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House to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias

(thehill.com)
152 points xqcgrek2 | 7 comments | 27 Aug 25 18:25 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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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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1. lukev ◴[27 Aug 25 19:27 UTC] No.45043942[source]▶
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!

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2. rafaelmn ◴[27 Aug 25 19:51 UTC] No.45044283[source]▶
Is a non-profit a private entity ?
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3. Y-bar ◴[27 Aug 25 19:52 UTC] No.45044303[source]▶
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.
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4. lukev ◴[27 Aug 25 19:58 UTC] No.45044375[source]▶
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.

5. lukev ◴[27 Aug 25 20:02 UTC] No.45044424[source]▶
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.
6. BobaFloutist ◴[27 Aug 25 20:50 UTC] No.45045071[source]▶
In this context, yes. It gets confusing, but a "public entity" refers to the government.
7. sgnelson ◴[28 Aug 25 00:50 UTC] No.45047056[source]▶
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.