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House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

(thehill.com)
152 points xqcgrek2 | 4 comments | 27 Aug 25 18:25 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Aurornis ◴[27 Aug 25 18:49 UTC] No.45043467[source]▶
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.

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Fricken ◴[27 Aug 25 18:58 UTC] No.45043573[source]▶
It's time to move Wikipedia from the US to a safer haven
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1. bbor ◴[27 Aug 25 19:23 UTC] No.45043897[source]▶
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…

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2. perihelions ◴[27 Aug 25 19:30 UTC] No.45043979[source]▶
> "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)

3. lenerdenator ◴[27 Aug 25 19:34 UTC] No.45044037[source]▶
I wouldn't put it past the Canadian government to do the same thing. Other Anglosphere governments already have, see Australia and UK.
4. bawolff ◴[27 Aug 25 19:39 UTC] No.45044106[source]▶
> 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)