Wikipedia

The Wikipedia (".org") was the first large scale test of the wiki technology for general purpose public knowledge base gathering and distribution. As of late April 2003 it had over 115,000 articles and hundreds of contributors, perhaps thousands, as the use of pseudonyms and IP numbers to identify even named frequent authors is a rampant practice there.

Some believe that there is a good deal of disinformation going on via the wikipedia, small cliques devoted to censorship, to pro-technology propaganda and systematically raising the flak level on views that question American supremacy or hegemony, scientism, mathematical fetishism, "Platonism", the political economy and concept of wealth implied in neoclassical economics, the current particle physics 'Standard Model' as an undisputed foundation ontology, or basis for all models of what is "real", imperialism, w:militarism, human cognitive bias, Internet infrastructure bias and questioning the very idea of a persuasion technology. Despite discussions on 'Systemic Bias of Wikipedia' and various worst cases and threats that might arise from continued failure to address this systemic bias, a groupthink seems to prevail there that by some magical means, the wiki process or neutral point of view policy itself can overcome the imbalance in authors or points of view or the powers of sysops.

One issue where there has been substantial discussion of bias is on the raising standards of evidence on claims uncomfortable to the Bush administration. For instance articles with inflammatory titles like Bush League or Bush Knew have often been replaced with those that fail to explain the significance of the common but inflammatory title, or worse, obscure or omit evidence of collusion or incompetence on the part of figures in that administration. The most flagrant example is probably the omission of any discussion of whether intelligence failure prior to September 11, 2001 was sufficient to conclude collusion or incompetence by administration figres, and the citation instead of weak and easy-to-discredit rumours and urban legends, e.g. that Israeli citizens were warned in advance to evacuate. This replacing credible by sensational claims tactic is one of many well known Weapons of mass deception used by the Bush League itself.

Another issue is simple deletion of views without refutation, abuse of the concept of reverting an article (eliminating the contributions of several authors on the ad hominem grounds that a 'suspect' author contributed a fewk in the chain), and simple failure to follow rules for deletion and being conservative about elimination of text. Accusations that one anonymous IP or pseudonym "is" a hated or targetted author seem to be quite common as well, and seem to justify for some sysops an endless extension of IP ban tactics. This practice is more common on French and other non-English wikipedias, where a small clique has effectively taken control of the whole editorial process. The English wikipedia is exceptional mainly for this having taken a bit longer!

The Wikipedia seems as amenable to subversion by these means as Indymedia or the so-called mainstream press. However, due to the relative openness of the wiki process and GNU GFDL open content license, some persistent objections to various aspects of its policies have led to forking projects or tendencies to dissent, even outright factions, within the Wikipedia authors:

• The Internet Encyclopedia rejects the neutral point of view avowed by Wikipedia in favor of multiple point of view articles.

• Twelve leverage points inspired by Donella Meadows' systems thinking in ecology have been applied by some within wikipedia advocating a more 'Natural point of view' that would take its starting point from ecology and biology, not from physics or politics.

• The 'troll' non-community seems to be strong, persistent, and utterly unwilling to adhere to conventions defined on the wikipedia mailing list which they seemingly reject in favor of more egalitarian governance which would work through the wiki technology itself.

• Some internal projects to define lists, e.g. of Islamic terms or urban economics terms or ecoregions, which are considered a critical objective basis of knowledge by those proposing a 'natural' view, seem to be systematically moving attention deliberately to undercovered areas considered to be important by those with no particular bias towards the wiki process or any particular belief in the power of neutral point of view.

Other 'meta' discussions on wikipedia focus on issues in neutrality of history, of sciences, and ethics of various means of governance. There is a relatively 'simple view' of morals and ethics that has remained stable for some time there, indicating that the capacity to come to some kind of relatively unbiased agreement on such topics does exist there.