If you rely on Wikipedia, why?
Wikipedia’s neutral point of view “is dead”, declares co-founder Larry Sanger, who is now launching a free-speech alternative:
… “It’s become centralized and controlling,” says Sanger in his video announcing the Encyclosphere, “just like Facebook and Twitter. They have all become openly hostile to views unapproved by the establishment. Let’s fix this — not with a better encyclopedia, but an open encyclopedic network…”
Of course, none of this is surprising to proponents of intelligent design, who have been targets of Wikipedia’s bias through the years.
Caitlin Basset, “Wikipedia’s Bias Meets a Free-Speech Alternative” at Mind Matters News
In 2014, Harvard faculty members Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu published research showing that Wikipedia articles are both more politically biased than those of Encyclopaedia Britannica and more slanted to the left.
The Critic argues that bias can be seen not only in Wikipedia’s entries but in its very choice of sources.
Most relevant to assessing bias is the question of which sources have been “deprecated,” which means a source that has been formally prohibited from being used in all but a handful of cases.
Wikipedia’s list of deprecated sources currently contains 16 right-leaning sources: Breitbart, the Daily Caller, the Daily Mail, the Daily Star, the Epoch Times, FrontPage Magazine, the Gateway Pundit, Infowars, LifeSiteNews, News of the World, One America News Network, the Sun, Taki’s Magazine, VDare, WorldNetDaily, and Zero Hedge – and just one left-leaning source, Occupy Democrats.
SHUICHI TEZUKA AND LINDA A. ASHTEAR, “THE LEFT-WING BIAS OF WIKIPEDIA” AT THE CRITIC
According to Critic writers Tezuka and Ashtear, the deprecation of these right-wing media sources might be a valid decision except for the fact that Wikipedia does not deprecate similar left-wing media sources… MORE
If you rely on Wikipedia, you don;t know what you are not being told.