Veracapedia: The Anonymous Truth
When someone needs to learn about something, anything, chances are that the first thing they will do is Google it. Then the first thing they find will be Wikipedia. A quick read and the process is complete — Truth found, learning complete! But anyone who has been in an educational setting has heard the phrase “Wikipedia is not a source of information.”
I always hated this argument, not because I think Wikipedia is a good source but because books are fallible too. Books can be wrong. Books have an agenda. No book is genuinely free from political bias. Millennial kids at school in the 00s used textbooks from the 1980s — Was everything we read current, relevant and free from bias? I guess books hold a certain trust in academics and books at school are, we hope, chosen with oversight. The teachers didn’t want us to use Wikipedia because it could not be trusted like the books, and they were right but for the wrong reasons.
“Anyone can change anything on Wikipedia,” said my English teacher. She was dead wrong. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, try it and see how long it lasts. To make an actual change, you have to be someone special... Ding Dong — It’s time to talk about how we are slipping into an Orwellian dystopia again.
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
The protagonist of George Orwell’s 1984 is Winston Smith, an editor in the Records Department at the governmental office Ministry of Truth. His job is to revise historical records to make the past conform to whatever ‘The Party’ wants it to be. Past events have no objective existence but survive only in written records and in human memories. Therefore, history, information and truth become whatever is convenient to the day.
The English edition of Wikipedia averages about 255 million page views a day. According to web analytics firm SimilarWeb, Wikipedia overall is the ninth most visited website in the world so it’s safe to say that we (humans) rely on it.
When you vote, who makes that decision? Who weighs up the arguments and decides who to vote for? “I do” you tell me, but answer me this; where did you read those arguments? What website did you use to learn about issues, facts and statistics that were important to you? Tell me, how do you know the truth? Who decides what your truth is?
Some of the information you have access to, the information that makes your world truthful is written, controlled and edited by a group of anonymous moderators based on good faith.
The boring yet frightening stats
Wikipedia tracks the editors and whilst some data is out of date it’s quite revealing. You can draw your own conclusions 🤷.
> 13% of people who edit Wikipedia are children (aged 12–17).
> 84% are male
> Only 1,032 administrators control the entire site.
>1% of Wikipedia’s editors have generated 77% of the site’s content.
Public internet forums need moderators just like the streets of London need police. They must make sure people follow the rules so that everyone can have a good time. The problem is that when this job does not pay a wage, we rely on volunteers and whilst some people want to make the world better, you're also going to attract marginalised and weak-minded people (shoutout to the wreckage of r/antiwork).
We know the dangers of hiding power behind a mask, the Zimbardo experiments are a great example of this. That's why to moderate life, the police are trained, accountable and notably present — we know who they are. Many internet moderators are none of these. There are untrained, unaccountable and anonymous.
I want to think that anonymous people on the internet are altruistic, have no agenda or bias, and never try to impose their political opinions on others — but then again, I use Reddit, so I know this to be wishful thinking. Crowd-sourced moderation should reduce bias, but only when allowing diverse people to partake…
The Invisible Hand
Whist rouge moderation on message boards like Reddit is mostly clear and can be witnessed, Wikipedia’s moderators are like the deep state who wield power behind the scenes. They do this by surreptitiously controlling information. Of course, words change over time and what is generally accepted by society changes also. The problem is that I would hope the people who decide what is generally accepted are doing so in good faith.
As an example, Wikipedia changed the definition of Cultural Marxism in 2014. I won't argue either side, but this part of socialist theory went from academic concept to right-wing conspiracy quicker than Jordan Peterson. The question is why? You can try and read the editing log for this page and see a bunch of childish squabbling for yourself. My point is not that fact that they changed it, but who the hell are these people deciding what truth is?
Outside Wikipedia, the Merriam-Webster dictionary changed the definition of Racism in response to US racial and identity politics. Who decides what words mean? Society at large or a small group of (probably not politically diverse) Americans? Merriam-Webster also amended the meaning of Sexual Preference in a knee-jerk political move.
Again, my criticism is not on definitions, I generally agree with the progressive mindset; it’s the clandestine decision-making process based on politics I do not like.
That's only one dictionary you’ll say, but then again where does Wikipedia take its information from?
I don't want some Winston Smith changing history, language and definitions on political whims, and this shouldn't be a Left-Right political point (but it is). It's a class issue; there are people at the top who control information telling people at the bottom what is true and what is false. A shadowy cabal of anonymous individuals subverting the information the world has access to — they control the past, present and future. And I don't want to drag the tone down, but you’re really fucking naive if you think that the global intelligence machinery isn’t involved in internet moderation.
And it is getting more interesting… @AlanRMacLeod at MintPress has found that Facebook has recruited dozens of individuals from the CIA, FBI and DoD to fill highly politically sensitive sectors such as trust, security and content moderation.
But it's referenced…
Every university student knows the gold mine at the bottom of a Wikipedia article, the home of all the references! Sure, we can’t reference Wikipedia, but we can reference a Wikipedia reference.
But who decides the validity of the reference? Is the Guardian a quotable source? Is the Telegraph? The New York Times? The Washington Post? The Daily Mail? Are we seriously going to get into the debate of objective news when media companies are owned by the 1%?
That’s if you can even use the references. Many references are hidden behind paywalls or links to out-of-print books. So I guess we’ll have to trust what is written, but isn't that the point of referencing work — I shouldn't have to trust something because it is written down in HTML or print.
So What?
It is not a big issue, but the way we receive information is becoming a complex societal development. Our worlds are physically the same, but our individual reality is curated through an algorithm-based information lens unique to us all.
Think of it like this, if everyone had their own dictionary, and words had different meanings to different people based on their political, ethnic, religious and social status, how would we communicate? We must know the shared truth and this should not be decided upon by a tiny anonymous invisible backroom subset of society.
It is not Wikipedia’s fault, they admit the website is not a reliable source of information that contains incorrect information, but for too many, it is the almost infallible go-to for any query. The people who decide the truth should be present, accountable and honest — but who decides your truth?
