Is Wikipedia still an impartial, crowd-sourced encyclopedia, or has it become a propaganda tool for a particular point of view? Investigative journalist Ashley Rindsberg charts the evolution of one of the world’s most popular websites, and comes to some surprising and disturbing conclusions.
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Transcript:
Can You Trust Wikipedia?
Presented by Ashley Rindsberg
Wikipedia is the most widely used source of information in human history.
Think about it.
When you Google anything—from historical events to current events —Wikipedia dominates the results.
Google ranks Wikipedia articles in the first spot on 80% of topic searches, and uses Wikipedia articles to populate its "knowledge panels" that are displayed next to these searches.
With this kind of reach, we would all want Wikipedia to be fair, objective, and accurate.
And if you’re doing research on Roman emperors, or Isaac Newton’s laws of motion or Beethoven’s Fifth symphony, it usually is.
But when it comes to contemporary political and social issues, Wikipedia has become something else entirely: a battlefield where ideology outranks accuracy.
When you’re researching immigration, climate change, or international conflicts, you’ll find not neutral information, but carefully crafted narratives.
On these issues Wikipedia is neither fair, nor objective, nor accurate.
How did this happen? Through coordinated groups of editors who systematically control what information stays and what gets deleted.
And anyone who challenges their preferred narrative gets shut down.
On issue after issue only one point of view is permitted.
Take Israel.
Over the past few years, a group of 40 anti-Israel editors have engaged in a campaign to fundamentally delegitimize the Jewish state and whitewash the crimes of Hamas and other terrorist groups.
These editors have scrubbed ties between Israel and the Jewish people from dozens of articles. They’ve contorted the definition of Zionism from a call for “restoration of the Jews to their homeland” to a call for “the colonization of Palestine by European Jews.”
Almost all things related to Israel have been tainted. For example, two of the main editors from this group contributed over 90% of the content to an article they created originally called “Zionism, race and genetics,” which attempts to smear Zionism by comparing it to Nazi race science.
The group isn’t just focused on tarring Israel. It also works round the clock to whitewash the crimes of Islamist groups.
One editor removed mention of Hamas’ genocidal charter. Others have tried to deny atrocities of the October 7, 2023, massacre.
Working in tandem, two editors went on “speed runs” to delete dozens of human rights abuses committed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
But this isn’t just about Israel and its enemies. Wikipedia articles related to American politics, racism, transgenderism and dozens of other subjects have seen a similar effect play out.
Wikipedia wasn’t always like this.
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