This is McCarthyism. You take a polarizing word, then you attack your enemies by claiming they are that thing, and couch the whole thing in an "investigation" whose outcome is predetermined.
There is no merit to discussing if the target is that thing, it doesn't matter. It's an ideological attack. If you take it on its face then the attackers win because you're treating them as if they were honest participants in a discussion, which they are not.
And remember even if the investigation (which is a farce) goes nowhere, allowing it to exist unchallenged means that some people are going to be harassed and intimidated. But, that too is the point, fear is what they want.
That’s the point of all this polarization: the era of mass dissemination of information revealed the horrors, mistakes, and transgressions of past regimes and histories that some parties would rather not be widely publicized. The result is a group who wishes to reauthor facts and data to fit their narrative, and the rest who want to act on quality data in good confidence.
It’s not a partisan fight, it’s a fight over whether or not nations, parties, or groups have a right to re-author reality through data to fit their desires.
Game theory would say that if you're looking to move the overton window, anything less than max would be a missplay. That is to say, anything except total polarization would fail to move the overton window the max amount in any given direction, since with max polarization, the possibility exists to move it the full amount, whereas a more nuanced claim that moved it only a little bit would only ever move it 'that little bit.'
$178 million might sound like an extremely large amount of money if you're a member of the general public, but for a global resource kept up to date that serves hundreds of billions of visitors per year this is actually not a huge quantity of money.
They spend only $3mil on internet hosting. They spent almost 6 mil on travel and conferences, and 26 mil on awards and grants.
They could easily run all wikimedia hosting on investment income (endowment) alone so the banner that often pleads for donations to keep wikipedia running is pretty scammy.
I don't work for wikipedia and haven't seen their budget in depth, but the link is mostly fluff. Reading it I have no idea if "support for volunteers" means supporting wikipedia editors, corporate, donations, etc. All we really know is that hosting costs are about 3.1 million a year.
Usually non-profit organizations like this get significant corporate funding because they do work for companies and political organizations, which is where the corruption comes from. I don't think there's any doubt Wikipedia is a politically biased organization, all you have to do is look at their URL blacklists to figure that out. The NYT is regarded as a high quality link, meanwhile you're not even allowed to link the epoch times as a reference despite it being the most comparable right-wing competitor to the NYT. Basically every major right-wing paper is banned, while every major left-wing paper is allowed
I'd also point out that there is a wall of separation between editors and the foundation.
> all you have to do is look at their URL blacklists to figure that out. The NYT is regarded as a high quality link, meanwhile you're not even allowed to link the epoch times as a reference despite it being the most comparable right-wing competitor to the NYT. Basically every major right-wing paper is banned, while every major left-wing paper is allowed
Fox News was deemed "generally unreliable" for politics and science, which in practice means that it's unusable in most cases, not so different from deprecated.
I also find it interesting that Al-Manar (essentially Hezbollah's media office) has a slightly better status than, say, Daily Mail.
I’m not following this comment. Yes, it’s a true statement. But do you mean it changes the situation? Should your comment be read as support for them spending their money sourced through donations to defend the accusations?
Why do you say that? What makes you say this is McCarthyism which was an accusation made against people in the House? I read the article and it says they are opening a probe into foreign influence peddling and people receiving taxpayer funding to do influence peddling and they asked for information from the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. You might disagree those are worth investigating but that sounds a lot more reasonable than McCarthyism. The headline makes it seem like they are simply just investigating bias.
Ideological suggests they have ideals, and values, but I think it’s simpler than that: This is about power and submission.
All of Trump’s seemingly irrational decisions are his emotionally rational pursuit of forcing people to submit, just like his dad did to him [0]. Like a lot of boomers scarred by untreated trauma, that’s what he understands respect to be: submission. It was wrong then, and wrong now, but attacking Trump, while intuitive, is the wrong way to engage him.
> During the second presidency of Donald Trump, Loomer emerged as an influential actor, using her social media platform to call for the firing of officials she deems insufficiently loyal to Trump. In early April 2025, reports emerged that Loomer influenced President Trump to dismiss more than half a dozen national security officials due to her suspicions of their disloyalty to him and advocated for additional firings.[13]
I don’t trust this administration to perform an unbiased investigation, but it’s not a secret that Wikipedia is a high profile target for anyone who wants to push an agenda.
Even trivial topics can attract die-hards who refuse to let an article say something they don’t like.
Wikipedia also seeks to have a similar problem to StackOverflow where some users have become very good at working their way into the site’s structures and saying the right things to leverage the site’s governance model to their advantage. The couple times I’ve visited “talk” pages for topics that seemed a bit off lately I found a whirlwind of activity from a handful of accounts who seemed to find a Wikipedia rule or procedure to shut down talk they disagreed with.
It's amazing how many discussions on HN are about "Company A is bad" instead of: "This behavior by the government is completely illegal or unethical and should not be occurring in a free society."
And as the very first comment points out, whether there is truth in the charge or not, now there are people saying "A is bad because I read it on the interwebs!" And regardless of where the investigation goes, there will be more comments talking about the good/bad of Wikipedia, and not the good/bad of the US government (or other governments as the case may be.) This is about the 10th post in the past week that suffers from this phonomenon (see the US buying part of Intel posts for an excellent example.)
HN commenters are very very good at missing the forest for the trees. Sometimes I wonder if it's intentional. Unfortunately, I think it often isn't.
I can think of a few instances where a government should investigate private entities for unlawful bias, such as biased non-merit based hiring, or biased interest rates based on the ethical background (e.g. via zip code) of the lender, or refusal to render service to people of colour.
Yes. Although the privileged tax status of a 501(c)(3) does come with the restriction that they cannot engage in direct political campaigning or endorsement of candidates, they are still a private entity fully protected by the first amendment.
I think that is what happens to every large system that tries to have fair rules. Eventually it gets lawyered.
Either there are objective rules where people can get a benefit out of knowing the ins and outs of them better, or there are no objective rules and decision makers decide things on vibes.
I'd definitely prefer the objective rules case. [Of course in real life its a spectrum and Wikipedia is somewhere in the middle]
> I’ve visited “talk” pages for topics that seemed a bit off lately I found a whirlwind of activity from a handful of accounts who seemed to find a Wikipedia rule or procedure to shut down talk they disagreed with.
Downloading Wikipedia is usually a first step for people getting involved in prepping or data-hoarding communities, because it's so much easier than most other websites, and the utility you get from it is pretty large. And the downloads, while fairly large, will still fit on a typical home computer.
There are probably tens of thousands of copies, if not more, floating around.
French spooks once detained a randomly-chosen Wikipedia admin and coerced them into using their credentials to delete an article (about French spooks),
Sorry for the dismissive tone, but this is a silly reactionary take. It's noise and the hot air is meant to serve as a distraction. Your doomerism isn't helpful.
I'm just as concerned about all this as you are. I guess I just have a bit of faith left in that reason will prevail. I'm cranky but also a perennial optimist.
I used to (and still am) one of the highest ranked editors you can be without becoming an administrator. Wikipedia has its problems, and I spent years fighting them- but I slowly realized there is no better way to do it.
Wikipedia is not an arbitrator of truth: everything needs a reliable, secondary source[0]. This means the content has to be notable enough that a reputable source wrote about it, and you cannot reference things like git commits or research papers (since they don't provide context and most people can't understand them).
If a Wikipedia article does use one of those sources, delete the paragraph. If you get into an Edit war, you'll win.
Today, with infinite information you can always find a source no matter how low quality and place it in equal setting with a high quality source.
Then it is suddenly "However"
If someone challenges you, you have infinite time due to obsession or being paid. You can then quote a barrage of wikipedia rules until the other side submits.
If whatever side of the "truth" has a time advantage, they will usually win. That's very common on topics that attract the obsessed, and the end result does not usually correlate with reality
this is false. all you have to do is see a mildly controversial article like "woman". it is all opinionated. and citing sources to add similar content to "man" would not work. you can go to history and see the comment form the woman who started much of it, saying something like "trying to start something here" and since then, it is like this.
Yes, I am sure what you say is true, but eventually the article(s) in question will be corrected, or tagged in some manner.
But just look at what Trump is doing to the Smithsonian, one example is turning US Slavery History into something even all slaves loved. Or erasing Trump's 2 Impeachments.
You and everyone with even a little bit of smarts knows the articles that will be first targeted is US Slavery History and Trump's multiple Impeachments.
This seems like just an attempt to change the news cycle, because there's no rule anywhere saying Wikipedia needs to be unbiased, any more than does Fox News or PragerU.
Probably an attempt at capturing Wikipedia, in preparation for censorship or historic revisionism. I feel like a cosnpiracy theorist, but such things seem less implausible these days.
It's not complicated, same process as has been applied to government agencies and private universities: remove "DEI", that is any mention of anti racism.
How it's enforced is a detail. They have the Supreme Court to issue whatever verdict is required.
No, it must be complicated. Wikipedia isn't grant-funded (they have money coming out of their ears) and it isn't a government agency subject to regulation. Most private publications are proudly biased.
In fact, the most likely outcome to the House trying to play hardball with Wikipedia is a double-digit percentage increase in their donations. Which I don't think House Republicans mind, because none of this is actually about Wikipedia.
Snatching editors off the street who revert regime-approved edits? It wouldn't be the first time they sent a goon squad to black bag someone for disfavored political speech.
Congress doing their investigation will be used in the media to "prove" that by virtue of being under investigation the executive actions against Wikipedia and its contributors are legitimate. Similar to how accusations of antisemitism led to the snatching of Ms. Ozturk.
The administration has just directed the head of the FHFA to create a pretext to illegally remove a governor of the Federal Reserve, what on earth do you think would stop House Republicans from ginning up some nonsense pretext for a politically motivated DoJ investigation? Why on earth do you think these people are bound by anything other than what they can get away with?
See the difference? The administration can in fact disrupt the Federal Reserve, and appears intent on doing so. But they would much rather you were talking about Wikipedia, which is something they have basically no power over whatsoever.
I do not disagree. The administration should not be allowed to terminate Fed governors. I'm optimistic that there is a SCOTUS majority that will prevent it (they explicitly drew a line around the Federal Reserve recently), but we'll see. But clearly: the administration can fire Executive Branch employees, and has a legal interpretation extending that the the Fed.
There is nothing at all connecting the administration to Wikipedia. People are falling for an op the GOP is running.
Dragging people for public spectacles in Congress, lawfare through frivolous lawsuits, frivolous investigation through a variety of agencies, wasting the orgs time in court, allies doxxing org members to intimidate them with stochastic terrorism.
If you haven't been paying attention to how Trump and Co have been weapoinzing government to silence critics or pressure private orgs, you haven't been paying attention.
maybe step back and think about what this targeted, repeated, deeply meticulous sequence of challenges to this very narrow topic of conversation is communicating about you, and is achieving in the net sense
is this the right application of your time and energy? perhaps that time and energy is more usefully spent fighting against the actively malicious current US political administration, than deconstructing arguments in that same vein?
"Dark money" is a term of art meaning partisan donation dollars that aren't itemized or tracked by the FEC. Dark money isn't illegal. It's "dark" because it's unregulated. When Republicans call money that doesn't end up in a campaign general fund "dark", they're literally saying they have no authority to regulate it.
I’m just establishing that they have been in power for 5 minutes and haven’t hesitated to try and literally rewrite history already. You should expect them to continue to do so wherever they think they can get leverage.
You're right, it's probably just a distraction, like sending the army into D.C. and Chicago is a distraction, like trying to illegally fire Fed governors is a distraction, like ordering the prosecution and persecution of political enemies is a distraction, like every blatant power-grab, attempt at intimidating the opposition, and obvious effort to establish a de facto hybrid authoritarian regime is just a distraction from...something. After all, the administration and its cronies are nothing but scrupulous about their adherence to The Rules.
Sending the National Guard into DC is in fact a distraction. Trying to fire the Fed governors is not a distraction. Prosecuting political enemies is not a distraction. See? Both kinds of things happen. It's important to distinguish.
Yes, the proper response is that the government isn't supposed to oversee Wikipedia's editorial policy (or other organizations' editorial policy). Wikipedia should clearly have a right to choose its policies without government interference.
Everything is projection. They're upset they can't insert their own bias into Wikipedia and want that bias codified by law or at least by corrupt lawmakers.
Then should we remove the 501c3 status of every church, mosque, temple, etc in the U.S. because they are biased towards not just the existence of a god, but the existence of their particular version of god?
More relevantly, it’s an open secret that a lot of churches are heavily into political advocacy directly for candidates, which they’re not supposed to do under their tax status, but they’ve been playing with the boundaries unchecked and are now really obviously past where they’re supposed to be—but nobody’s got the guts to go after them, so they just keep getting bolder.
The Trump admin was very creative when it came to Harvard and figured out many different pressure points to push all at once. Don't expect it to be too simple. The guys running this have thought about avoiding the easy dismissal: https://www.ortecfinance.com/en/about-ortec-finance/news-and...
Just look at how the recent flag burning EO was worded in order to get around 1A concerns.
It is painfully obvious that this administration and their party do not care about the Constitution, or even the principles they were willing to die to defend just 2 years ago.
If Trump wants Wikipedia gone he'll just sue them or open an investigation that never needs to ever go before a judge. Then in return for dropping the suit/investigation all they need to do is make sure that a friend of MAGA sits on the board and can make sure that certain edits get approved and others don't.
People who are surprised by this or still assuming that he can't/won't do something because of the law or norms or "but then the Democrats will do X" need to wake the fuck up.
These people are going to do whatever the fuck they want under whatever justification they can cook up, and they don't fear any repercussions because they are not planning to turn over their new-found power to anyone else.
The Trump admin has a lot less leverage over Wikipedia, though.
The Wikimedia Foundation does not depend on US government funding and even if the US somehow made life difficult for donors, they are sitting on a substantial endowment fund that can float them for a long time.
And at some point, if the harassment gets to be too much, Wikimedia can just up and leave. There's no reason that the Wikimedia Foundation needs to be headquartered in San Francisco, it could just as easily be in Oslo or Paris. That's a huge advantage that Harvard didn't have.
At face value, the letter (from the House Committee on Oversight and Governmental Reform) offers a sensible-sounding top-line explanation:
> The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating the efforts of foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion.
Based on the track record of the Trump administration, it is unwise to take any of their official letters at face value. This House committee may claim it really wants what is best for American citizens -- and they might actually believe it themselves -- but the dominant motivation has little to do with foreign influence. Rather, I think their primary motivation is to suppress or intimidate dissenters.
If the committee decided that it wanted to systematically investigate foreign influence, that would be a different matter. The differential targeting is quite telling.
About me (in case you want to know my leanings, so you can take them into account): I do not support this letter nor the current administration. That said, I didn't categorically reject the whole idea right away. I read the letter and thought about it. I'm not necessarily opposed to requiring private organizations do certain kinds of foreign actor tracking and reporting, but it has to be done legally and applied fairly.
Finally, I refuse to call this "politics as usual". Yes, sadly, committee investigations are often used as PR stunts. Both parties have done it. What is happening here is orders of magnitude worse to the extent it undermines freedom of speech and attempts to subvert another information source.
>Caveat: I do not support this letter nor the current administration. At face value, the letter (from the House Committee on Oversight and Governmental Reform) offers a sensible-sounding top-line explanation:
>> The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating the efforts of foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion.
"subsidized" modifies institutions there, so what they mean is academics and students edit Wikipedia some times, and they want to claim the right to control what those people say.
Reading the actual request letter made it make more sense. It seems like they are after moderation records related to alleged influence campaigns by foreign states.
> Even if there is organized bias, what can Congress legally do about it?
Something similar to their targeted of US Univerities/Colledes for anti-semitism and for being "woke." Trump has threatened the Harvard endowment, its ability to enrol foreign students, federal research funding, among others.
These are the same people who have spent the last 40 years lecturing me about how they are better patriots, attach American flags to everything they touch, know more about the founding fathers, and have a greater understanding of the constitution than we do.
As a charity they are tax exempt - that could be revoked. The US government could declare them to be a foreign influence operation and require them to register as foreign agents. They could add a requirement that everyone on Wikipedia must declare who they are before editing. They could restrict various pages from being displayed in the US. They could even block or even cease the domain if they wanted to play hardball.
Do not underestimate the levers of pressure that could be deployed here.
There is a ton of bias on Wikipedia. But this is the nature of anything trying to create a collective understanding of the world that involves multiple authors with diverse viewpoints.
But given the way this administration works (looking at their treatment of Universities/Colleges), they will only identify specific types of bias:
- criticism of Republicans
- criticism of Christian conservatism
- pro-LGBTQ+
- criticism of Israel
and try to punish Wikipedia for it, while allowing all other types of bias to flourish.
I expect financial sanctions to be threatened. Because Wikipedia is a US-based, it will likely end up in US court like so many of the other Trump policies.
UC Berkeley students embarrassed themselves on the world stage by attacking the free speech rights of conservative speakers... petualant, threatening and very in the media. People in Berkeley familiar with the history bent their heads in grief to see it. Free speech means that yes, conservatives may also speak in public IMHO
A group of students throwing a tantrum because someone they don’t like was invited to speak?
The most powerful government in the world using every tool it has to make the university whose speech they don’t like suffer? Tools including threatening to remove accreditation, refusing to disburse hundreds of millions of dollars in grants, threatening to end the student visas of the international students, etc.
(Though maybe the actors you're referring to are students rather than the administration. It's true that students can't violate someone's first amendment rights, although they can interfere with their exercise in a way that the administration might have a legal duty to prevent.)
I do not know the exact specifics of UC Berkeley and you didn't link to them.
That said, I am a financial supporter of FIRE, which often has come to the defense of free speech of conservatives. It is also opposed to the Trump administrations moves against Harvard:
Does Wikepedia/Wikimedia receive funding from the US government? If not, what's the basis for an investigation? Wouldn't any bias here fall under normal freedom-of-speech, same as any other media outlet?
So reading the actual letter what they are asking for:
> 1.Records, communications, or analysis pertaining to possible coordination by nation state
actors in editing activities on Wikipedia.
> 2. Records, communications, or analysis pertaining to possible coordination within
academic institutions or other organized efforts to edit or influence content identified as
possibly violating Wikipedia policies.
> 3. Records of Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) including but not limited to all
editor conduct disputes and actions taken against them.
> 4. Records showing identifying and unique characteristics of accounts (such as names, IP
addresses, registration dates, user activity logs) for editors subject to actions by ArbCom.
> 5. Documentation of Wikipedia’s editorial policies and protocols including those aimed at
ensuring neutrality and addressing bias as well as policies regarding discipline for
violations.
> 6. Any analysis conducted or reviewed by the Wikimedia Foundation (or by a third-party
acting on its behalf) of patterns of manipulation or bias related to antisemitism and
conflicts with the State of Israel.
---
IP adress of users who have gotten in trouble with arbcom is quite concerning. That could make people be afraid of contributing to controversial topics in case their IP ends up in US government hands. Definitely a chilling effect.
good thing wikipedia allows its entire database to be downloaded..... go ahead and change it to your will, we will have the data for a few years later....
That would be an unfortunate backup plan to rely on. We want to keep the full value of Wikipedia alive. Wikipedia is (1) an ideal; (2) a community of volunteers; (3) a brand; (4) a habit for many people seeking information; (5) a center (if not the center) of many online textual / knowledge ecosystems.
Peaceful, sustained, popular, legal, loud resistance is necessary to push back against an administration that is trying to kneecap influential dissenting viewpoints.
That's going to be awkward, when they find that there's been, for many years, a studious effort to push forth pro-Israel talking points and agendas.
(To be clear, there is also pro-Palestine, too, though certainly less organized.)
Also, RIP Wikipedia Review which, though it went downhill later, was an amazing source of revealing corruption in the Wikipedia bureacracy, cabalizing and literal secret mailing lists to coordinate protection of viewpoints, including pro-Israel, from the admins.
> The request [...] is part of an investigation into “foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion.”
On that basis - should there also be an investigation into https://www.mikejohnsonforlouisiana.com/ ? He is the Speaker of the House, and it would be incredibly easy for some of his taxpayer-paid staff to do stuff, with the objective of influencing U.S. public opinion...
> They referenced a report from the Anti-Defamation League about anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia that detailed a coordinated campaign to manipulate content related to the Israel-Palestine conflict
And there it is. The reason.
Do they have some kind of blackmail on people? It’s almost as if they had an operative throwing parties and video taping the depraved acts of people in power.
they can investigate all they want (which will be on the public record). The WP project, as hostile as it is to newbies and to those with an agenda, actually has a solid systemic policy foundation to address these concerns and the first amendment is basically a shield with a middle finger on it to petty legislative tyrants.
"Investigate" means "harass." There's no intent to do any fact-finding.
"Allegations" means "baseless accusations." Trump often employs the tactic of saying "people say" and then say something nobody has ever said before. It's a rhetorical device - appeal to anonymous authority - used to make people think this thought is widespread when it isn't.
To be fair objectivity is biased against an ideology that likes to just make things up and bullshit all the time so it’s quite likely there’s evidence of bias against said ideology.
I've observed that almost every political or controversial topic on Wikipedia is suffering political slant, reflecting the make-up of some of its motivated editors. See The left-wing bias of Wikipedia <https://thecritic.co.uk/the-left-wing-bias-of-wikipedia/>, a scientific/academic article about Wikipedia’s bias, by pseudonymous authors.
> Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has been critical of the online encyclopedia's accuracy and neutrality since the early 2000s. In May 2020, he published an article in his personal blog describing Wikipedia as "badly biased" and stated that he believed it no longer had an effective neutrality policy, claiming that portions of the Donald Trump article are "unrelentingly negative" while the Barack Obama article "completely fails to mention many well-known scandals" and various other topics he claims are presented with liberal bias.
- How the Regime Captured Wikipedia: https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-the-regime-captured-wikipe... : inside the cultural revolution at wikipedia, which pivoted it from a decentralized database of all the world's knowledge to a top-down social activism and advocacy machine
I guess Wikipedia does not echo the blatant lies the Trump Admin. is pushing.
Maybe Wikipedia should start blocking states the congress people asking for this investigation are from with a big banner saying "Your congress person wants us to push Trump Lies, so this site is blocked from your state until this investigation ends".
Then maybe these people understand what real bias looks like.
Organized bias like creating a specific page to for a fictional syndrome in order to wave away any criticisms of your opponents. So organized that Wikipedia won’t remove the obvious bs:
One of the many reasons I don’t donate to Wikipedia. To keep this page up is to continue fueling unnecessary culture wars. Which in my opinion doesn’t align with their mission as it is not knowlege but an attack:
> Wikipedia's purpose is to benefit readers by presenting information on all branches of knowledge.
Should the dictionary not list slurs in them because they preserve an unhealthy status quo as well?
That article makes sure to mention that Trump derangement syndrome is a logical fallacy in the first paragraph. They aren't fueling culture wars by being an information source. I'm not sure where the bias would be coming from here with this article, and on which side and to whom...
So then I should create Derangement Syndrome pages for every other Potus so we all may know and understand why you can and can’t criticize a Potus?
What knowledge does this page offer beyond indicating a cultural logical fallacy and listing a bunch of hypocrisy that can also be found on Trump’s main wikipedia page? What is so significantly different about TDS from Bush Derangement Syndrome that it needs it’s own page?
I mean it is a "a pejorative term used to describe negative reactions to U.S. President Donald Trump..." How is having a page for that biased. And this is coming from some who has been described in the past (not anymore) of having TDS.
Negative reactions to a US president isn’t exclusive to Trump. Yet here is a page indicating that there is something special about a person not liking a US President named Trump.
Where is the Bush Derangement Syndrome? Where is the Biden Derangement Syndrome? Arguably this page owes everything to Obama Derangement Syndrome.
Wikipedia is not a source of original research or thinking. If prominent and reputable sources spoke about and coined these other terms there would be articles about them, or the article would be more generic.
Wikipedia exists in the context of the real world. All it does is reflect it. Deal with it.
I am dealing with it. I am informing people about the crap quality of content on Wikipedia. All I’m doing is reflecting the hypocrisy. You don’t like the fact that I can post my dissent online? Deal with it.
This is has to be ragebait by a pathetic troll. You haven't even read the first 4 lines of the page you've linked, where it refutes your argument that "this is specific to Trump". At least work a little on your clown material.
You haven’t informed anyone of any such thing. Wikipedia does not generate original concepts on purpose and you are complaining that an equivalent term exists for other presidents. Right now if Wikipedia was to create pages for those terms, _that_ would actually be bias as those terms aren’t widely used/don’t exist and would only be added to meet some people’s concept of “fairness” where if something bad happens to my side something bad has to happen to yours too
Edit: Also as someone else pointed out the page describes the origin of the term as evolving out of Bush Derangement syndrome being coined in 2003 and even comments on a Thatcher Derangement Syndrome phrase used after her death. The Trump Derangement Syndrome appears to be the main article because of the actual usage by government and in legislation
Bush Derangement Syndrome is covered (the writeup is linked to from the TDS article) but there is something special when republicans in multiple state legislatures have proposed _legislation_ on the subject of TDS, under that name, which would spend taxpayer money. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_derangement_syndrome#P...
>Where is the Bush Derangement Syndrome? Where is the Biden Derangement Syndrome?
I'd say not everybody was paying attention at the time, but these syndromes defintely exist, it's just that no former President actually did what it takes to reach this level of regard.
All kinds of people agree that Trump can not be matched in a number of ways, conservatves, progressives, independents, whether they are deranged or not.
With any syndrome it does take a lot of consenus but eventually it's foolish to deny.
Every Presdient has it, some are just more prominent and widely recognized than others.
For an even handed treatment, it should really include discussion of or a link to the propaganda technique of projection / accusation in a mirror, which is how that term came about to begin with. Derangement is a key element of Trump's support, because objectively none of his policies add up to any kind of effective plan, nor do they make sense in the context of American values of individual liberty. It's all just empty spectacle of look over here, you've been wronged, we're going to performatively attack the people who supposedly wronged you. By preemptively lashing out and gaslighting the actually-conservative group as "deranged" for merely reacting to the destruction, they obscure the obvious.
They should also investigate Google, which often puts Wikipedia article extracts right at the top of the search results. There has been a great deal of misinformation spread this way.
Wikipedia is just the tip of the iceberg. How their biased viewpoints get amplified globally is a huge problem on top of that.
This is McCarthyism. You take a polarizing word, then you attack your enemies by claiming they are that thing, and couch the whole thing in an "investigation" whose outcome is predetermined.
There is no merit to discussing if the target is that thing, it doesn't matter. It's an ideological attack. If you take it on its face then the attackers win because you're treating them as if they were honest participants in a discussion, which they are not.
And remember even if the investigation (which is a farce) goes nowhere, allowing it to exist unchallenged means that some people are going to be harassed and intimidated. But, that too is the point, fear is what they want.
That’s the point of all this polarization: the era of mass dissemination of information revealed the horrors, mistakes, and transgressions of past regimes and histories that some parties would rather not be widely publicized. The result is a group who wishes to reauthor facts and data to fit their narrative, and the rest who want to act on quality data in good confidence.
It’s not a partisan fight, it’s a fight over whether or not nations, parties, or groups have a right to re-author reality through data to fit their desires.
Game theory would say that if you're looking to move the overton window, anything less than max would be a missplay. That is to say, anything except total polarization would fail to move the overton window the max amount in any given direction, since with max polarization, the possibility exists to move it the full amount, whereas a more nuanced claim that moved it only a little bit would only ever move it 'that little bit.'
Preach. How much time and money will Wikipedia have to waste defending this?
Don’t these people have anything better to do? Like lowering prices for everyday Americans instead of running up baseless legal bills?
From what I understand this is just a "polite" request, not a supeona, so Wikipedia can ignore it if they want.
You can just ignore congress?
If they are just asking nicely, yes (although there are probably political ramifications). If its an actual demand then no.
I imagine the way it normal goes is first they ask nicely and if you say no then they formally supeona you.
Depends if you're the president.
Yup
https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/575819-trump-ad...
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what evidence do you have to back up this baseless claim? They openly publish their financial reports: https://wikimediafoundation.org/who-we-are/financial-reports
$178 million might sound like an extremely large amount of money if you're a member of the general public, but for a global resource kept up to date that serves hundreds of billions of visitors per year this is actually not a huge quantity of money.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2023-2024-annu...
They spend only $3mil on internet hosting. They spent almost 6 mil on travel and conferences, and 26 mil on awards and grants.
They could easily run all wikimedia hosting on investment income (endowment) alone so the banner that often pleads for donations to keep wikipedia running is pretty scammy.
I don't work for wikipedia and haven't seen their budget in depth, but the link is mostly fluff. Reading it I have no idea if "support for volunteers" means supporting wikipedia editors, corporate, donations, etc. All we really know is that hosting costs are about 3.1 million a year.
Usually non-profit organizations like this get significant corporate funding because they do work for companies and political organizations, which is where the corruption comes from. I don't think there's any doubt Wikipedia is a politically biased organization, all you have to do is look at their URL blacklists to figure that out. The NYT is regarded as a high quality link, meanwhile you're not even allowed to link the epoch times as a reference despite it being the most comparable right-wing competitor to the NYT. Basically every major right-wing paper is banned, while every major left-wing paper is allowed
> Reading it I have no idea if "support for volunteers" means supporting wikipedia editors, corporate, donations
I think its pretty clear that "support for volunteers" does not mean corporate.
I too would like more detailed budgets, but we do have some info here.
> Usually non-profit organizations like this get significant corporate funding because they do work for companies and political organizations
The list of large donors is public https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2023-2024-annu... there are only 27 who gave > $50000. Which ones do you think Wikipedia is giving biased coverage to?
I'd also point out that there is a wall of separation between editors and the foundation.
> all you have to do is look at their URL blacklists to figure that out. The NYT is regarded as a high quality link, meanwhile you're not even allowed to link the epoch times as a reference despite it being the most comparable right-wing competitor to the NYT. Basically every major right-wing paper is banned, while every major left-wing paper is allowed
Discussion about epoch times at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not... my understanding is the concern is around them promoting conspiracy theories without evidence not their political alignment.
>my understanding is the concern is around them promoting conspiracy theories without evidence not their political alignment.
That might be their justification but is it actually true?
Specifically: Do you believe that every major right-wing paper promotes conspiracy theories while every major left-wing paper does not?
I would disagree with your premise that every major right wing paper is listed.
For example fox news and the Washington Examiner are considered right wing and are not listed as a deprecated source.
Similarly there are left wing sources on the deprecated list like the grayzone or Occupy Democrats. (Arguably those are rather fringe)
Certainly the epoch times has been widely criticized for being factually inaccurate in ways the new york times has not been.
I also don't particularly think the new york times is equivalent to the epoch times in terms of reputation.
Fox News was deemed "generally unreliable" for politics and science, which in practice means that it's unusable in most cases, not so different from deprecated.
I also find it interesting that Al-Manar (essentially Hezbollah's media office) has a slightly better status than, say, Daily Mail.
See also (Wikipedia cofounder) Larry Sanger's critique of Wikipedia' source bias - https://larrysanger.org/2021/06/wikipedia-is-more-one-sided-...
I’m not following this comment. Yes, it’s a true statement. But do you mean it changes the situation? Should your comment be read as support for them spending their money sourced through donations to defend the accusations?
In the US, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.
Why do you say that? What makes you say this is McCarthyism which was an accusation made against people in the House? I read the article and it says they are opening a probe into foreign influence peddling and people receiving taxpayer funding to do influence peddling and they asked for information from the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. You might disagree those are worth investigating but that sounds a lot more reasonable than McCarthyism. The headline makes it seem like they are simply just investigating bias.
What do you think McCarthyism is?
Definitely McCarthyism, or possibly a slippery slide towards something worse. These attacks on free speech are much more brazen than I expected.
Ideological suggests they have ideals, and values, but I think it’s simpler than that: This is about power and submission.
All of Trump’s seemingly irrational decisions are his emotionally rational pursuit of forcing people to submit, just like his dad did to him [0]. Like a lot of boomers scarred by untreated trauma, that’s what he understands respect to be: submission. It was wrong then, and wrong now, but attacking Trump, while intuitive, is the wrong way to engage him.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/07/donald-trump...
> This is McCarthyism.
Roy Cohn was Trump's mentor after all.
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> This also ties into what DOGE kept finding.
DOGE wasted billions of dollars and failed.
your accusations of progressives is basically describing actual christian americans
> This is McCarthyism.
You say this like it's a bad thing, and some think it would be a good thing:
> “Joseph McCarthy was right,” Loomer responded without missing a beat. “We need to make McCarthy great again.”
* https://archive.ph/https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arch...
> During the second presidency of Donald Trump, Loomer emerged as an influential actor, using her social media platform to call for the firing of officials she deems insufficiently loyal to Trump. In early April 2025, reports emerged that Loomer influenced President Trump to dismiss more than half a dozen national security officials due to her suspicions of their disloyalty to him and advocated for additional firings.[13]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Loomer
It is a bad thing and anyone who thinks otherwise is acting in bad faith.
I don’t trust this administration to perform an unbiased investigation, but it’s not a secret that Wikipedia is a high profile target for anyone who wants to push an agenda.
Even trivial topics can attract die-hards who refuse to let an article say something they don’t like.
Wikipedia also seeks to have a similar problem to StackOverflow where some users have become very good at working their way into the site’s structures and saying the right things to leverage the site’s governance model to their advantage. The couple times I’ve visited “talk” pages for topics that seemed a bit off lately I found a whirlwind of activity from a handful of accounts who seemed to find a Wikipedia rule or procedure to shut down talk they disagreed with.
Should any administration be investigating a private entity for bias?
Whether there is bias or not is entirely immaterial! The government should not be the Ministry of Truth!
It's amazing how many discussions on HN are about "Company A is bad" instead of: "This behavior by the government is completely illegal or unethical and should not be occurring in a free society."
And as the very first comment points out, whether there is truth in the charge or not, now there are people saying "A is bad because I read it on the interwebs!" And regardless of where the investigation goes, there will be more comments talking about the good/bad of Wikipedia, and not the good/bad of the US government (or other governments as the case may be.) This is about the 10th post in the past week that suffers from this phonomenon (see the US buying part of Intel posts for an excellent example.)
HN commenters are very very good at missing the forest for the trees. Sometimes I wonder if it's intentional. Unfortunately, I think it often isn't.
I can think of a few instances where a government should investigate private entities for unlawful bias, such as biased non-merit based hiring, or biased interest rates based on the ethical background (e.g. via zip code) of the lender, or refusal to render service to people of colour.
Yes. Because there are laws against those things.
There are no laws about bias in political content published by private entities. Because of the Constitution.
Is a non-profit a private entity ?
Yes. Although the privileged tax status of a 501(c)(3) does come with the restriction that they cannot engage in direct political campaigning or endorsement of candidates, they are still a private entity fully protected by the first amendment.
In this context, yes. It gets confusing, but a "public entity" refers to the government.
I think that is what happens to every large system that tries to have fair rules. Eventually it gets lawyered.
Either there are objective rules where people can get a benefit out of knowing the ins and outs of them better, or there are no objective rules and decision makers decide things on vibes.
I'd definitely prefer the objective rules case. [Of course in real life its a spectrum and Wikipedia is somewhere in the middle]
> I’ve visited “talk” pages for topics that seemed a bit off lately I found a whirlwind of activity from a handful of accounts who seemed to find a Wikipedia rule or procedure to shut down talk they disagreed with.
If you think legalese is bad on talk pages, try reading an arbcom case sometime ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Index/Ca... ) its a fascinating pseudo-legal system.
It's time to move Wikipedia from the US to a safer haven
Moving Wikipedia elsewhere will likely have to happen. Thought, the US may respond by blocking Wikipedia content as many regimes in the past have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia
Not to give any ideas, but a likely outcome is a US-based fork that has the offending bias removed, with a "ministry of truth"-y name.
There is already https://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page
You can just download it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
Downloading Wikipedia is usually a first step for people getting involved in prepping or data-hoarding communities, because it's so much easier than most other websites, and the utility you get from it is pretty large. And the downloads, while fairly large, will still fit on a typical home computer. There are probably tens of thousands of copies, if not more, floating around.
Real… luckily they can just hop the border into Vancouver - not as safe as Europe or east Asia, but certainly an easier ask.
I wonder if they have any dedicated compute stateside, tho…
> "not as safe as Europe"
French spooks once detained a randomly-chosen Wikipedia admin and coerced them into using their credentials to delete an article (about French spooks),
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5503354 ("French homeland intelligence threatens a sysop into deleting a Wikipedia Article (wikimedia.fr)" (2013)—191 comments)
I wouldn't put it past the Canadian government to do the same thing. Other Anglosphere governments already have, see Australia and UK.
> I wonder if they have any dedicated compute stateside, tho…
Wikipedia has data centers in Virginia, texas and san francisco. (They also have some in other countries)
Sorry for the dismissive tone, but this is a silly reactionary take. It's noise and the hot air is meant to serve as a distraction. Your doomerism isn't helpful.
Blatant, open, unabashed authoritarianism is just “noise”…?
What red line are you waiting for before acknowledging that we’re in a dangerous situation (aka headed towards doom)?
I'm just as concerned about all this as you are. I guess I just have a bit of faith left in that reason will prevail. I'm cranky but also a perennial optimist.
Trust? They've loudly and proudly bragged about their bias. Anyone thinking modern Republicans have any morals is a fool just waiting to be tricked.
I support Wikipedia from the first day -- and this is true. I had to laugh! there is bias for certain.. of many kinds.
I used to (and still am) one of the highest ranked editors you can be without becoming an administrator. Wikipedia has its problems, and I spent years fighting them- but I slowly realized there is no better way to do it.
Wikipedia is not an arbitrator of truth: everything needs a reliable, secondary source[0]. This means the content has to be notable enough that a reputable source wrote about it, and you cannot reference things like git commits or research papers (since they don't provide context and most people can't understand them).
If a Wikipedia article does use one of those sources, delete the paragraph. If you get into an Edit war, you'll win.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
Today, with infinite information you can always find a source no matter how low quality and place it in equal setting with a high quality source.
Then it is suddenly "However"
If someone challenges you, you have infinite time due to obsession or being paid. You can then quote a barrage of wikipedia rules until the other side submits.
If whatever side of the "truth" has a time advantage, they will usually win. That's very common on topics that attract the obsessed, and the end result does not usually correlate with reality
this is false. all you have to do is see a mildly controversial article like "woman". it is all opinionated. and citing sources to add similar content to "man" would not work. you can go to history and see the comment form the woman who started much of it, saying something like "trying to start something here" and since then, it is like this.
Yes, I am sure what you say is true, but eventually the article(s) in question will be corrected, or tagged in some manner.
But just look at what Trump is doing to the Smithsonian, one example is turning US Slavery History into something even all slaves loved. Or erasing Trump's 2 Impeachments.
You and everyone with even a little bit of smarts knows the articles that will be first targeted is US Slavery History and Trump's multiple Impeachments.
Even if whitehouse.gov rewrites history, or forces reputable outlets to make "corrections", Wikipedia articles can (and do) reference archives.
This seems like just an attempt to change the news cycle, because there's no rule anywhere saying Wikipedia needs to be unbiased, any more than does Fox News or PragerU.
Probably an attempt at capturing Wikipedia, in preparation for censorship or historic revisionism. I feel like a cosnpiracy theorist, but such things seem less implausible these days.
How exactly is that supposed to work?
It's not complicated, same process as has been applied to government agencies and private universities: remove "DEI", that is any mention of anti racism.
How it's enforced is a detail. They have the Supreme Court to issue whatever verdict is required.
No, it must be complicated. Wikipedia isn't grant-funded (they have money coming out of their ears) and it isn't a government agency subject to regulation. Most private publications are proudly biased.
In fact, the most likely outcome to the House trying to play hardball with Wikipedia is a double-digit percentage increase in their donations. Which I don't think House Republicans mind, because none of this is actually about Wikipedia.
So, again, how is this supposed to work?
Snatching editors off the street who revert regime-approved edits? It wouldn't be the first time they sent a goon squad to black bag someone for disfavored political speech.
If they're going to operate purely extrajudicially, what would House hearings have to do with anything? These theories aren't coherent.
Congress doing their investigation will be used in the media to "prove" that by virtue of being under investigation the executive actions against Wikipedia and its contributors are legitimate. Similar to how accusations of antisemitism led to the snatching of Ms. Ozturk.
The administration has just directed the head of the FHFA to create a pretext to illegally remove a governor of the Federal Reserve, what on earth do you think would stop House Republicans from ginning up some nonsense pretext for a politically motivated DoJ investigation? Why on earth do you think these people are bound by anything other than what they can get away with?
See the difference? The administration can in fact disrupt the Federal Reserve, and appears intent on doing so. But they would much rather you were talking about Wikipedia, which is something they have basically no power over whatsoever.
Uh, no. The administration explicitly cannot disrupt the federal reserve by law. That's why they're cooking bogus justifications against the governor.
Likewise, they'll just make shit up or use some tiny administrative technicality against Wikipedia.
I do not disagree. The administration should not be allowed to terminate Fed governors. I'm optimistic that there is a SCOTUS majority that will prevent it (they explicitly drew a line around the Federal Reserve recently), but we'll see. But clearly: the administration can fire Executive Branch employees, and has a legal interpretation extending that the the Fed.
There is nothing at all connecting the administration to Wikipedia. People are falling for an op the GOP is running.
How has it worked already?
Dragging people for public spectacles in Congress, lawfare through frivolous lawsuits, frivolous investigation through a variety of agencies, wasting the orgs time in court, allies doxxing org members to intimidate them with stochastic terrorism.
If you haven't been paying attention to how Trump and Co have been weapoinzing government to silence critics or pressure private orgs, you haven't been paying attention.
What happened to Harvard?
What happened to CBS/Paramount?
What happened with 60 Minutes?
What about ActBlue?
Harvard is extensively grant funded; that was the administration's leverage.
CBS's owners were existentially dependent on DOJ approval of an impending merger.
60 Minutes is a CBS property.
Nothing has happened to ActBlue.
So again I ask: how exactly is the House supposed to accomplish anything with Wikipedia?
maybe step back and think about what this targeted, repeated, deeply meticulous sequence of challenges to this very narrow topic of conversation is communicating about you, and is achieving in the net sense
is this the right application of your time and energy? perhaps that time and energy is more usefully spent fighting against the actively malicious current US political administration, than deconstructing arguments in that same vein?
No, I think I'm just going to continue having the discussion we're having here.
Wikipedia doesn’t receive any federal funding, what leverage does the House of the current administration have without money to withhold?
Not directly but I have seen some people (senators) claim that at least one of their funds is "democratic dark money."
"Dark money" is a term of art meaning partisan donation dollars that aren't itemized or tracked by the FEC. Dark money isn't illegal. It's "dark" because it's unregulated. When Republicans call money that doesn't end up in a campaign general fund "dark", they're literally saying they have no authority to regulate it.
They are *already* retroactively rewriting reports and documents to align with the dear leaders brain farts.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250807-us-to-rewrite...
And? They can rewrite their own reports as much as they want. They don't get to rewrite Jacobin articles.
I’m just establishing that they have been in power for 5 minutes and haven’t hesitated to try and literally rewrite history already. You should expect them to continue to do so wherever they think they can get leverage.
Nothing I'm saying has anything whatsoever to do with thinking that the GOP is operating in good faith.
You're right, it's probably just a distraction, like sending the army into D.C. and Chicago is a distraction, like trying to illegally fire Fed governors is a distraction, like ordering the prosecution and persecution of political enemies is a distraction, like every blatant power-grab, attempt at intimidating the opposition, and obvious effort to establish a de facto hybrid authoritarian regime is just a distraction from...something. After all, the administration and its cronies are nothing but scrupulous about their adherence to The Rules.
Sending the National Guard into DC is in fact a distraction. Trying to fire the Fed governors is not a distraction. Prosecuting political enemies is not a distraction. See? Both kinds of things happen. It's important to distinguish.
Yes, the proper response is that the government isn't supposed to oversee Wikipedia's editorial policy (or other organizations' editorial policy). Wikipedia should clearly have a right to choose its policies without government interference.
Everything is projection. They're upset they can't insert their own bias into Wikipedia and want that bias codified by law or at least by corrupt lawmakers.
I don't see the point. Even if there is organized bias, what can Congress legally do about it?
Remove 501(c)3 status, apparently. Trump's repeatedly threatened this in other cases - the TNPA concluded he didn't have that power with executive orders, but congress did https://tnpa.org/nonprofits-under-fire-how-the-irs-can-and-c...
Not a lawyer tho, and it seems that even with a majority getting something like that through congress would be very difficult.
So bias is reason to remove 501c3 status?
Then should we remove the 501c3 status of every church, mosque, temple, etc in the U.S. because they are biased towards not just the existence of a god, but the existence of their particular version of god?
More relevantly, it’s an open secret that a lot of churches are heavily into political advocacy directly for candidates, which they’re not supposed to do under their tax status, but they’ve been playing with the boundaries unchecked and are now really obviously past where they’re supposed to be—but nobody’s got the guts to go after them, so they just keep getting bolder.
Yeah that'd be a very easy 1A case.
> Yeah that'd be a very easy 1A case.
The Trump admin was very creative when it came to Harvard and figured out many different pressure points to push all at once. Don't expect it to be too simple. The guys running this have thought about avoiding the easy dismissal: https://www.ortecfinance.com/en/about-ortec-finance/news-and...
Just look at how the recent flag burning EO was worded in order to get around 1A concerns.
It is painfully obvious that this administration and their party do not care about the Constitution, or even the principles they were willing to die to defend just 2 years ago.
If Trump wants Wikipedia gone he'll just sue them or open an investigation that never needs to ever go before a judge. Then in return for dropping the suit/investigation all they need to do is make sure that a friend of MAGA sits on the board and can make sure that certain edits get approved and others don't.
People who are surprised by this or still assuming that he can't/won't do something because of the law or norms or "but then the Democrats will do X" need to wake the fuck up.
These people are going to do whatever the fuck they want under whatever justification they can cook up, and they don't fear any repercussions because they are not planning to turn over their new-found power to anyone else.
The Trump admin has a lot less leverage over Wikipedia, though.
The Wikimedia Foundation does not depend on US government funding and even if the US somehow made life difficult for donors, they are sitting on a substantial endowment fund that can float them for a long time.
And at some point, if the harassment gets to be too much, Wikimedia can just up and leave. There's no reason that the Wikimedia Foundation needs to be headquartered in San Francisco, it could just as easily be in Oslo or Paris. That's a huge advantage that Harvard didn't have.
The government gives a lot of exceptions to 1A when claiming they are fighting "bias" against certain groups, countries, or items.
With this Supreme Court that has judges using the Constitution as toilet paper? Not so easy to win.
Legally? As if Republicans care about legality.
At face value, the letter (from the House Committee on Oversight and Governmental Reform) offers a sensible-sounding top-line explanation:
> The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating the efforts of foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion.
Based on the track record of the Trump administration, it is unwise to take any of their official letters at face value. This House committee may claim it really wants what is best for American citizens -- and they might actually believe it themselves -- but the dominant motivation has little to do with foreign influence. Rather, I think their primary motivation is to suppress or intimidate dissenters.
If the committee decided that it wanted to systematically investigate foreign influence, that would be a different matter. The differential targeting is quite telling.
About me (in case you want to know my leanings, so you can take them into account): I do not support this letter nor the current administration. That said, I didn't categorically reject the whole idea right away. I read the letter and thought about it. I'm not necessarily opposed to requiring private organizations do certain kinds of foreign actor tracking and reporting, but it has to be done legally and applied fairly.
Finally, I refuse to call this "politics as usual". Yes, sadly, committee investigations are often used as PR stunts. Both parties have done it. What is happening here is orders of magnitude worse to the extent it undermines freedom of speech and attempts to subvert another information source.
[1]: https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/08272...
>Caveat: I do not support this letter nor the current administration. At face value, the letter (from the House Committee on Oversight and Governmental Reform) offers a sensible-sounding top-line explanation:
>> The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating the efforts of foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion.
Wikipedia is not subsidized by us tax dollars.
"subsidized" modifies institutions there, so what they mean is academics and students edit Wikipedia some times, and they want to claim the right to control what those people say.
Reading the actual request letter made it make more sense. It seems like they are after moderation records related to alleged influence campaigns by foreign states.
> Even if there is organized bias, what can Congress legally do about it?
Something similar to their targeted of US Univerities/Colledes for anti-semitism and for being "woke." Trump has threatened the Harvard endowment, its ability to enrol foreign students, federal research funding, among others.
Exactly, more tempest-in-a-teapot spectacle that keeps their supporters cheering for the destruction of the Constitution and individual liberty.
These are the same people who have spent the last 40 years lecturing me about how they are better patriots, attach American flags to everything they touch, know more about the founding fathers, and have a greater understanding of the constitution than we do.
Does Wikipedia take any federal funding?
> Does Wikipedia take any federal funding?
As a charity they are tax exempt - that could be revoked. The US government could declare them to be a foreign influence operation and require them to register as foreign agents. They could add a requirement that everyone on Wikipedia must declare who they are before editing. They could restrict various pages from being displayed in the US. They could even block or even cease the domain if they wanted to play hardball.
Do not underestimate the levers of pressure that could be deployed here.
They could put them on a variety of lists that would prevent them from banking in the U.S. which would mean they couldn’t receive donations, etc.
There is a ton of bias on Wikipedia. But this is the nature of anything trying to create a collective understanding of the world that involves multiple authors with diverse viewpoints.
But given the way this administration works (looking at their treatment of Universities/Colleges), they will only identify specific types of bias:
- criticism of Republicans
- criticism of Christian conservatism
- pro-LGBTQ+
- criticism of Israel
and try to punish Wikipedia for it, while allowing all other types of bias to flourish.
This isn't that different than the TikTok ban being motivated in Congress by the prevalence of criticism of Israel on TikTok: https://forward.com/culture/688840/tiktok-ban-gaza-palestine...
I expect financial sanctions to be threatened. Because Wikipedia is a US-based, it will likely end up in US court like so many of the other Trump policies.
UC Berkeley students embarrassed themselves on the world stage by attacking the free speech rights of conservative speakers... petualant, threatening and very in the media. People in Berkeley familiar with the history bent their heads in grief to see it. Free speech means that yes, conservatives may also speak in public IMHO
So what is a greater threat to free speech.
A group of students throwing a tantrum because someone they don’t like was invited to speak?
The most powerful government in the world using every tool it has to make the university whose speech they don’t like suffer? Tools including threatening to remove accreditation, refusing to disburse hundreds of millions of dollars in grants, threatening to end the student visas of the international students, etc.
Also, note that only the second of those actors is prohibited by the Constitution from infringing free speech.
UC Berkeley is a public university, so its administration is bound by the first amendment according to the incorporation doctrine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...
(Though maybe the actors you're referring to are students rather than the administration. It's true that students can't violate someone's first amendment rights, although they can interfere with their exercise in a way that the administration might have a legal duty to prevent.)
> the free speech rights of conservative speakers
Free speech is the right to speak without retribution of the law. It is not the right to be heard or platformed.
I do not know the exact specifics of UC Berkeley and you didn't link to them.
That said, I am a financial supporter of FIRE, which often has come to the defense of free speech of conservatives. It is also opposed to the Trump administrations moves against Harvard:
https://www.thefire.org/news/findings-against-harvard-are-bl...
Does Wikepedia/Wikimedia receive funding from the US government? If not, what's the basis for an investigation? Wouldn't any bias here fall under normal freedom-of-speech, same as any other media outlet?
So reading the actual letter what they are asking for:
> 1.Records, communications, or analysis pertaining to possible coordination by nation state actors in editing activities on Wikipedia.
> 2. Records, communications, or analysis pertaining to possible coordination within academic institutions or other organized efforts to edit or influence content identified as possibly violating Wikipedia policies.
> 3. Records of Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) including but not limited to all editor conduct disputes and actions taken against them.
> 4. Records showing identifying and unique characteristics of accounts (such as names, IP addresses, registration dates, user activity logs) for editors subject to actions by ArbCom.
> 5. Documentation of Wikipedia’s editorial policies and protocols including those aimed at ensuring neutrality and addressing bias as well as policies regarding discipline for violations.
> 6. Any analysis conducted or reviewed by the Wikimedia Foundation (or by a third-party acting on its behalf) of patterns of manipulation or bias related to antisemitism and conflicts with the State of Israel.
---
IP adress of users who have gotten in trouble with arbcom is quite concerning. That could make people be afraid of contributing to controversial topics in case their IP ends up in US government hands. Definitely a chilling effect.
It's incredible the lengths the American political system will go to to keep the Zionist lobby happy.
Also worth noting that The Hill itself has fired at least 2 journalists over their criticisms of Israel.
good thing wikipedia allows its entire database to be downloaded..... go ahead and change it to your will, we will have the data for a few years later....
That would be an unfortunate backup plan to rely on. We want to keep the full value of Wikipedia alive. Wikipedia is (1) an ideal; (2) a community of volunteers; (3) a brand; (4) a habit for many people seeking information; (5) a center (if not the center) of many online textual / knowledge ecosystems.
Peaceful, sustained, popular, legal, loud resistance is necessary to push back against an administration that is trying to kneecap influential dissenting viewpoints.
https://archive.ph/17L8H
Wait, I thought "bias" was a woke word
Republicans are ruining EVERYTHING.
That's going to be awkward, when they find that there's been, for many years, a studious effort to push forth pro-Israel talking points and agendas.
(To be clear, there is also pro-Palestine, too, though certainly less organized.)
Also, RIP Wikipedia Review which, though it went downhill later, was an amazing source of revealing corruption in the Wikipedia bureacracy, cabalizing and literal secret mailing lists to coordinate protection of viewpoints, including pro-Israel, from the admins.
> The request [...] is part of an investigation into “foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion.”
On that basis - should there also be an investigation into https://www.mikejohnsonforlouisiana.com/ ? He is the Speaker of the House, and it would be incredibly easy for some of his taxpayer-paid staff to do stuff, with the objective of influencing U.S. public opinion...
But you see, he is American. The xenophobia part is an important part of their reasoning.
Wikipedia should change the pop ups to feature Donald with an appeal to use his world view.
"And reality has a well-known liberal bias." — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Colbert_at_the_2006_Wh...
> They referenced a report from the Anti-Defamation League about anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia that detailed a coordinated campaign to manipulate content related to the Israel-Palestine conflict
And there it is. The reason.
Do they have some kind of blackmail on people? It’s almost as if they had an operative throwing parties and video taping the depraved acts of people in power.
Just another attempt to vilify a public source of information to keep the masses stupid. As usual. Pol Pot would be proud.
they can investigate all they want (which will be on the public record). The WP project, as hostile as it is to newbies and to those with an agenda, actually has a solid systemic policy foundation to address these concerns and the first amendment is basically a shield with a middle finger on it to petty legislative tyrants.
Of course it is biased.
Biased towards sanity while the government and a significant part of this country is biased in the opposite direction.
No wonder they're afraid.
The really big one and most likely origin of all of this, was this article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
Which calling it that, is of course a huge issue for all the zionist genocide deniers (both liberals and conservatives).
This is Orwellian doublespeak.
"Investigate" means "harass." There's no intent to do any fact-finding.
"Allegations" means "baseless accusations." Trump often employs the tactic of saying "people say" and then say something nobody has ever said before. It's a rhetorical device - appeal to anonymous authority - used to make people think this thought is widespread when it isn't.
To be fair objectivity is biased against an ideology that likes to just make things up and bullshit all the time so it’s quite likely there’s evidence of bias against said ideology.
I've observed that almost every political or controversial topic on Wikipedia is suffering political slant, reflecting the make-up of some of its motivated editors. See The left-wing bias of Wikipedia <https://thecritic.co.uk/the-left-wing-bias-of-wikipedia/>, a scientific/academic article about Wikipedia’s bias, by pseudonymous authors.
From a, pre-censored Wikipedia article <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ideological_bias_...>:
> Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has been critical of the online encyclopedia's accuracy and neutrality since the early 2000s. In May 2020, he published an article in his personal blog describing Wikipedia as "badly biased" and stated that he believed it no longer had an effective neutrality policy, claiming that portions of the Donald Trump article are "unrelentingly negative" while the Barack Obama article "completely fails to mention many well-known scandals" and various other topics he claims are presented with liberal bias.
References for the above passage:
* Wikipedia Is Badly Biased https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ by Larry Sanger (ex-cofounder of Wikipedia)
* Wikipedia co-founder slams Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter and the ‘appalling’ internet https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/05/wikipedia-co-founder-larry-s...
* How Wikipedia Became a Battleground for Racial Justice https://slate.com/technology/2020/06/wikipedia-george-floyd-...
Further information:
- How the Regime Captured Wikipedia: https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-the-regime-captured-wikipe... : inside the cultural revolution at wikipedia, which pivoted it from a decentralized database of all the world's knowledge to a top-down social activism and advocacy machine
- Inside Wikipedia's leftist bias: socialism pages whitewashed, communist atrocities buried https://www.foxnews.com/politics/wikipedia-bias-socialism-pa... , Feb 18, 2021
- The face of crypto censorship on Wikipedia? https://decrypt.co/23563/the-face-of-crypto-censorship-on-wi...
- Funneling donations to irrelevant causes
- The Wikimedia Foundation spends Wikipedia donations on political activism https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33170710
- The next time Wikipedia asks for a donation, ignore it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33174533
- Wikipedians question Wikimedia fundraising ethics after “somewhat-viral” tweet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403233
- Glenn Greenwald https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1686386344166334464: "Wikipedia has been degraded into a blunt arm of propaganda for the liberal establishment"
- @echetus on Wikipedia's donations and finances: https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633
I guess Wikipedia does not echo the blatant lies the Trump Admin. is pushing.
Maybe Wikipedia should start blocking states the congress people asking for this investigation are from with a big banner saying "Your congress person wants us to push Trump Lies, so this site is blocked from your state until this investigation ends".
Then maybe these people understand what real bias looks like.
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What are the lies being peddled by Wikipedia right now? Be specific please.
Hey, Let's investigate together if their freedom of speech is used correctly.
/s
Meanwhile: Hey EU, regulating our friedly corporate donors, means you harm their freedom of speech !!!!!!!!
What about now the VP goes to Europe and lectures them on feee speech haha
“Your freedom of speech is whatever we say it is.”
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Organized bias like creating a specific page to for a fictional syndrome in order to wave away any criticisms of your opponents. So organized that Wikipedia won’t remove the obvious bs:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_derangement_syndrome
One of the many reasons I don’t donate to Wikipedia. To keep this page up is to continue fueling unnecessary culture wars. Which in my opinion doesn’t align with their mission as it is not knowlege but an attack:
> Wikipedia's purpose is to benefit readers by presenting information on all branches of knowledge.
I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess that you have no issues with these wiki pages:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_image_of_George_W._Bu...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_con...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_religion_conspi...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_contro...
Should the dictionary not list slurs in them because they preserve an unhealthy status quo as well?
That article makes sure to mention that Trump derangement syndrome is a logical fallacy in the first paragraph. They aren't fueling culture wars by being an information source. I'm not sure where the bias would be coming from here with this article, and on which side and to whom...
So then I should create Derangement Syndrome pages for every other Potus so we all may know and understand why you can and can’t criticize a Potus?
What knowledge does this page offer beyond indicating a cultural logical fallacy and listing a bunch of hypocrisy that can also be found on Trump’s main wikipedia page? What is so significantly different about TDS from Bush Derangement Syndrome that it needs it’s own page?
This page didn't create or popularize the term "Trump derangement syndrome".
So? It maintains it the presence and unhealthy status quo. What is your point? I never declared it created the pejorative.
But legitimizing stupid shit is a choice.
I mean it is a "a pejorative term used to describe negative reactions to U.S. President Donald Trump..." How is having a page for that biased. And this is coming from some who has been described in the past (not anymore) of having TDS.
Negative reactions to a US president isn’t exclusive to Trump. Yet here is a page indicating that there is something special about a person not liking a US President named Trump.
Where is the Bush Derangement Syndrome? Where is the Biden Derangement Syndrome? Arguably this page owes everything to Obama Derangement Syndrome.
Wikipedia is not a source of original research or thinking. If prominent and reputable sources spoke about and coined these other terms there would be articles about them, or the article would be more generic.
Wikipedia exists in the context of the real world. All it does is reflect it. Deal with it.
I am dealing with it. I am informing people about the crap quality of content on Wikipedia. All I’m doing is reflecting the hypocrisy. You don’t like the fact that I can post my dissent online? Deal with it.
This is has to be ragebait by a pathetic troll. You haven't even read the first 4 lines of the page you've linked, where it refutes your argument that "this is specific to Trump". At least work a little on your clown material.
You haven’t informed anyone of any such thing. Wikipedia does not generate original concepts on purpose and you are complaining that an equivalent term exists for other presidents. Right now if Wikipedia was to create pages for those terms, _that_ would actually be bias as those terms aren’t widely used/don’t exist and would only be added to meet some people’s concept of “fairness” where if something bad happens to my side something bad has to happen to yours too
Edit: Also as someone else pointed out the page describes the origin of the term as evolving out of Bush Derangement syndrome being coined in 2003 and even comments on a Thatcher Derangement Syndrome phrase used after her death. The Trump Derangement Syndrome appears to be the main article because of the actual usage by government and in legislation
Bush Derangement Syndrome is covered (the writeup is linked to from the TDS article) but there is something special when republicans in multiple state legislatures have proposed _legislation_ on the subject of TDS, under that name, which would spend taxpayer money. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_derangement_syndrome#P...
>Where is the Bush Derangement Syndrome? Where is the Biden Derangement Syndrome?
I'd say not everybody was paying attention at the time, but these syndromes defintely exist, it's just that no former President actually did what it takes to reach this level of regard.
All kinds of people agree that Trump can not be matched in a number of ways, conservatves, progressives, independents, whether they are deranged or not.
With any syndrome it does take a lot of consenus but eventually it's foolish to deny.
Every Presdient has it, some are just more prominent and widely recognized than others.
Edit: not my downvote BTW
For an even handed treatment, it should really include discussion of or a link to the propaganda technique of projection / accusation in a mirror, which is how that term came about to begin with. Derangement is a key element of Trump's support, because objectively none of his policies add up to any kind of effective plan, nor do they make sense in the context of American values of individual liberty. It's all just empty spectacle of look over here, you've been wronged, we're going to performatively attack the people who supposedly wronged you. By preemptively lashing out and gaslighting the actually-conservative group as "deranged" for merely reacting to the destruction, they obscure the obvious.
They should also investigate Google, which often puts Wikipedia article extracts right at the top of the search results. There has been a great deal of misinformation spread this way.
Wikipedia is just the tip of the iceberg. How their biased viewpoints get amplified globally is a huge problem on top of that.
One man's biased is another man's correct.