Wikipedia- The Flawed Non-Encyclopedia

Wikipedia: The Flawed Non-Encyclopedia
Richard Gale and Gary Null PhD
Progressive Radio Network, May 13, 2020

At this very moment, there are highly respected physicians, epidemiologists, medical biostaticians, forensic experts and other scientists coming forth to voice concerns over the information being disseminated in the mainstream media about the COVID-19 pandemic. In many cases their own professional assessments are at odds with what we hear from the World Health Organization, the CDC, and Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. In their estimation, these institutions are conveying inaccurate or exaggerated analyses and evaluations that are representative of the nation’s poor public healthcare system. Seemingly, every day a new voice joins this choir, which compels us to critically reexamine the entrenched medical establishment’s unequivocal statements.

Never before have we been so inundated with fake news, conspiratorial musings, and ideological rants that frequently appear more hallucinatory than factual. Subjective opinion, biases, and hidden agendas are rampant, and readers and viewers need to be increasingly on their guard to discern truth from fiction. The early scandals in medical journals, which were publishing junk research to favor private pharmaceutical drugs and interests, resulted in rules for authors to list their conflicts of interests with drug companies and other profit-driven institutions. That did not curtail the publication of biased research, which is still endemic; nevertheless, conflicts were identified and flagged for readers to determine for themselves the papers’ accuracy. Medical journals thereby became more transparent.

Similarly, there are hundreds of thousands of voices, including leaders in a variety of medical and health professions, who are voicing warnings about the reliability of information found on the world’s most referenced encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Large segments of the Wikipedia’s pages on medical modalities are grossly inaccurate. Worse, much is mean spirited, laced with unbridled vindictive and this presents a very real danger to the public health worldwide.

This may shock many readers or perhaps appear as a flagrant overstatement. However, a search for any Wikipedia entry on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) disciplines and professionals who practice them, results in condemnations and derogatory language with the intent to discredit the nonconventional practice. These entries by Wikipedia’s volunteer editors deny completely the enormous body of peer-reviewed scientific studies cataloged in the National Library of Medicine. At the same time, efforts to correct the misinformation, libel and character assassination of personal bios for those who advocate CAM fall on deaf ears. Wikipedia editors, site administrators, the WikiMedia Foundation’s Board of Directors and its co-founder Jimmy Wales collectively refuse to acknowledge their accountability for the encyclopedia’s extreme biases and the damage it causes to untold numbers of patients from what might be life saving therapies for their medical conditions.

For the average user, on the encyclopedia’s main pages, it may appear as nothing is amiss. However, behind the scenes on Wikipedia’s Talk pages and Noticeboard Wikipedia’s real fetid culture is exposed. Exchanges and arguments over content can be vicious, prejudiced and dogmatic. It is not uncommon to read altercations between editors accusing each other of libel in efforts to protect a page that abandons reason, objectivity and fairness. For example, in a heated editorial war (known as a “Wiki war”) over whether an entry on “Ancestral health” should be deleted, administrators who were determined to label the Paleolithic diet with the derogatory term “pseudoscience” were charged with libelous language towards authors of scientific papers supporting this dietary regimen. There were also charges of misinterpreting the science in favor of their personal subjective claims. One editor identified the problem of cherry-picking medical research in order to favor a prejudiced stance similar to many of Wikipedia’s entries for other non-conventional medical therapies.

There are numerous additional examples. These types of exchanges and editorial struggles for control are common on the entries for alternative and natural health. Editorial chaos runs so deep that many Wikipedia editors who once held idealistic views of the encyclopedia’s mission to bring the accumulation of human knowledge to the world no longer contribute to Wikipedia. What remains among senior administrators are many ideologues who have found a global platform to advance ulterior motives. Increasingly, Wikipedia has become a savage socio-political motivated project rather than a depository of reliable information and knowledge for subjects that are emotionally charged and affect vested interests.

Our research indicates that some of the leading administrators who have destroyed Wikipedia’s credibility when dealing with medical subjects espouse the Skeptic dogma, and believers in modern Skepticism have waged a ferocious campaign to falsely discredit all alternative medical practices and portray them as a risk to public health. Unfortunately, Wikipedia’s co-founder and Board member Jimmy Wales is a Skeptic himself. Skeptics are on record publicly stating their intention to maximize Wikipedia’s global reach to promulgate their message of radical scientific materialism. In essence Skeptics refuse to acknowledge the tens of thousands of peer-reviewed scientific studies confirming proof of safety and efficacy in much of complementary and alternative medicine.

Given the conflicts of interests now endemic, is it possible that Wikipedia is one of the most deceptive sites on the internet? And can its unreliability be attributed to the encyclopedia’s centrally flawed model? Certainly, there is a lot of valuable information and knowledge on Wikipedia, as long as a subject is not socially and politically contentious nor exerts a direct impact upon public perceptions that may threaten the halls of power, certain ideologies and monetary interests that Wikipedia favors. Aside from medicine and the pharmaceutical industry, this also includes left-right political divisions, the religion versus atheism debate, doctrines of scientific materialism, etc
One glaring problem is the complete lack of transparency throughout the Wikipedia experiment; likewise, this has bred a culture of secrecy within the volunteer editorial community that daily contributes to expanding the encyclopedia. The Business Dictionary defines transparency as the “lack of hidden agendas or conditions, accompanied by the availability of full information required of collaboration, cooperation and collective decision making,” and the “essential condition for a free and open exchange whereby the rules and reasons behind regulatory measures are fair and clear to all participants.” Wikipedia, in our opinion, is infused with hidden agendas that reach up to the WikiMedia Foundation’s executives and Board members.

There are a variety of reasons and motivations behind individuals and organizations acting non-transparently and in secret. Dr. Stephen Greenspan, a psychologist and forensic expert in capital legal cases, writes that a lack of transparency “often reflects confusion as to who owns the privilege (i.e., has the right to decide who can receive personal information).” Greenspan’s statement likewise reflects the turbulence and vying for power found between editors and Wikipedia administrators on Talk pages. Senior administrators will commonly invoke their privileges of seniority. Moreover, most editors are anonymous, conceal their identities and educational backgrounds, which raises the question over what they are hiding.

In Common Knowledge: An Ethnography of Wikipedia, author Dariusz Jemielniak writes,

“… Wikipedia differs significantly from other large open collaboration communities in the sense that it is composed mostly of nonprofessional authors… even though Wikipedians represent all kinds of professions, virtually none of them have professional experience in encyclopedia development, and their motivations to contribute are not job related.”
Jemielniak also references several scholars who have researched Wikipedia’s culture and note that “the lack of transparency in terms of revealing Wikipedia contributor identity calls into question the validity of the outcome.”

Lack of transparency also breeds distrust, as anyone who has worked in an oppressive, hierarchical work environment will surely have encountered. And this is another reason why the encyclopedia does not warrant trust, nor should its parent organization the WikiMedia Foundation

Christopher Bateman, who was a Wikipedia editor, is author of Wikipedia Knows Nothing, a philosophical evaluation of what qualifies as objective, reliable knowledge by deconstructing Wikipedia as his primary example. Bateman identifies several serious flaws that are instituted in the encyclopedia’s model. These flaws in turn reduce its authenticity as a reliable source of information. In Bateman’s words this includes,

• We have no way of knowing whether the information recorded there has been mischievously altered by someone;

• No one who edits the Wikipedia has been credibly selected for expertise;

• Editorial obfuscation [i.e. editor and administrator anonymity] permits politics-as-war to infest the pages;

• The Wikipedia, in inheriting the encyclopaedic project but then outsourcing the referencing work to all comers, inherits serious conceptual problems that its community is perhaps only dimly aware of.

These four flaws noted by Bateman were built, unintentionally, into the very underlying structure of Wales’ open-source encyclopedia from its onset. Bateman’s point that almost no editors have any knowledge of composing an encyclopedia entry is especially worth noting. This shortsightedness has now resulted in the more egregious dysfunctions of malice and hidden agendas that plague the encyclopedia.

However, the deeper scandal is that we have found no evidence that the Wikimedia Foundation takes any responsibility for the misinformation and libelous accusations found on its pages. There is no system of deterrence. Unlike normal politics, there is an implicit deterrence factor of two parties calling each other out in legislative battles and in courts of law. However, the Foundation’s apparent failure to protect those who are subjected to scorn, undue prejudice, deception and gross misreporting is simply business as usual and people’s reputations and livelihoods are injured and even destroyed with impunity. The Foundation declares innocence under the protection of Bill Clinton’s Communications Decency Act. And in turn, it is our experience that the Foundation protects those very editors who are often the most ideological, pernicious and least transparent. Consequently, the entire Wikipedia model is objectively unsound.
Without any concerted oversight from the Foundation’s leadership to enforce accountability among its senior volunteer editors, the law of the mob is permitted to rule and determine what content is eventually enshrined in the encyclopedia’s pages.

Consequently, senior editors, Skeptics in particular, believe they can act above even Wikipedia’s own written rules of conduct and act with extrajudicial hubris. Anonymous Skeptics function collectively as judge, prosecutor and jury and finally executioner to act unilaterally on their own whims and destroy people’s reputations. For years, permitting editors to remain anonymous rather than being required to register their real identities and resumes of expertise, has been hotly debated on Wikipedia pages. It is a reason why Wikipedia knows nothing. Inevitably, honest editors argue in favor of registration; many editors with ulterior motives prefer the current policy of anonymity and are pleased with structural non-transparency. Jimmy Wales continues to side with those who want to keep their identities and backgrounds, if any, secret. Consequently, many health-related pages are written and edited by people with no experience in the medical and health fields and do so for the sole purpose of defaming alternative medicine and ruining the lives of its leading voices.

This leads us to the question: how many editors are in fact agent provocateurs working on the behest of special interest groups, and not the least the pharmaceutical industry? In multiple law suits, for example against Monsanto and drug makers, court evidence uncovered in depositions and Freedom of Information Act filings has revealed how these industries actively create and fund astroturf groups to destroy the reputations of their critics. It would be naive to assume, therefore, that Wikipedia has not been infiltrated by such groups for the sole purposed of destroying alternative medicine and the reputations of its most public advocates. A second question is to what extent does the WikiMedia Foundation itself engage in astroturf activities on behalf of private interests as donors?

It is our contention that the flaws in Wikipedia’s structural model, in addition to editors’ personal biases and prejudices, can in fact endanger people’s lives if they rely on the site for health information. For the countless people and patients who visit Wikipedia in search for accurate health-related advice, they are unknowingly being propagandized by ignorant, unqualified and biased editors. For this reason, it is not simply that Wikipedia is an unreliable and unprofessional medical resource, but it is morally corrupt by enabling anonymous bigots and the rule of the mob to mischaracterize, with malicious intention, alternative medicine as quackery and convey the message to avoid it at all costs.