack on the Nord Stream pipeline Sept. 26, 2022, the floundering Fake News instead took to attacking the 85-year-old prize-winning former hero of the left, who exposed the My Lai massacre, Watergate and Abu Ghraib.

Leading the way for the character assassination campaign, Reuters labeled Hersh “no stranger to controversy”, as if that were a bad thing for an investigative journalist. “The White House dismissed Hersh’s report, which relied on a single source to support its claim about the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, as ‘utterly false and complete fiction.’ Reuters was unable to corroborate Hersh’s self-published article”, the WEF and Pfizer-tied “Reuters” wrote.

It was not clear what Reuters had done to try and “corroborate” the story.

No one at Reuters seems to have spoken to the Russian, German, Swedish or Danish investigators about the charges, for example.

TASS did, and were informed the Swedish Prosecutor’s Office “is unable to tell you anything about that because of confidentiality.” The Copenhagen Police also had “no further comment” on the bombshell report, which is not exactly a denial.

Speaking in the German Parliament on Wednesday, Green “Climate and Economics Minister” Robert Habeck said any information on the Nord Stream blast is “classified” and “part of a classified investigation. Therefore this is not a topic for parliamentary Question Time.” It was also far from a denial of Hersh’s claims.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said Hersh’s report contains “nothing unexpected”: “We assumed the involvement of the US and at least some of Washington’s NATO allies in this outrageous crime, which was an armed attack on a key element of critical infrastructure.”

In classic Stalinist style, Hersh’s Wikipedia entry was retconned to label Hersh a “conspiracy theorist”.

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Why We Should Be Wary of Wikipedia

If you’re like me, and pretty much the rest of humanity, when you want to know something, you Google it. Invariably, at or near the top of the results, is a Wikipedia finding with your answer. 

That is an astounding amount of power and influence for Wikipedia. 

Wikipedia claims to be the place for us to understand… everything, quickly and simply. 

Apparently we trust Wikipedia… why? 

For one thing, Wikipedia is a nonprofit. 

And it says that: 

Wikipedia is a place to learn, free from bias or agenda… Show the world that access to independent and unbiased information matters to you.” — The Wikimedia Foundation

How does Wikipedia provide this “independent and unbiased” information?

Wikimedia, the foundation that hosts Wikipedia, allows anonymous individuals whose identity it does not know — and whose expertise or agenda it has not vetted — to create its content. 

Some of these anonymous editors are relentless about creating negative perceptions of certain individuals and entities — and they are experts at it, rendering their subjects powerless to correct false or slanted information. 

This is a serious issue that needs to be addressed and widely discussed. But is it? Not that I can see. I searched Google to see how much this has come out in major media.  

I found a 2021 article in The Washington Post, written by Samuel Baltz, “a PhD candidate in political science and scientific computing and an MS student in applied mathematics at the University of Michigan.” He asserted: 

Wikipedia is one of the few socially driven websites where, even though anyone can contribute information about breaking news, misinformation is largely suppressed. And Wikipedia’s coverage of current events often directs attention to its pages about ideas in political science, giving readers context for the news…

Wikipedia has developed an impressive record of political and ideological neutrality.

He then goes on to state that it “has serious biases in its coverage.” But what strikes me is that those biases are in the interests of the establishment media like The Washington Post. And, like the fox in the hen house, those media serve as the actual arbiters for whether information on Wikipedia should be trusted. Baltz writes:

From the gender gap in its biographies of scientists to its disproportionate focus on politicians from wealthy countries, Wikipedia’s coverage of people is particularly skewed. And these biases are rampant on the pages that people visit to understand political events.

But because anyone can become a Wikipedia editor, these biases can be corrected.

In other words, the problem with Wikipedia is that it is not politically correct enough, from a kind of establishment liberal perspective. This means women, minorities, and non-Americans are underrepresented — which, as we all know, is hardly a problem limited to Wikipedia alone. The Washington Post has its own problems around this issue. 

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New browser extension replaces Wikipedia pages in search results with Encyclosphere pages

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has announced the launch of a browser plugin that adds Encyclosphere results, while offering the possibility to remove those from Wikipedia – when performing a search using Google or DuckDuckGo.

Other search engines will be added soon, according to the plugin’s page on Chrome Web Store (also works with Brave). The description also notes that Wikipedia results are removed when there are relevant ones from the Encyclosphere.

Another feature, which Sanger admits in one of the tweets announcing the launch of the extension is likely to be “properly appreciated” only by “techies” is the inclusion of a built-in peer-to-peer encyclopedia reader, which opens articles from WebTorrent, in this way rendering the browser into a network node.

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Wikipedia’s ‘Recession’ Page Shows 41 Edits In One Week, Attempts At Changing Definition

A Wikipedia administrator has placed a pause on edits to Wikipedia’s “Recession” page by unregistered users until early August to stop “vandalism” and “malicious” content after the page was edited 41 times in the past seven days with repeated attempts to alter the historical definition of a recession.

On Thursday, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) estimated that the U.S. economy shrank for the second straight quarter at a 0.9 annualized rate. In recent weeks, the Biden administration had argued that there is no agreed-upon definition of a recession, despite economists consistently saying a recession can be signaled by two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. The plethora of Wikipedia revisions come as the Biden administration attempts to go around the commonly held definition of the term.

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Wikipedia Removes Entry for Hunter Biden’s Firm “Rosemont Seneca” Because It Risked Becoming a “Magnet for Conspiracy Theories About Hunter Biden”

Wikipedia erased the entry of Rosemont Seneca from its site recently.  The online encyclopedia known for its far-left bias, goes soft on Democrats and their allies while it does the opposite with conservative, America-loving sites like TGP.

Newsmax reports:

Wikipedia editors earlier this week removed an entry on Hunter Biden’s investment firm Rosemont Seneca Partners because it was “not notable,” archived comments from the Talk Page revealed.

The censoring of information happened Wednesday. The company co-founded by Hunter Biden has been at the heart of controversy lately.

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