Any of my readers over the age of forty remember when gaining any sort of basic orientation in the world required (at least) consulting a copy of “The World Book Encyclopedia” or (more likely) hours in the library digging through the card catalogue, pouring over books (if they weren’t out on loan), taking notes on paper, and trying to keep it all organized.
With the advent of the Wikipedia in 2001 and the corresponding growth and availability of the internet access, a whole new world of information became available at the tips of our fingers. Want to know the basics (and some of the details) of a famous (or moderately obscure) singer’s or a sports star’s or a politician’s life? It’s all there, usually with footnotes to take you to the primary sources.
Composed (small d) democratically by many thousands of volunteer editors worldwide, Wikipedia, now existing in 300 different languages, is the largest and most read reference work in all of history.
So what about accuracy? As Time Magazine puts it (I got the reference from Wikipedia), and as I have personally seen demonstrated:
…the site has not been defaced by vandals or hijacked by zealots. Or more precisely, it is vandalized every day but is usually repaired within minutes by any one of the millions of users who are motivated to protect and nurture the site.
Does that mean that Wikipedia is always perfectly accurate or that all the articles in it are perfectly unbiased? Of course not, but it is an invaluable starting point for orientation and learning about almost anything.
The totalitarian, anti-democratic governments of both Russia and China have censored specific pages or the whole website, respectively. This should be a wake-up call when we read of Elon Musk’s and his über-wealthy right wing tech bros’ campaign against Wikipedia. Lila Shroff in a recent article in The Atlantic:
A recent target in Elon Musk’s long and eminently tweetable list of grievances: the existence of the world’s most famous encyclopedia. Musk’s latest attack—“Defund Wikipedia until balance is restored!” he posted on X last month—coincided with an update to his own Wikipedia page, one that described the Sieg heil–ish arm movement he’d made during an Inauguration Day speech. “Musk twice extended his right arm towards the crowd in an upward angle,” the entry read at one point. “The gesture was compared to a Nazi salute or fascist salute. Musk denied any meaning behind the gesture.” There was little to be upset about; the Wikipedia page didn’t accuse Musk of making a Sieg heil salute. But that didn’t seem to matter to Musk. Wikipedia is “an extension of legacy media propaganda!” he posted.
Shroff makes the further point:
That the people who are constantly writing and rewriting Wikipedia entries are disaggregated volunteers—rather than bendable to one man’s ideological views—seems to be in the public interest. The site’s [Wikipedia’s small d democratic] structure is a nuisance for anyone invested in controlling how information is disseminated. With that in mind, the campaign against Wikipedia may best be understood as the apotheosis of a view fashionable among the anti-“woke” tech milieu: Free speech, which the group claims to passionately defend, counts only so long as they like what you have to say…This group is less interested in representing multiple truths, as Wikipedia attempts to do, than it is in a singular truth: its own.
In my view, Musk is the wannabe Goebbels to Trump’s Hitler. Musk understands, as Joseph Goebbels certainly did (and Trump certainly does) that you can control the opinions of a sufficient segment of the population by controlling the information to which they have easy access, or, failing that, by convincing a sufficient segment of the population that certain media are untrustworthy.
Shroff’s Atlantic article again:
Even if he [Elon] can’t buy Wikipedia, by blasting his more than 215 million followers with screeds against the site and calls for its defunding, Musk may be able to slowly undermine its credibility. (The Wikimedia Foundation [a non-profit to which I contribute] has an annual budget of $189 million. Meanwhile, Musk spent some $288 million backing Trump and other Republican candidates this election cycle.)
It is particularly ironic that much of Musk’s vast fortune (a fortune roughly 2000 times what he spent on the election of Republicans!) is significantly dependent on contracts he has with the federal government, i.e. provided by our tax dollars.
Musk wants to use our own money to control our access to information—and, thereby, our thoughts. It’s a chilling prospect—another aspect of the oligarchic coup in progress—and another reason to resist with all we have.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. This is the second time I’ve been gobsmacked over the issue of Wikipedia. From its inception I thought of Wikipedia as an invaluable—but not infallible—worldwide, small d democracy-based resource. I was flabbergasted about ten years ago when the wife of a high school classmate of mine, a man who had become a Fundamentalist, non-denominational pastor, assailed a statement of mine with, “You know, Wikipedia isn’t a reliable source!” This from a woman who certainly believed that her interpretation of every word found in her particular version of holy Christian text was the Absolute Truth not to be contested in any way. It was then I realized at significant portion of Christian Fundamentalists deny the general veracity of the aggregate of human knowledge.