We do not expect you to trust us
It is in the nature of an open collaboration and work-in-progress like Wikipedia that quality may vary over time, and from article to article. While some articles are of the highest quality of scholarship, others are admittedly complete rubbish. Also, since Wikipedia can be edited by almost anyone anytime, articles may be prone to errors, including vandalism. So please do not use Wikipedia to make critical decisions.
Jimmy wales, co-founder of fake news site, Wikipedia, states today in the Sunday Times that ‘Fake news has almost zero impact on Wikipedia’.
The site that banned the Mail for being an unreliable news site is itself one of the least reliable information sites out there…no one trusts it enough to use it as a source on its own…even Wikipedia says, as quoted above, that it would be foolish to do so. The site that is controlled by people with determined agendas, a ‘stagnant pool of editors from a limited demographic.’
The Mail itself criticised Wikipedia back in 2012…
Iffy-pedia: Up to six in ten articles on Wikipedia contain factual errors
Up to six in ten articles on Wikipedia contain inaccuracies, according to new research.
The number of factual errors shows just how unreliable it can be to use the online resource as a sole means of digging up information.
Yet millions base everything from school homework to corporate presentations using facts and figures they have gleaned from the site
No doubt this contributed to the Mail being banned as a source by Wikipedia…something the BBC hasn’t bothered to investigate despite constantly referring to the ban when talking of ‘fake news’ issues. The Mail responded with its own investigation into who banned them and why…
The making of a Wiki-Lie: Chilling story of one twisted oddball and a handful of anonymous activists who appointed themselves as censors to promote their own warped agenda on a website that’s a byword for inaccuracy
You may say ‘they would say that’ but what they say is true…Wikipedia is essentially run by a small clique of activists who guard it and shape its ‘facts’ to suit their own agenda…..
Very few Wikipedia editors and contributors use their real name or provide any information about who they are.
In theory, the intellectual sparring at the heart of Wikipedia’s group editing process results in a consensus that removes unreliable contributions and edits. But often the contributor who “wins” is not the one with the soundest information, but rather the one with the strongest agenda.
Individuals with agendas sometimes have significant editing authority.
Administrators on Wikipedia have the power to delete or disallow comments or articles they disagree with and support the viewpoints they approve.Due to the fact that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone with an Internet connection, users can falsify entries.
There is little diversity among editors.
According to a 2009 survey by the Wikimedia Foundation, 87 percent of Wikipedia editors are male, with an average age of 26.8 years. According to executive director Sue Gardner, they hail mostly from Europe and North America, and many of them are in graduate school.It has become harder for casual participants to contribute.
According to the Palo Alto Research Center, the contributions of casual and new contributors are being reversed at a much greater rate than several years ago. The result is that a steady group of high-level editors has more control over Wikipedia than ever….A group of editors known as “deletionists” are said to “edit first and ask questions later,” making it harder for new contributors to participate, and making it harder for Wikipedia—which, again, aspires to provide “the sum of all human knowledge”—to overcome the issue that it is controlled by a stagnant pool of editors from a limited demographic.Accurate contributors can be silenced.
Deletionists on Wikipedia often rely on the argument that a contribution comes from an “unreliable source,” with the editor deciding what is reliable.
Reading how people convince others to believe their fake news I came across this explanation that chimed exactly with how the BBC operates...relying on its inherited reputation for trust and accuracy in order to peddle lies convincingly to people whom they know will by default trust the BBC and not question its reliability…
Ultimately, though, they aimed to succeed less by assembling convincing stories than by exploiting the trust of their marks, inducing them to lower their guard….hoaxes tend to thrive in communities which exhibit high levels of trust.
Yep, don’t trust the BBC and you might just start to see the world as it is and not as the BBC wants you to see it.
Here’s a very good example relating to Wikipedia:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/30/wikipedia-climate-fiddler-william-connolley-is-in-the-news-again/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/14/willia-connolley-now-climate-topic-banned-at-wikipedia/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/10/13/wikipedia-turbo-revisionism-by-william-connolley-continues/
A prime example is the entry for Breitbart News which has been deliberately been engineered to be a hatchet job.
e.g Breitbart always describes as Conservative, but has never described as Far-Right, and definitely not “alt right” which some white-supremacists call themselves, yet the editors have done all they can to push in those terms.
If you click the TALK button you can see there was a discussion.
Strange that when they had a vote I spoke there, yet my 2 short comments seem to have now been deleted ..(Normally things are never deleted in the talk section)
It was when editing Wikipedia pages (I don’t do it now) that I really got to understand the Left. If an editor was on the Left they generally had no interest in truth, all they wanted to do was create a narrative which fits their ideology, and (on the principle presumably that the end justifies the means) they will use every means at their disposal to suppress information they dislike.
To Wikipedia’s credit despite endless attempts to prevent me from editing, every attempt failed, but it was not worth wasting my life correcting Leftist errors, because lies is all they have, it is what justifies their existence to themselves.
Wikipedia (in general) is only ever good for basic information, anything (with the exception of some technical areas) more than that, while it is toned down from extreme Leftist bigotry, is more likely than not to be Leftist garbage.
I too had a short period editing Wikipedia. But I gave up after everything I put on it was deleted. So I doubt you will find anything to do with these scientific papers on Wikipedia (Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics, Gerhard Gerlich, 2009) or (Unified Theory of Climate, Ned Nikolov & Karl Zeller, 2011). But the last time I looked they were still available on Google Scholar. So like the BBC and all left-wing sources, Wikipedia is driven by a need to censor reality that conflicts with liberal left-wing ideology.
Also I remember when I was a young Astronomer, finding errors in an Encyclopaedia in a Library, so I wrote a letter pointing out errors in the positions of the nearest stars in a three dimensional representation of space up to about 20 light years. They wrote back saying that they thanked me for pointing this out, but they had already corrected this for future editions. A few years later I found out that they always say that to people who point out errors. So I could have been the only person to have pointed out the error.