The right wing is coming for Wikipedia

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/09/18/right-wing-wikipedia-editor-heritage

by donsupreme • 10 months ago

59 60 10 months ago

FUD. Wikipdedia's always on the brink of disaster if you listen to them.

Given the mountain of evidence for Wikipedia's left wing bias[1][2][3][4], it seems something ought to change, but hard to answer "how?"

I expect to receive many downvotes for this, despite providing high-quality and authoritative sources. Which is not unlike what happens on Wikipedia :)

[1] https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/is-wikipedia-politically-...

[2] https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-the-regime-captured-wikipe...

[3] https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

[4] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5022797

unethical_ban3• 10 months ago

Whatever the merits of those articles, the idea of calling editors "evil" for debating the sudden addition of Erika Kirk is not decent or neutral.

atmavatar• 10 months ago

Considering the right-wing mainstreams such ideas like holocaust denial, white replacement theory, that the civil war was fought about anything other than slavery, that immigrants secretly steal and eat household pets, etc., it quickly becomes apparent that reality has a left-wing bias.

LocalH• 10 months ago

Either that, or the mainstream right wing is much closer to the far right than they'd ever admit (and that they get pissed when people call them out on it).

sambeau• 10 months ago

Wikipedia is a global resource, edited by educated—often academic—people all over the world. Why would anyone expect it to conform to the US idea of what is left and right? For most of Europe the American Democrats are to the right of their mainstream right-wing parties.

There is no bias to the left. The USA has shifted so far to the right that balance now looks leftist.

beardyw• 10 months ago

Yes, it makes me despair that we in more tolerant societies may need to break away if things get too bad.

qcnguy2• 10 months ago

There is huge bias to the left. Wikipedia outright bans right wing sources from being used as citations, including non-US sources like the Daily Mail, so it's not true that it's something to do with US bias.

This isn't due to a quality problem. Daily Mail articles are usually highly accurate and they publish voluminously. It's because leftists on Wikipedia ban conservatives as part of their relentless ideological war, as they do in every other context.

snowe2010• 10 months ago

The mountain of evidence you supplied is just evidence that republicans more often than not are involved in unsavory things. Hence the change you see with the think tanks, because they generally do not make the news in the same way that a pedophile politician does. Neutrality is telling the truth, not saying nice things about “both sides”.

zb3• 10 months ago

Good, let's make it more balanced (but it won't happen anyway).

IAmBroom• 10 months ago

You fantasize that the right-wing of America is aiming for "more balanced"?

poszlem5• 10 months ago

[flagged]

tehjoker2• 10 months ago

One thing to consider is that Republican affiliation is a minority opinion, so it makes sense that they would be outnumbered in a random sampling, though I would expect 2:1 rather than 3:1.

poszlem5• 10 months ago

According to Pew’s most recent National Public Opinion Reference Survey (Feb–Jun 2025), 46% of Americans identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, and 45% identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/fact-sheet/party-affili...

In a truly random U.S. sample you would expect Republican identifiers to be nearly as numerous as Democratic identifiers.

Not sure where you got your numbers from.

mcphage• 10 months ago

Hmm, how many Democrats do you think should serve in Conservapedia’s editor community?

poszlem5• 10 months ago

I don't know, does Conservapedia claim to have NPOV?

bryanlarsen3• 10 months ago

More interesting to me is the study that shows that Wikipedia editors start off being very radical (who else is going to invest the effort required), but moderate significantly over time.

Can't find the link I wanted, it was on HN this year, IIRC.

notmyjob• 10 months ago

Exactly what you’d expect given any moderated system. Certainly you can learn what will not be accepted and moderate one’s approach without sctually shifting ideologically.

poszlem5• 10 months ago

Could it be this one: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w22744/w227...

unethical_ban3• 10 months ago

My make of it is the Left wing social values and perceptions of reality are broadly more tolerated than those of the far right that is complaining.

Is an editor "evil" for deleting or debating the addition of a politically charged article? Come on.

I weep for this country: if we had a voting system that allowed multiple parties (>2) to really compete, we could have an intellectually honest right wing.

hagbard_c7• 10 months ago

Can you not just say 'right' without the need to add 'far' in front of it?

Do you consider the left wing to be intellectually honest in your country? If so, why? Could you explain in your own words why the right wing is not intellectually honest while the left wing supposedly is? It all sounds rather strange to me considering the way left-wing politics is so often driven by feelings instead of facts.

fulafel• 10 months ago

editors identify as Democrats at about three times the rate of Republicans

This seems to presume that the desireable middle ground would be the average of two US parties. But Wikipedia is global. (Not to imply it would be fine for the US, but that's another argument)

jsbisviewtiful• 10 months ago

Make of that what you will.

Conservatives are making up their own reality as they lie and hate their way through life. What I make of that editor ratio is that Wikipedia will remain truthful and less corrupt when presenting factual information - and not yet another propaganda mouthpiece.

ryandvm• 10 months ago

:shrug:

Academia has always leaned left - make of that what you will.

Are you suggesting DEI?

karmakurtisaani• 10 months ago

It's probably just that reality has a left wing bias.

poszlem5• 10 months ago

Given that early universities were founded by churches, ‘always’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

mcv7• 10 months ago

I think it just seems that way because at this period in time, truth, science, and facts are seen as left-wing. Although universities have always been interested in exploring new ideas, which probably tends towards progressiveness.

mcv7• 10 months ago

I’ll probably get downvoted

Always happy to oblige.

But honestly, I find this sort of upfront self-victimization annoying and not conducive to honest debate.

Wikipedia’s volunteer editor community leans heavily left wing politically.

I think they lean heavily towards verifiable facts. In some countries, those may be the same thing, but I don't think that's universally the case.

RickJWagner• 10 months ago

Your prediction was right, of course.

Hacker News has become like Reddit, where facts and logical arguments don’t matter. If your post isn’t sufficiently leftist, it will be downvoted.

It’s a pity, and it reflects badly on the left. They have some crazies in their camp.

cosmicgadget• 10 months ago

That's like saying science would be better (more factual) if we required that 50% of scientists be republican.

baggy_trough• 10 months ago

Social sciences probably would be. Right now it’s just progressives congratulating themselves on the smell of their own farts.

twirlip• 10 months ago

There's a reason why Conservapedia sucks and isn't used by anybody.

smitty1e• 10 months ago

Stand by for Elon and Grokipedia:

"We are building Grokipedia @xAI.

Will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia.

Frankly, it is a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe."

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1972992095859433671

HanShotFirst• 10 months ago

Trying to identify and remove bias in any direction is a worthy goal. That said, an evenhanded and factual approach to doing this may result in more negative sentiment towards people or organizations that deny facts; push fringe ideas without the benefit of widespread public support, or evidence, or academic consensus; or who have similarities with historical people or organizations who have come to be viewed negatively with the benefit of hindsight.

yahway• 10 months ago

Can we stop with politically divisive rage articles on a tech forum? I come here to escape political ragism polluting the internetsphere.

hagbard_c7• 10 months ago

Wikipedia needs some 'right wing' to offset the heavy 'left-wing' bias on nearly every article which has some political tangent, no matter how distant. It was supposed to be an encyclopedia, not an activist manual or propaganda organ but in many ways it has turned into the latter. You may - for some unfathomable reason - agree with the lefties who rule the roost among the editors so you may not realise just how much resistance the site has against publishing things which go against whatever desired narrative there happens to be but that does not make it right. Just like Michael Jordan realised 'Republicans buy sneakers too' it is time for Jimmy Wales (et al) to realise conservatives use encyclopedias too or it will end up not being known as an encyclopedia but as a political platform. There's plenty of those already and it would be a damn shame if Wikipedia remained stuck in that mire. Come on, Wales, wake up and smell the coffee (or tea or whatever you prefer) and realise the 'progressive' grip on the media is weakening. The site should be neither 'left' nor 'right' but 'factual' as facts neither care about your feelings nor about your ideology.

mcv7• 10 months ago

It was supposed to be an encyclopedia, not an activist manual or propaganda organ but in many ways it has turned into the latter.

Can you give examples where it's an activist manual or a propaganda organ? My impression is that everything is well-sourced and fairly reliable. At least, more so than the vast majority of information sources on the Web.

Although I suppose on some level, there is something inherently left-wing about a free, common, public source of information that's accessible and editable by anyone, whereas conservatives would probably prefer to privatize and commercialize it.

But I guess it's good that conservatives also see the value it in.

hagbard_c7• 10 months ago

I can give you some links to articles discussing the problems with biased Wikipedia articles which should answer any questions you have on this subject. If you want examples you an just look for anything related to the current US administration for a good start.

https://thecritic.co.uk/the-left-wing-bias-of-wikipedia/

https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased

As to the claim that Wikipedia articles are 'well-sourced and fairly reliable' this is true for articles which are not in any way related to politics but misleading or sometimes even downright false where it concerns politically charged subjects, partly due to the (ab)use of the 'Perennial Sources' list which in for the most only allows sources which abide to the 'progressive' narrative. By banning sources which do not follow the narrative it is difficult to sometimes impossible to add corrections to biased articles since those corrections relate to facts only published on such sites. This often leads to lengthy discussions on the Talk pages for those articles where editors defend their deletion of such corrections by claiming the sources are banned or untrustworthy - this based on the Perennial Sources list [1] which lists heavily biased propagandist sources like MSNBC, ABC, CNN, Al Jazeera, SPLC, ADL, the Atlantic and many others as 'reliable'. In this way Wikipedia treats sources like pseudo-democratic countries treat parties: just ban the parties and candidates which don't tow the line and let the world marvel at your party or candidate 'winning' every election 'fair and square'.

The problem with Wikipedia's bias is very well known, just point a search engine at the question 'does wikipedia have a political bias' (or something along those lines) for examples. Articles on politically charged subjects - and there seem to be more and more of those - end up like talking points for the desired narrative instead of informative overviews of the subject matter. Such articles are then used as 'proof' of the position espoused in the narrative, as 'teaching material' to further the narrative, as input for LLM training runs which leads to those models ending up being more biased and more.

Yes, Wikipedia has a significant political/ideological bias towards the 'left' or 'progressive' side.

As to there being something 'left-wing' about a 'free, common, public source of information that is accessible and editable by anyone' I beg to differ. I consider this to be neither left-wing nor right-wing, liberal nor libertarian. Where ideology comes in to play is when someone with an ideological bias starts removing viewpoints which do not fit some desired narrative, especially when this is done in an organised fashion so as to crowd out dissenting viewpoints. As it stands now on Wikipedia it is those with a left-wing bias who are largely responsible for such activities. I won't claim that there is something inherently left-wing about the desire to silence those with dissenting views because I know this not to be true. I do claim this is inherently authoritarian and that this behaviour is what has dragged down Wikipedia. It would be a good thing for those in charge of keeping the project alive to realise that it stands or falls by its general reliability which has been severely affected by the actions of these activist editors.

A long-ish answer but that's because I've been around Wikipedia for a long time - since its inception - and consider it a damn shame that the project has been subject to ideological capture.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...

techblueberry2• 10 months ago

Can you provide some examples? I often see this FUD and then something like, “they don’t even include the conservative viewpoint” and then I click on the link and see the conservative viewpoint.

burkesquires• 10 months ago

See Wikipedia's list of sources that it considers valid…are these left or right or balanced? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...

The right wing is coming for Wikipedia

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