Martin Luther posting his 95 theses on the wall of the Church in 1517. Painting by Ferdinand Pauwels, 1872.
1. Wikpedia is based on the myth that anyone can edit it, but "anyone" can't really edit it, because it has a highly restrictive and arcane editing system that creates a very high barrier to participation and has a very low threshold for rejection.
2. Wikipedia editors are anonymous and unaccountable.
3. While Wikipedia always prides itself on its massive statistics of articles edited, it's actually a relatively few number of people editing most articles.
4. Wikipedia has an internal core group of editors empowered to make the judgement calls on all controversial entries.
5. These decisions on controversial entries or the arcane editing process itself aren't put to a vote of all editors or even a secret-ballot vote of the core group of editors; they are decided by cultic consensus or "democratic centralism".
6. There is no clear, transparent criteria for who gets to be in the core group of editors who make all the decisions on controversial entries.
7. There is no clear and transparent criteria even for what is a controversial entry.
8. Wikipedia is not part of social media and not even part of the Internet. While it is linked everywhere, its own links never link to anything outside its own servers, but only to its own pages.
9. Wikipedia is not part of modern Web 2.0. It has no "like" buttons; no "retweet this" buttons; no voting. To be sure, under some pressure, *some* pages now have a voting on a ranking of "Trustworthy/Not Trustworthy" but this "goes nowhere". We can't see the results of how the public is voting. Wikipedia takes no action.
10. Wikipedia creates a myth of non-profit culture and volunteer work and aggressively fundraises from individuals. But it is also taking large grants from financiers like George Soros, and is not publicizing on its website what its budget and expenditures are.
11. Wikipedia's cult-like founder Jimmy Wales recently subjected the whole world to thuggish blackmail by taking his site down, making it unavailable for users like teenagers doing their homework, merely because he didn't like an anti-piracy law being debated by Congress which hadn't even come to a vote yet. What else does little Jimmy not like that might make him black out his site?
12. Even while engaging in this histrionic stunt of blacking out his site, Jimmy Wales ensured that the site retained its traffic statistics so that it wouldn't lose its Google ranking.
13. The gravest crime against free thought committed by Wikipedia with collusion from Google is that it appears among the first returns on nearly every search, dumbing down thought, crippling intellectual curiosity, and curtailing research -- as well as ruining reputations and spreading lies. This is constantly referred to as something automatic or something nobody can do anything about. But it happens because of Google's secret algorithms; it happens because lazy people see something first and link to it again so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and when Google wants to change it, it's uncanny how it gets changed really fast (like the infamous vandalized entry of Rick Santorum).
14. When somebody is libeled and harassed in a biographical or other entry, they have no recourse. They can't appeal. They can't put a comment on the page with a refutation. They can only try to edit the page -- but as the subject of the entry, they'll have no credibility and will simply be erased by other secret and unaccountable editors. If they try to hire a reputation company to do the editing, they will be jeered at as well and ultimately overruled. They can't do anything except try to correct the record elsewhere on the net, but with far less visibility.
15. Wikpedia is way heavily overused especially by young students and dumbs down thinking. They are acquiring a view of the world based on what Wikipedia says, even though many of the entries are biased or incomplete or even vandalized.
16. Wikipedia deploys automatic bots on some of the editing chores and this opens up questions about how much human intelligence is involved in decision-making about controversies.
17. Wikipedia is always advertised as a selfless voluntary effort, but we can't see how selfless it is because we can't see the true identities of the editors, to see if they belong to corporations or political parties or other nonprofits with causes that are antithetical to impartiality.
18. Wikpedia is replacing journalism and putting journalists out of business although journalists, who are both accountable and trained, are better at writing current events.
19. Wikipedia is putting librarians out of business, although librarians are also better trained, accountable, and can use a wealth of human knowledge and their institutional base better to help readers and researchers than just a robotic page in the Internet.
20. Wikipedia is putting other experts out of work. Who wants to bother finding and communicating with and even paying an expert, when Wikipedia already has at least something on the subject, even if it is biased or wrong?
21. Wikipedia is incorporated into many other software and site and ap projects, so it is not only where it is marked and visible, but poisons many other areas with its bias and venom.
(I'll get to 95 theses in due course, as there are more, especially if you begin to single out really awful entries, like the one on the Soviet GULAG citing Vyshinsky -- Vyshinsky! -- as a humanist. If you have any contributions, leave them in the comments.)
Recent Comments