Wikipedia: The Failed Experiment to Democratize Knowledge

Gary Null, PhD & Richard Gale
Progressive Radio Network

“The problem is not that people don’t have access to information. The problem is that they have access to managed information—curated by anonymous power, insulated from accountability.”

The Old Dream of a Universal Library—and the New Reality

Efforts to gather and preserve the world’s knowledge into a single self-contained resource has been a human endeavor for over 2,000 years. The oldest surviving encyclopedia was compiled by the Roman statesman Pliny the Elder during the 1st century and covered topics about natural history, architecture, medicine and geography. The impulse behind this project was not merely archival. It was civilizational. It reflected an understanding that societies survive and flourish when accurate knowledge is preserved, curated, and transmitted across generations.

By definition, and not dissimilar to modern conventional dictionaries, an authoritative encyclopedia is “researched and written by well-educated, well-informed content experts.” Encyclopedia entries are “not written in order to convince, although one of its goals is indeed to convince its readers of its own veracity.” The factuality of a topic, in other words, is to be framed and understood within the culture, discipline, or science on its own grounds. It is for this reason that people resort to encyclopedias for quick and concise referencing because of their reputation for objectivity and thoroughness.

However, the words quoted above are not found in a dictionary’s definition or in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which should be properly regarded as the world’s most reliable encyclopedia. Rather these quotes appear on Wikipedia’s entry under “Encyclopedia”.

Yet despite its definition, the virtual Wikipedia open-source encyclopedia consistently fails to meet its own standard and very often violates it outright.

And this failure is not trivial. It is not an academic quarrel over footnotes. It has real-world consequences—professional, financial, reputational, and political. When a platform is treated globally as the first-stop authority for knowledge, and when that platform is structurally incapable of accountability, the corruption of its content becomes the corruption of public understanding.

That corruption becomes policy. It becomes publishing decisions. It becomes hiring decisions. It becomes social and professional exclusion. It becomes the suppression of legitimate scientific debate. And in the realm of medicine and health—especially when we are talking about prevention, chronic disease, quality of life, and the right of individuals to choose among therapeutic options—it becomes something far worse.

It becomes harm.

Wikipedia’s Unmatched Reach—and Its Unmatched Vulnerability

Wikipedia has achieved the top position for being the most viewed and referenced encyclopedia in the world. As of May 2024, the English Wikipedia contains over 6.8 million distinct entries and is increasing at a rate of 534 new entries daily due to its army of over 800,000 registered voluntary editors.

This is frequently presented as a triumph of democratized knowledge. But “democratized” is not the same as “accountable.” And “open” is not the same as “neutral.” The modern reader is encouraged to believe that crowd-editing produces balance. In reality, crowd-editing often produces capture: the loudest, most organized, most obsessive factions dominate controversial subject areas. Once entrenched, they build procedural fortifications. They weaponize policy language. They patrol pages like ideological border guards. And they enforce a pseudo-neutrality that operates as a one-way gate.

While countless people around the world benefit from the breadth and scope of knowledge the encyclopedia provides, for almost two decades it has equally been the target of growing criticism for its biases and lack of objectivity on many subjects that have a direct impact on people’s health and well-being.

There are over 200,000 health and medical-related topics. Although the majority of medical entries do not draw controversy and provide relatively accurate and clear encyclopedic definitions for the biology and the etiology of diseases and medical conditions, there is a significant quantity of approximately 700 pages that directly concern Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) therapies and natural health modalities, including Chiropractic, acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), naturopathy, homeopathy, orthomolecular medicine, energy medicine, etc.

This grouping of articles is separated off from the medical arts and sciences and intentionally marginalized under the heading of “pseudoscience” and quackery – highly prejudiced and derogatory terms that do not belong in a legitimate encyclopedia.

These unconventional medical entries have also been hijacked by a movement promoting a radicalized ideology of scientific rationalism known as Skepticism.

And that is the core of the problem: Wikipedia is not behaving like an encyclopedia. It is behaving like a managed narrative system—especially in the areas where scientific debate, corporate profit, and public policy intersect. It’s one thing for a magazine or opinion site to argue a position. It is quite another for an encyclopedia to smuggle ideological judgments into what is presented as neutral knowledge.

Wikipedia’s own definition of “Alternative Medicine” reveals in no uncertain terms its depreciatory impression about this worldwide and centuries-old collection of natural health practices:

“Alternative medicine is any practice that aims to achieve the healing effects of medicine despite lacking biological plausibility, testability, repeatability or evidence of effectiveness. Unlike modern medicine, which employs the scientific method to test plausible therapies by way of responsible and ethical clinical trials, producing repeatable evidence of either effect or of no effect, alternative therapies reside outside of mainstream medicine and do not originate from using the scientific method, but instead rely on testimonials, anecdotes, religion, tradition, superstition, belief in supernatural “energies”, pseudoscience, errors in reasoning, propaganda, fraud, or other unscientific sources.”

That is not encyclopedic language. That is a prosecution.

Britannica vs. Wikipedia: Credentials vs. Anonymity, Scholarship vs. Contempt

Unlike other medical pages, there is an apparent lack of reputable medical professionals successfully editing these pages. The majority are anonymous amateurs who consistently rely on Skeptic websites and publications as primary reference sources. Despite the volumes of peer-reviewed studies and articles cataloged in the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine and other research databases confirming the efficacy of these non-conventional therapies, Skeptic editors rely solely upon those studies that may be used for censure and defamation.

Since Skeptics now control and monitor these health subjects there is no opportunity for transparency and honest debate to correct gross errors are more often than not systematically shut down.

When looking for information about alternative health issues using legitimate, highly respected encyclopedias such as the Encyclopedia Britannica we find fair, balanced, and scholarly reviews based on reliable objective sources and professional expertise. Britannica and other comparable encyclopedias name the editors and their professional credentials in any given subject. There is no debasement. There are no attacks. At no point in these highly revered encyclopedias is there character assassination, ridicule, mocking, or disparagement of people supporting an alternative and complementary medical approach at variance with medical orthodoxy.

The process for crafting a subject entry is transparent, and instructive. Therefore, due to the lack of subjective biases and prejudices, users benefit from the information provided by being given the liberty to make up their own mind about an entry’s veracity.

Now let’s compare that to an experience on Wikipedia which calls itself an encyclopedia but fails even the most rudimentary challenges. Most of the editors are anonymous with no reliable curriculum vitae to see if they have expertise in the area they are editing. Their use of words such as “charlatan,” “quack,” “lunatic,” “fringe,” and “pseudoscientific” are not uncommon. There is zero transparency.

One feels an oozing sense of condescension viewing the biographies of highly respected and professional people who criticize conventional medical newspeak. They are held in utter contempt, and their expertise is pre-judged as having no legitimate value.

Worse, they are condemned as quacks, charlatans, opportunists in Wikipedia’s virtual reality of Stalinist show trials—condemned without an opportunity to respond to the allegations.

And that brings us to something the public still doesn’t fully understand: Wikipedia is not simply a reference site. It is a reputational weapon when misused. It can function as a blacklisting apparatus—especially in fields where powerful institutions want a monopoly on legitimacy.

The Personal Reality: “Did You See Your Profile on Wikipedia?”

Imagine waking up one day and someone in your office says, “did you see your profile on Wikipedia?” I said, I’m not familiar with Wikipedia. And I didn’t put any profile up. Well, someone did.

And so I take a look, and not a single thing in the profile is accurate. So, we reach out to Wikipedia to try to make changes. After first looking at their own guidelines, it says that if a living person is being attacked or libeled, then that biography should be taken down immediately.

That was in 2007 or 2008. It’s still there.

The consequences? Loss of multiple book contracts because of, quote, the references made in Wikipedia. Who made the references? They won’t tell you.

How can you get them removed? What they tell you doesn’t work. But they would have known that.

How many people are affected in a similar manner? We don’t know, except almost everyone in the alternative healing and complementary medicine movement, physicians, scientists, patients, advocates, authors, journalists, have been similarly libeled.

And how is this allowed to be maintained? Because of Bill Clinton protecting them and how this was set up. Why is it still allowed after all these decades, and enormous damage done to people’s careers?

And that is a question that we intend to ask. But this question should be asked by those who have the power, authority, and responsibility to stop it.

Now, step back and consider what this really means. A platform that claims neutrality, that claims to be an “encyclopedia,” that claims to have policies against libel of living persons, can still allow—year after year, decade after decade—information that is demonstrably false, damaging, and professionally consequential to remain fixed in place.

This isn’t an oversight. This isn’t a minor glitch in a sprawling open system. This is structural. It’s the structure doing what it was built to allow: anonymous attack without meaningful remedy.

In my opinion, it cannot be slowed down, improved, altered, or in any fashion remedied. I literally believe that the only outcome should be the total close down of the Wikimedia Foundation. And then if the Congress and the official investigative committees approve, an in-depth investigation as the evidence is overwhelming.

I have personally written over 75 articles, all concerning the problems of Wikipedia. I’ve sent every one to Wikimedia Foundation. Their only charge back is, stop writing the articles.

Thousands of people can be on the site attacking or altering your biography. We have sent detailed analysis of who the people were, released or acknowledged as editors, or where they got their information. Nothing changed.

Any editor who wanted the truth and had the truth from outside independent sources and made the change, it was reversed within minutes.

And that is the lived experience that mirrors what so many organizations and individuals report: a closed loop of edits, reversions, intimidation, and bans, all under the cover of “policy.”

The Systemic Capture of Alternative and Complementary Medicine Pages

Everyone should be greatly concerned that Wikipedia’s articles about alternative medical modalities to prevent and treat disease have been expropriated by an army of compromised editors whose sole mission is to undermine the therapeutic credibility and scientific evidence of these therapies.

Practically all of these non-orthodox medical entries are dominated by people who are intent on preserving the pro-pharmaceutical status quo.

Anyone can spend a little time searching through Wikipedia articles about homeopathy, chiropractic, popular herbal supplements and vitamins, etc. and quickly discover that favorable peer-reviewed research is unwelcome. If anyone doubts this and feels game, register as an editor and try to make a constructive truthful edit about the medical efficacy of any of these alternative treatments, supported by an irrefutable medical reference, and it will be quickly removed within hours. Continue to make the same edit and you will eventually be banned.

This is a crucial point: Wikipedia’s defenders often say, “Anyone can edit.” In practice, on contentious pages, anyone can attempt to edit—until they are punished for doing so. Then the field belongs to the entrenched faction.

And that faction has a worldview. It is not merely “science.” It is a particular ideology of scientific rationalism—often operating like a belief system of its own, with heresy rules and enforcement mechanisms.

The NHF Case Study: A Neutral Entry Turned into a Smear

Let’s take an example.

The National Health Federation (NHF) founded in 1955 is an international consumer, health freedom organization dedicated to protecting citizens’ rights to consume healthy foods over-the-counter access to dietary supplements and access to alternative medical therapies.

In the past NHF has had a formative role in getting chiropractors legally licensed in the United States, the recognition of acupuncture as a viable treatment and the passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act that enables Americans access to dietary supplements under the assurance of government quality controls and good manufacturing practices.

Moreover, the Federation is recognized by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) with UN observer status and has a seat on the FAO-WHO’s Codex Alimentarius Commission, which establishes international food standards and guidelines including the use of pesticides, food additives, preservative, contamination levels, etc.

In fact, with membership now representing 22 nations, the NHF is the sole consumer advocacy organization on the Commission uncontaminated by any individual government and the private interests of large food manufacturers, agro-chemical companies such as Monsanto, the pharmaceutical giants and their lobbyists.

In other words, NHF is a highly esteemed consumer protection organization with a 70-year history of protecting individual health freedoms.

In 2007, NHF board members conducted a small experiment to test Wikipedia’s neutrality. NHF had no entry in Wikipedia; therefore, an entry was created that was kept very neutral without noting any unreasonable or questionable claims.

After a period of time, the entry was radically modified to portray the federation in a negative light. Positive references were replaced by anti-natural health references. All attempts by the organization to restore the page’s original entry were rejected.

An outside attorney’s effort to correct NHF’s page were met with threatening cease and desist notices.

NHF’s current Wikipedia entry describes the Federation as “an alliance of promoters and followers who engage in lobbying campaigns… uses the words ‘alternative’ and ‘freedom’ for its own purposes” and is “antagonistic to accepted scientific methods as well as to current consumer protection law.”

However, these Wikipedia quotes are sourced back to a militant anti-alternative medicine organization, Quackwatch, which has a long history of harassing natural health practitioners and practically every modality of alternative medicine in order to further advance its drug-based and corporate food agenda.

Consequently, the Federation had no other means to correct the false information and therefore resigned itself to the fate of lingering in Wikipedia prison for perpetuity.

That last phrase—Wikipedia prison—is not rhetorical flourish. It is the condition of being unable to correct false public claims about yourself or your organization in the most visible “reference” site on the planet.

A Culture That Mimics Dogma

There are numerous other examples of board certified physicians advocating for alternative medical therapies and professional health associations experiencing similar obstacles. So much so, it is now embedded into Wikipedia culture, which is now analogous to the firmly held beliefs in any dogmatic religious sect.

It is no longer a question whether Wikipedia is redeemable; rather, on matters regarding medicine and health and controversial geopolitical and party-related domestic issues, the encyclopedia has transmuted into an Augean stable of misinformation and corporate and political nepotism.

That is strong language, but it fits the reality: when facts are filtered through ideological enforcement, “knowledge” becomes a managed product.

And then we have to ask: what type of person does this?

‘Character Assassination’ is a practice in which a deliberate and sustained effort is made to damage the reputation or credibility of an individual, social groups or institutions.

Martin Icks from the University of Amsterdam and Eric Shiraev at George Mason University introduced a classification of seven character assassination methods, which they defined as “anonymous lies’, ‘misquoting’, ‘silencing’, ‘acts of vandalism’, ‘name-calling’, ‘mental illness’ and ‘sexual deviance’.

The authors identified Wikipedia as a common context for ‘anonymous lies’. Our investigations have shown that misquoting, silencing, name calling and online abuse or harassment are quite prevalent.

The Absence of Recourse—and the Normalization of Abuse

For those whose reputations and positive public contributions have been terrorized and debased by Wikipedia, there is no recourse to restore their character, legal or otherwise.

Over the years, voluminous complaints have been communicated and/or filed to the Foundation, including lawsuits, about the gross violations in Wikipedia’s editorial policies, misinformation and inflammatory and potentially libelous language. Sadly, such requests in the majority of cases go unheeded.

As a last resort, what can be done is to refuse the Wikipedia Foundation’s fund drives and any solicitations to grant giving and donations.

Our own past experience in filing lawsuits against the Foundation has been met with abuse both from Wikipedia’s legal network and privileged volunteer editors who are privately supported by the Foundation.

The Foundation categorically has refused to assume responsibility or be held accountable for the abuse perpetrated by senior and administrative volunteer editors and groups promoting antagonistic ideologies against medical therapies and its leading proponents they happen to disagree with.

The consequence has been that the scientific reputations and efficacy of these therapies, and the careers of those practicing them, are seriously undermined and damaged.

Based upon the evidence it is our belief that the Foundation knowingly enables this activity to persist and is in fact ideologically aligned with an anti-natural health agenda that threatens the pharmaceutical industry.

The “Universal Code of Conduct” That Changes Nothing

Frustrated Wikipedia editors, past and present, have acknowledged that Wikipedia’s culture of harassment and abuse on its Talk Pages is uncontrollable.

In 2020, the Foundation drafted its Universal Code of Conduct to address this systemic problem of toxic behavior and announced it would begin to ban editors who are charged with abusive behavior towards other editors.

However, over 6 years have passed and the Code has yet to be ratified by the Wikimedia Board and its enforcement is still pending.

Unfortunately, this new ruling, as admirable as it may be, ignores the volumes of misinformation and libelous language already found on the encyclopedia’s pages.

Nor would the Code restore Wikipedia’s original standards of neutrality, nor will it address the dire state of negligence to codify verifiable guidelines to determine what is and is not accurate content.

In other words: even if the culture becomes “less rude,” the informational damage remains locked into place.

Wikipedia vs. Medical Reality

Skepticism’s assault against CAM therapies has become a counter-insurgent effort to delegitimize contemporary trends in medicine.

In 2019, the World Health Organization reported, “traditional and complementary medicine is an important and often underestimated health resource with many applications, especially for the prevention and management of lifestyle-related chronic diseases and in meeting the health needs of ageing populations.”

The number of American medical schools offering courses in complementary and alternative medicine has been increasing rapidly. The most prestigious American medical schools now have departments for CAM or include these subjects in their curriculum including acupuncture, hypnosis and herbal remedies according to a recent US News article.

A joint 2024 NIH-Johns Hopkins paper reported that alternative health approaches increased to 38% in 2022, and 49% of Americans use complementary therapies for pain management.

Another government survey estimates that 62% of US adults use some form of alternative medicine annually.

On the other hand, Wikipedia feels threatened by this trend as its editorial animosity continues to become more hostile.

It is crucial to consider the Wikimedia Foundation in the larger context of international corporate globalism and its imperialist agenda.

As a nonprofit organization, the Foundation doesn’t act independently from many of the largest federal and international globalist entities, including private mega-corporations.

Its largest declared donors include Google, Microsoft, Intel, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg, Boeing, Goldman Sachs, Chevron, Merck, Oracle, and Bank of America.

Despite giving a wink and nod to the Constitutional rights of free speech, it has equally acted in favor of censorship.

Last year, the Foundation filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court supporting the reversal of Texas and Florida bills that “prohibit web operators from banning users or removing speech and content based on the viewpoints and opinions of the users in question.”

From its press release, the Foundation argues that such bills would “diminish the quality and usability of Wikipedia for billions of readers and users worldwide.”

Of course, full open access to free speech on the encyclopedia would undermine any of the Foundation’s hidden agendas to advance certain ideologies or scientific narratives over and above others.

The WHO, NIH, and the Polishing of Institutional Biographies

The Foundation is also fully immersed in the missions and objectives of the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health.

Wikipedia’s entry for the WHO is entirely free of any criticisms despite the numerous charges of incompetence and corruption that the organization has faced, such as the debacle in its handling of the 2008 swine flu scare.

In October 2020, the Foundation entered a collaboration with the WHO to advance the latter’s narrative in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Wikimedia Foundation’s CEO and World Economic Forum young global leader, Katherine Maher, assured the encyclopedia’s commitment to “myth busting” medical information that challenged the WHO and individual government health policies that followed WHO guidelines.

In response to the collaboration, the WHO’s Director-General Tedros, himself having faced many controversial accusations in the past, stated that the relationship will assure people have access “to reliable health information from WHO across multiple countries, languages and devices.”

Likewise, Wikipedia’s 15-year relationship with the National Institutes of Health has protected the federal agency’s Wikipedia page free from warranted controversy.

The same is true for many other international organizations, such the WEF, that promote a centralized globalist agenda controlled and orchestrated by an elitist class.

The Intentional Blindness to Evidence

Perhaps most frustrating is that despite the factual evidence that medical science supporting alternative medicine is not on Wikipedia’s side, it stubbornly refuses to acknowledge it.

This leaves us to only one belief; that is, this is intentional and the Wikimedia Foundation has another agenda that transgresses its own ethical claims.

Among the 37 million citations in the NIH’s PubMed database, 100s of 1000s of journal studies provide a substantial degree of credibility to alternative medical and natural non-drug therapies.

Billions of patient visits worldwide show that alternative and complementary medicine works on the patient level.

A government study estimates that 53%, over half of America’s 338,600 office-based American physicians recommend at least one complementary health approach to their patients.

The most recommended therapies are massage (30%), chiropractic (27%), nutrient and herbal supplements (26%) and acupuncture (22%).

Fifty-three percent of American psychiatrists now recommend mind-body therapies such as meditation, yoga, and guided imagery.

Yet, by extension, according to Wikipedia’s Skeptic ideology, all of these doctors are regarded as quacks and charlatans.

This is not simply a mistake, it is horribly wrong by every moral standard.

The Larger Health Crisis and Wikipedia’s Role

Americans have been in a steady declining state of health, life expectancy and psychological well-being for many years.

The dire state of the nation’s health echoes the incessant rise in more and more drug prescriptions and surgical interventions.

It is no longer questionable that these trends are deeply interconnected.

Physicians only recommend natural medical interventions because their personal clinical experience has shown they are effective.

So, what has Wikipedia actually contributed to the health crisis that may turn the tide?

Fundamentally nothing because it only pedals more of the same remedies causing the problems and disparagingly marginalizes remedies that may provide relief and increase patients’ well-being.

The Only Honest Question Left

Only in America could you have something that calls itself an encyclopedia be so wrong on so many things. And nothing changes.

At the beginning of this, we are laying out what the studious work of one of America’s finest investigative journalists, Helen Buyniski, has done over the last 10 years, and yet no one in the media is willing to discuss this, touch this subject, no investigative journalist.

Not 60 Minutes, 20/20, Dateline, Nightline.

We believe it’s time to hold those people, including its founder and others who’ve run the foundation, personally responsible.

At that moment, with qualified evidence, then it’s important to demand Congress, many members of whom have themselves been attacked, hold hearings.

Because the people doing the attacking are anonymous. As a result, you don’t know who’s attacking you.

And how is this allowed to be maintained? Why is it still allowed after all these decades and enormous damage done to people’s careers?

That question has to be asked where power actually exists: Congress, oversight bodies, investigative committees, and officials with authority to subpoena records and compel testimony.

Because this is not simply an internet problem.

This is an institutional accountability problem.

A Refusal to Fund the Machine and a Demand for Accountability

It is past time the public says no more Wikipedia.

No more anonymous trolls with psychological dysfunctions who intimidate accomplished medical professionals and alternative medical professions.

And finally, no more handouts to the Wikimedia Foundation when it goes on its begging rounds to further feed its revenue stream, which was $180 million in 2023.

But “no more donations” is only the beginning. The real issue is epistemic governance, who controls what counts as “true” in the public square, and under what ethical constraints.

When Wikipedia smears living individuals and organizations, it is not simply expressing an opinion. It is establishing a reputational “fact” that then propagates across media, publishers, institutions, employers, and academic systems. Wikipedia becomes a citation hub. The smear becomes self-reinforcing: journalists quote Wikipedia, Wikipedia cites journalists, and the loop becomes its own closed circuit of legitimacy.

In such a system, truth does not win by evidence. Truth wins only if the gatekeepers permit it.

And if the gatekeepers are anonymous—and ideologically aligned—and institutionally protected—then the public is not living under democratized knowledge.

They are living under curated knowledge.

Action Steps: What Readers Can Do Now

This is where outrage has to become discipline. If we want accountability, we need organized, concrete pressure—not just complaint.

Stop treating Wikipedia as an authority in health and medicine

Use it, if at all, as a starting index—not a final source. Cross-check with:

• PubMed and peer-reviewed databases
• university medical libraries
• credentialed clinical guidelines
• named experts with documented publications
  If Wikipedia contradicts high-quality evidence, don’t assume the evidence is wrong.

Document reputational harm and preserve records

If you or your organization is affected:

• archive versions of the page (screenshots, timestamps, diff histories)
• archive takedown requests and responses
• retain evidence of professional harm (lost contracts, cancellations, denials)
  This builds the factual basis for oversight and legal pressure.

Demand congressional hearings and formal oversight

Not vague letters—specific demands:

• subpoena editorial communications where possible
• investigate donor influence and institutional collaborations
• examine how “living persons” policies are applied in practice
• examine the role of organized ideological groups controlling specific topic areas

Challenge the media’s dependence on Wikipedia

When journalists cite Wikipedia as a baseline:

• submit corrections with peer-reviewed sources
• ask editors why anonymous material is treated as a factual anchor
• push for editorial policies banning Wikipedia as a primary source in contentious areas

Withdraw support and pressure major donors

If a foundation claims neutrality while enabling ideological defamation:

• refuse donation solicitations
• communicate to corporate donors that reputational abuse is being funded
• make it reputationally costly for institutions to pretend this is benign

Support transparent alternatives

Support platforms and publishers that:

• name editors
• disclose credentials
• allow genuine debate
• correct errors without ideological retaliation

A Closing Statement for a Stand-Alone Exposé

We were promised an encyclopedia for the people.

Instead, in the areas that matter most—medicine, health freedom, controversial science, geopolitics—we have watched an ideological enforcement system consolidate itself under the mask of neutrality. A real encyclopedia persuades through rigor. Wikipedia increasingly persuades through intimidation, repetition, and procedural capture. That is not democratized knowledge. That is a managed narrative.

And if the evidence continues to show that the Wikimedia Foundation will not correct libel of living persons, will not restrain abusive gatekeeping, and will not restore neutrality to the areas most vulnerable to institutional capture, then we are left with one conclusion:

Accountability must come from outside the system. Because the system has shown us—over and over again—that it will not hold itself accountable.

No more Wikipedia as unquestioned authority. No more anonymous trials without defense.
No more reputational destruction in the guise of “reference.”

It is time to put the evidence forward—publicly, relentlessly, and with enough organized pressure that the people who actually have power can no longer pretend this is just “the internet being the internet.”

It isn’t. It’s the shaping of truth in the modern age. And it must be confronted accordingly.