Apparently people just give them money, I’m not sure why, but they do◦— and a lot. In 2008 they got their largest donation to date, which was $3 million dollars from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a philanthropic nonprofit organization founded by the former CEO of General Motors.674 They would later give them millions more. Google has also given millions of dollars to them as well, so its no wonder that Wikipedia articles are usually one of the top search results for just about anything.
Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife have given them hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own personal money, on top of the money Google gave them as a corporation.675 All donations are tax deductible because the Wikimedia Foundation is registered as a nonprofit organization.
Wikipedia has been involved in several lawsuits over defamation, and a substantial amount of their money has been spent defending them. One of their attorneys, Matt Zimmerman, admitted, “Without strong liability protection, it would be difficult for Wikipedia to continue to provide a platform for user-created encyclopedia content.”676
Comedian Stephen Colbert once sarcastically praised Wikipedia for their ‘quality’ by pointing out that the article on Lightsabers (the handheld weapon from Star Wars) was longer than the article about the printing press.677 Since its editorial policies and oversight are so flawed, the site has been called “the abomination that causes misinformation.”678
Articles about controversial subjects like global warming, illegal immigration, and abortion all have massive liberal bias, and entries about living people, particularly conservative authors, journalists, and activists, are the most biased on the entire website.
Because Wikipedia has become the go-to place for most people when they want to look something up, major corporations use sock puppet accounts to edit pages about their companies and products trying to paint them in a favorable light and scrub criticism. Such edits have been traced back to people at companies like PepsiCo, Sea World, Walmart, Exxon Mobil, and others, since no company wants negative information about them or their products on an ‘encyclopedia’ article about them.679
In 2012 it was discovered that two employees of Wikipedia’s parent company (the Wikimedia Foundation) also ran a public relations business which included editing and monitoring the Wikipedia pages of their clients.680 In 2015 it was revealed that some Wikipedia editors had been running a coordinated blackmail and extortion racket by using their editorial powers to allow the defamation of public figures and businesses if they didn’t pay them protection money.681
These editors would contact businesses and lesser-known ‘celebrities’ whose pages had been rejected due to lacking notoriety or for “excessive promotional content.” As The Independent reported, “According to a Wikipedia insider, at this stage the scammers would demand a payment of up to several hundred pounds to successfully ‘re-post or re-surface’ the article, and in some cases demanded an on-going monthly payment to ‘protect’ the articles.”682
Before we look at the examples of censorship and liberal bias on Wikipedia as a whole, let’s use my own page as an example. Since I’m a ‘newsworthy’ public figure there is an article about me, which (at the time that I’m writing this book) says that I’m an author and “conspiracy theorist,” best known for my “conspiracy theories” about secret societies like the Bilderberg Group and Bohemian Grove.
At one point in early 2017, the entry was updated to say that I’m an author and media analyst, and cited reports in The Washington Times and on Fox News, both calling me that. There was an editor war, and some people kept deleting the reference to me being a media analyst, and then others would change it back, and this continued until an editor locked the page which prevented anyone except approved Wikipedia editors from changing it. I then called out the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, on Twitter for the censorship and the two of us exchanged messages privately though DMs and emails about the issue.
He surprisingly and graciously updated the article himself,683 and used citations to reports from Fox News,684 The Washington Times,685 and The Daily Caller as the sources, all of which identified me as a media analyst.686 Soon afterward some editors overruled him and deleted any reference to me being a media analyst, claiming the reason was that the citations were to “unreliable sources.”687
Editors also deleted part of the article which said, “Dice runs a YouTube channel which has over 980,000 subscribers, and more than 300 million views,” which is very strange because my YouTube channel is a large part of my career, and as you may know, I had become the most popular conservative YouTuber at the time.688 The fact that Wikipedia wouldn’t allow a reference to my YouTube channel or it’s statistics is because they’re trying to downplay my popularity and paint me as just some little known ‘conspiracy theorist,’ not wanting readers to know that I have a huge audience with millions of viewers a week.689
They also deleted a reference to a show on the Travel Channel that I had been featured on called America Declassified, even though I’m listed on the credits at IMDB, the Internet Movie Database, which is the industry standard for film credits.690 The false categorizing of my work, and the deletion of prominent facts about my career and popularity are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of Wikipedia’s manipulation of information and participation in spreading fake news.
Pages of popular conservatives often have large “Controversies” sections which contain long lists of every little thing they’ve said that liberals find objectionable or want to amplify. Pages for Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Savage all have the “Controversy” section or equivalent which nitpick things they’ve said or done. Wikipedia has even been known to use unflattering photos of conservatives in their profiles.
Conversely, there are relatively few liberal journalists or talk show hosts who have a ‘Controversy’ section in their articles, or have much negative information about them even mentioned at all. For example, there is no mention on MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell’s page about his conspiracy theories about President Trump, which got so outrageous that he even claimed Vladimir Putin orchestrated a false flag attack in Syria using chemical weapons to help President Trump’s approval ratings.691 There’s not a single mention on Michael Moore’s page, or Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ page about their endless Russian conspiracy theories either. Maxine Waters even claims, among other strange things, that Russia coined the term “Crooked Hillary” for Donald Trump.692
Transgender TV star ‘Laverne Cox’ was born Roderick Cox, a man, but Wikipedia editors refuse to allow his birth name to be mentioned anywhere on his page.693 Roderick was the first transgender person to appear on the cover of Time magazine and ‘she’ is hailed as a hero in the liberal media, but unlike every single other actor or actress on the planet who uses a stage name (or legally changes their name), Wikipedia will not allow any mention of the fact that ‘Laverne Cox’ was born Roderick Cox.694