(Natural News) For some time, I'd heard rumors that Wikipedia was not the open-source knowledge utopia it claimed to be. Despite a comprehensive set of rules replete with checks and balances and a seemingly open democratic editing process, stories of pay-for-play editing, character assassinations, ideologically-driven trolling, and other offenses against public knowledge suggested all was not right in Jimmy Wales' empire. Authors and public figures in fields as diverse as Complementary and Alternative Medicine and progressive politics (including Deepak Chopra, Rupert Sheldrake, Gary Null, John Pilger, and George Galloway) have complained of persistent negative coverage on Wikipedia despite the site's vaunted neutrality and the promise that "Biographies of Living Persons" are held to the highest standard. Efforts to have misinformation corrected were fruitless and their reputations have suffered as a result.

(Article by Helen Buyniski republished from PRN.fm)

This seemed implausible. How could a site with over 100,000 volunteer editors, with open access for anyone looking to get involved, be engaged in such widespread bias? As an investigative journalist and activist who has spent many years seeking the truth in a landscape of obfuscation and lies, I decided to find out exactly what was going on at Wikipedia.

First, Wikipedia no longer has over 100,000 editors. The number of active editors has been declining for over a decade, even as fewer new editors join the site. MIT researchers found the "complex bureaucracy" and "hard-line responses to newcomers' mistakes" were the primary reasons why would-be editors opted not to stick around. Meanwhile, the site's core of "active" editors decreased from 2007 to 2015 by 40%, dropping to about 30,000.1 In 2017, Purdue University reported that just one percent of those editors had made 77% of the total edits.2 The rate of changes rejected climbed from 6% in 2006 to 25% in 2010,3 and the site bans 1,000 IP addresses a day.4 "Edit wars" are resolved by silencing them. Editors who hang on long enough to become administrators capable of freezing and deleting entries no longer feel compelled to abide by Wikipedia's rules, and statistics show that the number of editors approved to become administrators has plummeted since 2007.5 Wikipedia is an oligarchy with all the problems that entails. One set of rules exists for the user-citizen, and one for the ruling class of administrators and senior editors.

Wikipedia has a convoluted and lengthy policy on conflicts of interest, a policy that seems to lengthen whenever another pay-to-play edit scandal breaks. And there have been a lot of these scandals. Disclosing one's conflicts of interest is not even mandatory but a "generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow."6 The unwritten law seems to be that paid editors should only engage in conflict-of-interest work if they can do it without getting caught and embarrassing the site. If you can't obey the rules, at least break them quietly. Many paid editors do opt to follow the policy, disclosing their conflicts of interest and liaising with third-party editors to modify their clients' entries, but many more slip through the editorial process unnoticed.

Quid Pro Quo

In 2013, a British Petroleum representative was found to be supplying Wikipedia editors with company-approved text that eventually comprised 44% of BP's page. The editing took place while a civil trial was underway which could have resulted in BP paying out billions of dollars to victims of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The process itself – PR flack supplies biased "info" to an unaffiliated editor, who then inserts it without disclosing its origins – is common on Wikipedia and does not actually violate the rules, as BP was quick to point out.7 Indeed, multiple editors jumped to the defense of the editor working for BP, suggesting they were also being paid or merely wanted to keep their options open.