Is Wikipedia Reliable for Factual Objectivity?
When you turn to FOX News, or MSNBC on the other hand, you generally needn’t be a sophisticated consumer of TV “news” coverage to know what you’re getting. Neither hides where its coming from very much. And even if they try to maintain objectivity, an innate bias exists in reportage from opposite ends of the political spectrum, even without intending spin. In fact, maybe that’s why you choose them.
It’s somewhat different at the editorial pages of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, for example. True, the editorial page of each also has a clear bias, even if the occasional op-ed veers from the editorial page’s party line. When you read a column and recognize the columnist’s byline, though, if you’re even slightly in the know, you’ll intuitively sense where the piece will travel — left or right.
Still, when a reader seeks pure “fact reporting” she has a right to expect unbiased fact reporting. Yes, although every reporter has a bias of some sort when covering a story, sufficient editorial supervision (even beyond fact checking) exists to try to ensure that the reporter’s idiosyncratic bias hasn’t crept into the story. (This assumes, as the skeptic would argue, that the newspaper’s own editorial bent isn’t in the tank for one of the story’s protagonists, or the other.)
What happens, however, if an individual authors his own blog which requires no editorial supervision by anyone at all? Presumably in that case, the reader should know that the blogger is on her own dime exercising her First Amendment right to pretty much blog anything she wants — questionable or not, biased or not, maybe even inflammatory or not. No editorial supervision, and no right for the reader to expect it.
So, if you receive a blogpost directly from Donald Trump, or Kyrie Irving, or Joe Rogan, or AOC, or you find the blog, for example, on Linked In, it’s your job as reader or subscriber to determine for yourself its reliability based partly on what you might otherwise have learned or personally investigated. If the blogger purports to state fact or his opinion based on fact, you, the reader, assume the risk of knowing that those “facts” or opinions are not as reliable as those, say, produced by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., where editorial scrutiny has always been a hallmark, even allowing for the possibility of mistakes on older entries as new facts about subjects emerge.
And remember: the individuals who compose the entries for Britannica are paid employees or independent contractors subject to robust editorial supervision and review. They’re being paid, and so anonymity is part of the equation. They don’t contribute simply to have their research and writing exist in a revered publication such as the Britannica in order to brag to a small coterie of friends sworn to silence over a beer.
Nowadays, though, people have multiple online sources. According to a study posted online by Similarweb, a nonpartisan research company that studies Web traffic, the first line of research, is invariably Wikipedia. In contrast, Britannica is the eleventh most popular. Users, of course, don’t pay Wikipedia unless they wish to make a voluntary contribution. And frankly, as easy as pie to call up Wikipedia on an iPhone. And, make no mistake, it’s an extraordinary (at least) first-step research tool.
Wikipedia’s ranking raises an important question: who writes the roughly six million entries that exist? I have no idea, nor does anyone really. It could be you or me or the guy down the hall whom we don’t even know. And who supervises us editorially? No one! Thus, when you read a Wikipedia entry, you have no assurance that anyone fact-checked or supervised it. All you know is that the author was previously “approved” before becoming a Wikipedia author or editor; it is the same approval for either. And, by the way, the pre-approved individual didn’t have to be pre-approved in the discipline about which he or she is authoring or editing an entry. Her discipline, if any, could be archaeology, but she writes or edits entries about snowmobiles, Cicero or guacamole. Astonishing!
So, assume that someone had authored Wiki’s Abraham Lincoln entry for example. Now, an “approved” Wiki writer comes along who believes that Lincoln was a virulent racist — some limited scholarship exists for that proposition. Theoretically, he could “load up” the Lincoln entry with edits intended to paint Lincoln as a consummate villain rather than the somewhat-flawed hero as he is generally accepted. That said, the reader won’t know who wrote the entry or, more pertinent here, who edited Lincoln’s portrait as villainous, or that the “editor” suffered an objectively innate bias about Lincoln. To be sure, it’s hardly like looking at a columnist’s byline in the Times or the Journal and basically knowing “who” wrote it and where he’s coming from.
So, what brings this to the fore? As known, President Biden promised to nominate a Black woman to fill Justice Breyer’s Supreme Court seat. The press has widely reported three frontrunners: Judge Katanji Brown Jackson of the U. S. Court of the Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Associate Justice Leondra R. Kruger of the Supreme Court of California, and Judge J. Michelle Childs of the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina. Politico, a well-regarded publication, reports that two former law clerks of Judge Jackson claim that another former clerk, who is identified in the Politico article as Matteo Godi, has added material to Judge Brown’s Wiki entry to make her profile more appealing to a liberal (maybe Biden) audience, and has also edited the Wiki entries of Judge Kruger’s and Judge Childs’s, as well as the entries of other Black women judges, to present them as less appealing to those who might be of interest to President Biden.
Now, there’s typically a special bond between a judge and her former clerks. And, presumably, if he is indeed the anonymous “editor” — as Politico’s sources, i.e, other former Jackson clerks maintain — he truly believes in the edits he has made, and has edited to Judge Jackson’s Wikipedia page for a long time now. (Of course, Godi had to have been pre-approved to edit Wiki entries).
Strictly speaking, Godi’s ostensibly done nothing wrong. He has effectively been accorded “license” by Wiki to do what he’s done assuming, of course, that his edits are presented in good faith. As an editor, he actually possesses the license, as it were, to compose an entry about me that includes, among other things, that I was stopped for speeding in 2012 on the Long Island Expressway (which I was). Or to add another seemingly innocuous or non-innocuous fact to an entry already written by someone else about me. Or, finally, to tweak the entry by removing something that was already there. And it wouldn’t matter to Wiki, presumably, if he liked or despised me.
In the Politico story noted above, a spokesperson for Wikimedia (the foundation that oversees Wikipedia) says that “We do not write, edit, proofread, or determine what content is included on Wikipedia or how that content is maintained.” Basically, the statement says that Wiki leaves editorial decisions to its “community of volunteers” — and, assuming that Godi is one, editorial discretion rested where he signed onto his own laptop. That is, unless another member of the “community of volunteers” comes along and edits Godi’s “stuff” back to what it was before Godi entered the equation.
Other than what Judge Jackson’s two “informer” clerks have told Politico, all the public and Wiki readers would know about who edited the entry is the anonymous code word Godi presumably uses — H2rty.
So, will anything happen as a result of this dustup? Probably not. I, for one, have always wondered who the people are who have been willing to author the six million original entries on Wiki — with no pay, and doing so anonymously with no public approbation whatsoever for having done so (even a byline). I still have no answer who writes them, and why. However, as a result of the H2rty disclosure, we certainly have a better idea now who, generically, has been doing the “tweaking” — up or down. And it certainly should give cause for concern. Like mentioned above, using Wiki is always a good first step. But it certainly shouldn’t be the only step when any level of serious analysis of an issue is required.
