Wikipedia or Trashpedia?
Wikipedia has the nickname Trashpedia because it is riddled with false information. Its use in research is deemed unacceptable due to the unreliability of its contents. Furthermore, it has evolved into a project of neo-colonialism for it allows only Western interpretations of non-European cultures and civilizations.
The basic idea of Wikipedia is flawed. It allows anyone to edit entries, and although that may include well informed scholars, and enthusiasts who can bring the outsider’s fresh view, it also includes bigots, racists, amateurs, and evil people who wish to spread misinformation.
A well-known example of malicious content was an article in 2005 on the American journalist John Siegenthaler, who was once assistant to US Senator Robert Kennedy. The article suggested that Siegenthaler may have been a suspect in the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and that of his brother, John Kennedy. Siegenthaler was unable to get it corrected through the normal channels but was eventually able to get redressal after he approached the Board of Trustees of Wikipedia.
For ordinary mortals there is no pathway to the Board of Trustees and there is no recourse to malicious lies. Many people have had to go to the courts for the removal of false information. But most don’t have resources or energy to get this done.
There are any number of stories of individuals writing prejudiced content on business and academic rivals and presenting their own material in a positive light. Also, people under anonymous handles cite their own obscure papers in general articles and on biographical sketches for their moment of fame.
Wikpedia is also being used to smear people. It is easy to provide citation to a criticial article and leave out others that counter it and then hang a summary assessment of “fascist” or whatever the most popular curse word of the day might be. To the outsider this will appear perfectly objective. This is how evil works now, and as you can see it is not very different from how it worked in Nazi Germany.
Larry Sanger, one of the two co-founders of Wikipedia and now one of its staunchest critics insists that it is badly biased and untrustworthy. He argues that Wikipedia’s left-leaning volunteers cut out sides to the stories that don’t fit their agenda, and that the establishment elites hire writers to support their positions. If catpoochino beans pass through the entrails of the cat, Wikipedia essays are the excreta of the hegemonic Anglosphere.
Some call it Wokipedia for it has embraced the hard-left Woke worldview.
Echo chamber
Like other social media platforms, Wikipedia has evolved into an echo chamber where the user is presented with only one type of content instead of being shown a balanced narrative. This disinformation is powerful since the articles are written in an academic style and users do not see other sources that disagree with the article.
Since Wikipedia is convenient to use, it continues to spread wrong ideas. It is useful for material on the hard sciences and for general statistical information, but mostly bad otherwise. People who depend only on it for topics on history, culture, politics, and religion are often appallingly misinformed. The title “encyclopedia” makes them think that what they have read is objective and authoritative.
The contents of Wikipedia are also flawed because the editors are predominantly from the West and under the cloak of anonymity the worst of the lot are perpetuating normally concealed attitudes of racism and Eurocentrism, and giving oxygen to theories that good scholars no longer accept.
Some editors of Wikipedia are failed academics with demonic energy who wish to conquer anonymously what they were unable to do in their normal careers. And spending much of their working life editing Wikipedia articles and by the use of multiple anonymous handles they have obtained administrative status which entitles them to block opposing views. The anonymous persona of the editors and the low stakes have made Wikipedia politics much more vicious than real politics.
Frustrated by this system, the entire Indian subcontinent has simply opted out. Indians have recognized that just as the Nazis used the phrase “Jewish science” to force out critics, the administrators are using the label “Hindutva” to smear those Indians who they perceive to be not in line with the politically correct position.
The numbers tell the story:
According to Ethnologue, a language reference publication, Hindi has almost 600 million total speakers again 1.1 billion for English. The total number of articles in English Wikipedia is nearly 6 million, whereas, shockingly, in Hindi it is a mere 130,000. Bengali (official language of Bangladesh) with nearly 300 million speakers has only 60,000 articles; the encyclopedias in Urdu (official language of Pakistan), Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and the rest fare no better.
Epistemicide
Philosphers speak of “epistemicide,” that is, the extermination of knowledge and ways of knowing, as a key component of the drive in Europe and later in the Arab/Turkic worlds to power and domination. Its operation varied from destroying art, burning books to extermination of people. According to one estimate only about 10% of European literature survived. Similar destruction occurred in Arabia, Iran, Central Asia, and India.
Ramón Grosfoguel argues that the Western university has continued this process of epistemicide in the social sciences. Wikipedia imposes a Eurocentric view by purging scholarly evidence that goes against it. It is epistemicide by stealth, for the administrators can maintain the fiction that the site is run by a community of volunteers.
Scrutiny of social media
Wikepedia is a social media company. Other such companies are under intense scrutiny for problems related to malicious and false content, sale of private information, and letting bots and fake agents have free play. Social media is being exploited by extremist political groups, terrorists, pornographers, hostile state actors, and criminals. Rumors spread by social media have caused deadly riots in countries like Sri Lanka, Myanmar, India, and France. Conservative political and cultural groups accuse the companies of blocking content that is favorable to them.
Initially there was much expectation from social media platforms, which were lauded for the Arab Spring and the Russian protests of 2011 and 2012. But now the violent “yellow vest” protests in France are not getting the same praise, because they are against the establishment in the West.They have been used by terrorist groups to recruit members and radicalize vulnerable groups, and also to plan and execute terrorist attacks. Hostile actors like anarchists and religious extremists use online disinformation to undermine democratic values and principles.
The dangers inherent in letting the social networks run without controls are becoming clear. They are used for trolling, child pornography, promotion of gang culture and violence. There is other criminal activity facilitated by social media in conjunction with the Dark Web.
Serious proposals for active oversight are being considered. Due to their impact on current events, this regulation is generally mentioned in relation to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Wikipedia is also doing serious damage by peddling half-truths but it appears to have escaped serious scrutiny.
As a sidelight, the Chinese Wikipedia is banned in China, as are most other Western social media companies, but that may be because China has largely split off from the rest of the Internet. Here are some of the Chinese versions of the most popular social media applications.
- WeChat: Not Just the Chinese Facebook
2. Sina Weibo: Twitter of China
3. Tencent QQ: Popular Instant Messaging App
4. Toudou Youku: Youtube of China
5. Baidu Tieba: A Search Engine Forum
6. Douban: Lifestyle Discussion Platform
7. Zhihu: The Quora of China
8. Meituan — Dianping: The Chinese Versions of Yelp
9. Momo: Tinder of China
10. Meitu: From the Creators of Meipai
Regulatory bodies
The UK Government on April 8, 2019 published a White Paper called Online Harms to develop laws to regulate social media companies and fine them if they do not police their contents. The idea is to have an independent regulator with punitive powers to issue “substantial fines, block access to sites and potentially impose liability on individual members of senior management”, if rules are broken.
Social media companies will be required to publish annual transparency reports on the harmful content on their platforms and how they are addressing it.
We don’t know how much the regulation being proposed in Britain will help in making social media more responsible. There is also danger that it will have a chilling effect on media freedom by handing extraordinary powers to the regulator, for give censors an inch and they will take a mile. In any event, it will have practically no impact on Wikipedia whose influence is more insidious.
A New Beginning
A resource at one’s fingertips can be valuable for raw information on places and people. Perhaps such a resource should only be devoted to basic facts with links to different signed articles by different experts.
The problem of the Indian subcontinent is unique. Racists and Eurocentrists in Europe and America are not as concerned with the past and the cultures of East Asia because their languages are different. India is important to them because the languages of north and west India belong to the same overarching family as that of Europe and therefore they wish to control its information.
Since Vedic wisdom and Yoga are much the fashion across the world these days, they must show that these were brought from Europe by migrants who then occupied India, even though India was the most densely populated region of the ancient world and the supposed migrants were few in number.
We need an online encyclopedia where the edits are by real people. The story on the three-way splitting of the Internet portends great change in the worldwide use of information technology. This is part of the struggle and strategic positioning by the three great powers US, China, and Europe.
Since Indian economy will soon be somewhat of a similar size as the other three, India needs to have a strategic vision on these technologies. An Indian version of the Wikipedia which is edited responsibly should be part of that vision.
