House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

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 time to move Wikipedia from the US to a safer haven

I support Wikipedia from the first day -- and this is true. I had to laugh! there is bias for certain.. of many kinds.

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

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.

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.

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…

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)?

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!

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.

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.

> "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 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.

I wouldn't put it past the Canadian government to do the same thing. Other Anglosphere governments already have, see Australia and UK.

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.

> 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)

There is already https://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page

Is a non-profit a private entity ?

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.

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.

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.